CSO leader Riccardo Muti shares his ‘soul’ at South Side concert
By ANDREW PATNER September 23, 2011 8:26PM
Riccardo Muti leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a free concert at the Apostolic Church of God Thursday evening. I Scott Stewart~Sun-Times
CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
▪7:30 p.m. Tuesday
▪Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan
▪Tickets,
▪(312) 294-3000; cso.org
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Updated: November 25, 2011 12:20AM
Riccardo Muti’s track record on keeping promises has been strong. He starts his second year as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra — much of his first year having been lost to now-resolved health matters — with an impressive checklist of accomplishments.
After saying that he would like to bring the orchestra to area prisons, he and CSO musicians and singers are well into their second year of work with incarcerated girls at the state youth facility in Warrenville. A first recording with the CSO scored two Grammys. A just completed six-city, 10-concert European tour was a critical and audience hit.
And Thursday night Muti opened the CSO’s 2011-2012 season not with a gala (that comes Saturday night), a subscription concert (that came Friday afternoon) or even at Millennium Park, scene of last year’s free concert welcoming the Italian conductor.
Rather, the full orchestra rode down to the South Side, where it took to specially constructed risers in the massive sanctuary of the Apostolic Church of God at 63rd and Dorchester. More than 5,000 people — from the church, the neighborhood, neighboring Hyde Park and elsewhere — snapped up the free seats and filled both the main worship space and a spillover chapel that accommodated some 1,500 who watched via the church’s own closed-circuit television service.
Isabelle Brazier, whose late husband, Bishop Arthur Brazier, built the landmark congregation over decades, extended an invitation to CSO Association President Deborah Rutter recently when Mrs. Brazier srealized that the CSO was looking for a site for this fall’s community performance. The Braziers had hosted the Civic Orchestra, the CSO’s professional training wing, in three historic appearances from 2003 to 2005, and before that, the CSO had helped to launch a successful classical orchestra program for youth at the church.
In keeping with these connections, there was no pandering here. The program was vintage Muti in its unusual array of European works close to his heart and a concerto with one of the orchestra’s main principals as soloist. In introductory remarks to the members of this historic African-American congregation, Muti said that he and his colleagues had “come to share their feelings, their love and their friendship.” The heart, he concluded, to shouts of “yes!” and “amen!,” “has only one color. And that is the color of the soul.”
The overture to Verdi’s early (1845) operatic setting of the story of Joan of Arc is no repertoire staple; the CSO just turned 120 and this was its first encounter with the piece. But it already contains the elements that would propel the omposer’s later great overtures to classic status, and no one plays Verdi like Muti does.
Mathieu Dufour last presented Jacques Ibert’s 1932-33 flute concerto six years ago as a farewell to Daniel Barenboim. This is another case of a performer at the top of the world pack-lifting a lesser work to its greatest possible heights. No technical, musical or interpretive task is beyond Dufour’s ability, and he gave a breathtaking and very personal performance of his French compatriot’s banal 20 minutes of perfume and puffery.
Muti’s Tchaikovsky also has a very direct personal communication. It would be much easier to play the Fifth Symphony as audiences are used to hearing it, and just let the big themes carry the piece while perhaps throwing in some tempo manipulations for effect. But Muti studies Tchaikovsky and takes him as seriously as Pierre Boulez does Schoenberg; the results are similarly revelatory. Demonstrating the complexity in Tchaikovsky makes his works more beautiful not less.
This was not only one of the largest audiences for a CSO concert, but also one of the most attentive and focused. Even in the dry acoustics of this modern, spare, Pentecostal worship space, the sense of communication between players, conductor and listeners was palpable. Muti and his musicians seemed deeply touched by the many ovations from the multi-racial and truly all-ages audience. In one last set of remarks after several bows by the group, Muti promised to bring the orchestra back but also reminded community members, to hearty laughter, that communication “goes in two directions” and that “we have a quite wonderful concert hall downtown.”
Friday afternoon, back downtown at Orchestra Hall, Muti repeated the Ibert and Tchaikovsky, but instead of the Verdi overture, offered a major suite of music by his teacher and mentor, Nino Rota, written for the classic Luchino Visconti film “The Leopard” (1963). Our views of movie music have changed in recent years and allowed us to hear the quite serious underpinning of many popular scores and appreciate the craftsmanship and aspirations of such individual composers as Rota. Just as he has done in reminding us how important Italian opera composers truly are, so Muti checks another item off his rich list of intentions by giving us Rota with great respect.
Highly recommended. Repeats at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan. Details at cso.org.
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