Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Sunday February 19, 2012 9:54PM CST
Riccardo Muti (left) shares a bow with composer Mason Bates in San Francisco. | © Todd Rosenberg Photography
The West won over by Riccardo Muti and CSO
First California tour since 1987 seen as a triumph
SAN FRANCISCO -- The western stars were well-aligned for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first California tour in 25 years.
Music director Riccardo Muti appreciated the heavy American touring of his 12 years heading the Philadelphia Orchestra and has been eager to bring the CSO to new places around the country. The San Francisco Symphony is marking its centennial and invited Chicago to anchor its anniversary American Orchestras Series, following the ensembles of Los Angeles and Boston and preceding Cleveland and New York. President Barack Obama managed to schedule a Thursday night fund-raising stay at the same San Francisco hotel as the orchestra.
And even in a global-warming world, the musicians were happy to trade Chicago for five concerts last week in the Bay Area, the O.C., Palm Springs and Desert, and San Diego.
The only thing missing was a long-awaited debut by the CSO in the stunning Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Even though that city’s Philharmonic and its charismatic young leader Gustavo Dudamel were away on their own travels -- to Dudamel’s native Venezuela -- CSO Association President Deborah F. Rutter, an Angeleno herself and a Philharmonic management alum, could not come to a contractual agreement with her L.A. counterpart, Deborah Borda.
Costa Mesa’s five-year-old Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall was the smiling beneficiary of this impasse.
Muti and Rutter put risky cards on the table not only in San Francisco -- where they played two sold-out programs to audiences used to unusual fare from SFS music director Michael Tilson Thomas -- but also in more conservative Costa Mesa, Palm Desert (a concert sponsored by former Waste Management Inc. CEO Dean and Rosemarie Buntrock, who are Chicago snowbirds), and San Diego. New pieces by the orchestra’s two young Mead composers-in-residence, Anna Clyne and East Bay resident Mason Bates, were programmed as centerpieces before a note had been heard from either work.
And works of Arthur Honegger, César Franck, and a lesser-heard Schubert entr’acte are not exactly box-office stunners, nor normally is the lengthy masterwork Schubert’s Great C Major Symphony No. 9.
But through Saturday the concerts were major hits with audiences and area critics, the only complaints arising from Muti’s dislike of offering encores, even on a tour. A Sunday night tour-concluding concert at San Diego's Copley Symphony Hall was still underway at press time.
Muti’s bringing together and building on the contrasting legacies of Georg Solti and Daniel Barenboim did not go unnoticed. The often icy San Francisco Chronicle critic Joshua Kosman, following both Davies Symphony Hall programs, wrote, “If this week’s extraordinary display by [Muti and the CSO] doesn’t emerge as the crowning glory of this [visiting orchestras] project, I for one will be flabbergasted.”
To the Costa Mesa concert of Honegger, Bates, and Franck, Timothy Mangam of the Orange County Register responded, “What an orchestra. And for those who already knew that, what a program.” Richard Scheinen of the San Jose Mercury-News made the 150-mile round-trip from Santa Cruz to San Francisco to review this “audacious concert [of Muti] showing off this great orchestra’s extreme versatility, extending its tradition.”
During the one scheduled tour rehearsal, Tuesday morning in San Francisco, Muti and the musicians tried to assess the sound in Davies, which would change a great deal when the 2,700 seats were filled. As in Chicago, at the concerts themselves the Bay Area audience was extremely enthusiastic for the Bates work, Alternative Energy, with its percussion sound effects, electronica. and infectious dance rhythms. Preceding the work with Honegger’s brief, powerful 1923 Pacific 231 was equally if not more effective, as the performances were even tighter. The repetitions of Clyne’s Night Ferry the next night showed more wear after repeated hearings and drew the one harsh criticism, from the Chronicle’s Kosman, of the tour.
“I am proud of this orchestra and of this tour,” Muti told me before sitting down to a line of 200-plus fans at a CD and DVD signing at Davies Hall. “There is nothing to prove, but to share music making at this level with such appreciative audiences is very special. And wait until we go to Italy in April!”
The Neapolitan conductor was so excited by this prospect that he seemed to need a reminder that he is taking the CSO to Russia first on that trip.
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