With apologies for the late posting.
Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Saturday March 3, 2012
Photos: Jonathan Nott, Pierre-Laurent Aimatrd (by A Newton), Michelle DeYoung and Stuart Skelton (RTHK Rado 3, Hong Kong)
Nott gives CSO instrumental soloists air and space to shine in Mahler's 'Das Lied'
Aimard dazzles in Schoenberg concerto
Repeats Saturday at 8 p.m.
BY ANDREW PATNER
RECOMMENDED
Last week’s outstanding Chicago Symphony Orchestra “Beyond the Score” examination of Arnold Schoenberg’s 1912 Pierrot lunaire made clear the strong personal, philosophical, and artistic connections between Schoenberg and his idol and sometimes mentor Gustav Mahler.
Originally conceived as the introductory part of a two-week residency by CSO conductor emeritus Pierre Boulez, it was to be followed by this week’s program of large-scale works by these two men. Eye problems required Boulez, who turns 87 this month, to withdraw from the podium, though in signature fashion he spent a week here supervising preparations for Pierrot and Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale.
This week a trusted younger colleague of Boulez, Briton Jonathan Nott, 49, agreed to take up the heavy-duty combination of Schoenberg’s 1942 Piano Concerto and Mahler’s 1907-8 posthumously performed and published Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), for orchestra with low-register female and tenor vocal soloists. A number of us have urged the CSO to engage Nott, principal conductor of the Bamberg (Germany) Symphony Orchestra since 2000 and a former holder of the same position with Boulez’s Ensemble Intercontemporain, as a guest for some time. Certainly his major gesture here should earn him his own programming and concert week.
Was Schoenberg Moses or Aaron, the lead characters in his 1930-32 unfinished opera? Lawgiver or high priest? This concert pairing made a case more that perhaps he was Joshua to Mahler’s Moses -- the general who carried the cause of music after the prophet had gone as far as he was allowed to go. Das Lied proved to be an end of life summation and farewell for Mahler, who died at 50 in 1911, a set of six poems on life, loneliness, and farewell from ancient Tang China translated by German poet, Hans Bethge. At times it is an extension of ideas from his formally entitled symphonies. More often it’s a distillation and paring down that seems to say, “I can say no more.”
Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto is from one of the many second acts that Schoenberg had but Mahler never was given. In this case pianist, comic actor, and raconteur Oscar Levant suggested a concert work to Schoenberg at a time when the composer was combining his strict twelve-tone music with more traditional harmonies and methods. The result is a 20-minute single movement piece that allows for interpretive freedom but requires the very highest technical ability. Pierre-Laurent Aimard, a key part of this two-week series, was the astonishingly expert pianist responding to and making apparent jazz, Romantic, and even “Western” sounds and moods. William Buchman’s bassoon work reminded just how beautiful the orchestral scoring is here.
Nott understands that the daunting hour-plus of Das Lied not heard downtown in 21 years (!), requires both an organic sense of totality and plenty of air and space around the frequent quiet exchanges of solo players, especially woodwinds. At times the orchestra swelled over engaged Australian tenor Stuart Skelton, but this is a perpetual difficulty with this piece and its demands on the male singer. The swells were there for a reason, though, if you followed either text or score and American mezzo Michelle DeYoung rode them fully in one of her best performances of a key work in her repertoire. Her half-hour “Der Abschied” (“The Farewell”) conclusion was both heartrending and inspiring.
All players were fully committed and key support came from principal horn Dale Clevenger, concertmaster Robert Chen, and assistant principal 'cello Kenneth Olsen here taking the principal’s chair. But winds Eugene Izotov, oboe, Scott Hostetler, English horn, Stephen Williamson, clarinet, and Mathieu Dufour, flute, have the “singing” roles in the orchestration and their work could not have been greater.
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