Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Friday June 15, 2012 1:08PM CDT. Postscript 6:50 PM CDT.
Muti, CSO serve up unusual bill anchored by Beethoven’s Fifth
Strong Shostakovich local première with bass Abdrazakov; 'Beyond the Score' is its own mixed bag
Riccardo Muti leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2010. Sun-Times photo by Tom Cruze
CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
◆ 8 p.m. Saturday and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday
◆ "Beyond the Score" 3 p.m. Sunday
◆ Orchestra Hall, 220 South Michigan Avenue
◆ Tickets, $37-$199
◆(312) 294-3000, cso.org
BY ANDREW PATNER
RECOMMENDED
[Based on the Friday afternoon performance of the Beethoven, I would raise this to HIGHLY RECOMMENDED]
The season-closing residency of Riccardo Muti with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra holds many of the music director’s trademarks. Unusual programming (a more neglected Bruckner symphony and a Paganini violin concerto next week), public gestures (throwing out the first pitch at a Cubs-Tigers game and opening up the CSO’s June 21 rehearsal to the public for “Make Music Chicago”), and a mix of dead seriousness with infectious humor.
Muti’s concert selections can evoke a late-night grocery run: items he loves or is intrigued by go into the cart regardless of whether they will make a structured meal. This week’s menu moves from a trivial, if biographically interesting, Prokofiev salute to one of Stalin’s massive construction projects, to the belated CSO première of one of Shostakovich’s last major works (and a chilling one at that) to everybody’s favorite: Beethoven’s Fifth. The combination might unnerve many but at least two of the dishes Thursday night were worth eating and talking about.
Muti has many oddities in his longstanding repertoire. Prokofiev’s 16-minute The Meeting of the Volga and the Don, Op. 130, is a “festive poem” from 1951 that the 'cellist Msistlav Rostropovich later claimed he suggested to the composer as a means of getting some money from the Soviet state when Prokofiev was literally starving before his death at 61.
If Muti had not decided to make some post-performance remarks about the sarcasm of such moments as the work’s string of comical false-endings, it would have been almost impossible to justify this paean to the achievement of slave labor. Perhaps 200,000 Gulag inmates were worked to the bone and worse to build a canal (and a 33-ton copper stature of Stalin) between these two great rivers. Principal trumpet Christopher Martin and colleague John Hagstrom provided stirring double fanfares. Otherwise this was Thomas the Tank Engine stuff.
In sharp contrast, Shostakovich’s 1974 Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti, Op. 145a, is very serious stuff, indeed. The emotionally tortured composer’s last orchestral work was written as Shostakovich was dying of heart disease and lung cancer, and while such major contemporaries as the Nobel laureate writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Rostropovich and his singer wife were being abruptly exiled from the Soviet state. In a cool, 45-minute survey, its biting verses from the great Italian Renaissance artist, in Russian-language renderings, set against spare scoring for a large orchestra create fascinating moments of musical space and emptiness that underline the despair of many of the poems on death, Dante’s exile, and personal integrity.
South Russian bass Ildar Abdrazakov (left), a Muti protége so impressive in the CSO performances and Grammy-winning recording of Verdi’s Requiem in 2009, as well as in the title role of Verdi's Attila with Muti at the Metropolitan Opera in 2010, was the wholly fitting soloist. Abdrazakov’s is not the cave-deep, earth-shaking voice associated with Russian basses, but his vocal placement, refinement, and native command of the language assured that the 11 songs were delivered with real poetry and without melodrama. Assistant principal Mark Ridenour and Hagstrom did the trumpet fanfare honors here. The deep and disturbing work makes a strong case for the original side of Shostakovich.
As for Beethoven, Muti offered a driven performance that stirred the sold-out crowd to four curtain calls. More interesting were the quiet touches of oft-overlooked detail, particularly in the Andante con moto movement, a veritable percolator of surprise. Principal oboe Eugene Izotov’s solo was, as ever, a gift. In contrast to former principal conductor Bernard Haitink’s almost mystical performance in 2010, this was a young man’s Beethoven with much red meat. But given conductors’ longevity and that he came of age after World War II, Muti, with all of his experience and accomplishment, still is, at 70, a young man. Thank goodness for that.
Postscript: Sixteen hours after Thursday’s concert ended, the CSO was back onstage Friday afternoon for the first of two season-finale “Beyond the Score” programs (to be repeasted Sunday afternoon), this one featuring British actor Simon Callow in the first half playing Beethoven, and Muti and the musicians after intermission playing Beethoven’s Fifth. The theatrical portion this time sacrificed the live orchestra alogether and went for a long costumed skit with actors and no narrator. As the script was still laden with information about many aspects of Beethoven’s (and Napoleon’s, as it turned out) life and specific musical examples, it seemed a disappointing change in the usually highly effective “BTS” format. A set of telling, impromptu anecdotes delivered by Muti from the podium after the subsequent CSO performance offered more that mattered and made sense in under 10 minutes than the entire hour-long staged presentation. John Goodwin did provide captivating illustrations of the composer’s music on fortepiano that gave a sense of how these themes, variations, and transitions might have sounded in the early 19th century, before the full development of the modern piano.
The symphonic performance was another, wholly positive, story. This was a different sound and spirit from Thursday night, which, perhaps because of the heavy-duty subscription program and two pieces entirely new to the CSO, could have been a final rehearsal for the Fifth. This time, and one imagines that it will go as well in the remaining three performances, we heard a revelation: Muti’s 41 years of leading major orchestras and wrestling with this score were on full display. A complete dynamic range was present with appropriate variants throughout. Movement timings made more sense, and there was real and artistic air around every note and section. When the symphony’s famed opening four-note theme returned as an accompanying figure in the last movement, its precise rhythm was unchanged. Somewhere there must be a German-Italian-English word that means “wow.”
