Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Riccardo Muti: gala concert moves, Bronfman dazzles

Here is my Monday September 26 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Saturday night September 24, 2011 Chicago Symphony Orchestra gala concert and Symphony Ball, with Riccardo Muti, music director, and Yefim Bronfman, piano.

 

Riccardo Muti leads the CSO on Friday at Orchestra Hall. | Rich Hein~Sun-Times

 Chicago Symphony Orchestra gala all business

Riccardo Muti’s remarks are missed at Verdi & Prokofiev concert, Bronfman dazzles

BY ANDREW PATNER

Overanalyzing opening-night gala concerts is not a particularly rewarding activity even as a parlor game for music critics.

Fortunately, the first three days of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra season with its music director Riccardo Muti have been such a whirlwind of complementary activity that Saturday night’s 90-minute “Symphony Ball” program can be seen in larger contexts.

Speeches -- and stage decorations -- were cut to a bare minimum at both Orchestra Hall and the subsequent Hilton Chicago dinner dance, and this was, for a change, unfortunate. As Muti demonstrated Thursday night at the wildly successful Apostolic Church of God South Side community concert and in impromptu remarks after the first work on Friday afternoon’s subscription season launch, he has a special way of connecting with audiences of every kind.

With a house and then a ballroom filled with monied donors and guests who might not otherwise be attending CSO concerts -- and with this season marking the 120th anniversary of the orchestra’s founding -- management missed an opportunity to reach out in this way to potential new attendees. Even popular CSO Association President Deborah Rutter was offstage.

Muti’s eclectic repertoire interests, though, are on full view this first month of the musical year: The next two weeks bring re-creations of historic concerts commemorating Franz Liszt and given by Gustav Mahler, and we’ve already heard film music by Muti mentor and teacher Nino Rota and a little-played early opera overture by his beloved Verdi.

Saturday offered a repeat of the 1845 Joan of Arc overture, even more crisp and varied in its sound in an actual concert hall acoustic, and only the second-ever CSO performance of the half-hour ballet, The Four Seasons, that Verdi wrote for the first, Paris, version of The Sicilian Vespers10 years later. (Another Italian, Riccardo Chailly, programmed it at Ravinia 16 summers ago.)

The ballet music is probably best known today, if known at all, from the ballet Jerome Robbins set to it and other Verdi excerpts on an all-star cast at New York City Ballet in 1979.  Unrelated to the opera which initially housed it, the ballet music is light but filled with rich melodies and characterful sections.  Muti has taken the work all over the world and it is in many ways a lesson in how he instructs both an orchestra and an audience in his view of proper, serious Verdi performance, along with some rather dramatic restored-to-health podium moves.

Under his critic's hat, Hector Berlioz noted early on that the "Spring" and "Summer" sections "give the virtuosi of the opera orchestra a chance to display their talents," and it was extremely fitting that both the brand-new CSO principal clarinet, Stephen Williamson, and his oboe counterpart, Eugene Izotov, are alumni of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, where they overlapped for three seasons. In all three programs this week, Williamson has sounded like a marvel, with an alluring tone and entrancing soft passage abilities. The long wait for the right successor to the retired Chicago mainstay Larry Combs appears to have been worth it.

The most serious work of the night was the central Prokofiev’s G minor Second Piano Concerto, and it is itself more of an exciting, if often aimless, virtuosic showcase. As soloist, the ever-phenomenal Yefim Bronfman showed how this often banged-about score can be played with both technical and musical finesse. The 2010 winner of Northwestern University's Jean Gimbel Lane piano performance prize, the Tashkent-born artist gives a recital of Brahms, Liszt, and more Prokofiev on Tuesday night at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall in Evanston.

Under the direction of the recently formed Women's Board, the crowd was a younger, hipper one than at galas past.  Co-chairs Annette Dezelan and Lisa Walker Rudnick announced at the dinner that some $1 million dollars had been raised for operations, education, and community programs.