It was a weekend of symphonic serendipity for classical music lovers in downtown Chicago.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra favored Orchestra Hall audiences with its first subscription concerts since its return from last month’s European tour. Meanwhile, over at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, Austria’s Bruckner Orchestra Linz presented an unusual and intriguing program of works, three out of four of them by American composers, in celebration of Black History Month.
Of the pieces Dennis Russell Davies, the Toledo-born chief conductor of the Bruckner Orchestra, chose to reflect aspects of the African-American and African experience at Friday night’s concert, none drew a more joyous response from the crowd than Philip Glass’ "Ife: Three Yoruba Songs" (2013), thanks in no small part to a charismatic performance by the world music diva for whom the cycle was written, the astonishing African vocalist Angelique Kidjo.
Glass set the songs to poems drawing on folkloric subjects written in the Yoruba language of Kidjo’s homeland, the West African nation of Benin. Over a large orchestra alive with Glass’ trademark pulsing ostinatos and swirling arpeggios, her chantlike vocal lines exerted a powerful, indeed primal effect through discreet amplification. The crescendo of excitement she built with the repeated refrain of the final song, "Oshumare," was so intense that one would not have been surprised to find her repeating the song as an encore, which in fact she did.
A longtime champion of Glass’ orchestral and operatic music, Davies three nights earlier had led his Bruckner Orchestra in the world premiere of the composer’s Symphony No. 11 at Carnegie Hall, in honor of Glass’ 80th birthday. The authority he brought to his accompanying duties carried through to the performances that preceded the Glass work.
Duke Ellington’s 1943 orchestral suite "Black, Brown and Beige" and the seven poems the Viennese composer Alexander Zemlinsky used as the basis for his 1929 cycle "Symphonic Songs" both took their inspiration from the Harlem Renaissance. There is little doubt, however, that Ellington’s homage to African-American faith and toil, to the black soldiers who died fighting for our country, is the most authentic of the two scores, a fact driven home by the orchestra’s energized account of Maurice Peress’ big-band orchestration.
The Zemlinsky song cycle is made up of German translations of texts by Langston Hughes, Frank Smith Horne and other black American poets associated with the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s.
Gritty slices of African-American life laced with bitter humor, also stark images of death, are couched in music utterly foreign to their subject matter and tone — music that trades in the freely tonal chromaticism and lush orchestral textures of the young Arnold Schoenberg, Zemlinsky’s future brother-in-law. There’s not a lick of jazz, nor anything else remotely American, about this music, ripped out of cultural context and drenched in Austrian late-Romantic expressionism. In sum: A well-meaning but fatally misguided period piece, although I admired the expressive commitment and burnished tone of Martin Achrainer, the bass-baritone soloist.
The program began with real American music, a suite from George and Ira Gershwin’s "Porgy and Bess." This was not the familiar Robert Russell Bennett arrangement but a rarely heard distillation by composer-conductor Morton Gould that actually conveys more of the opera’s Catfish Row flavor. The Austrian musicians proved they could sing and swing respectably, if not with quite the idiomatic ease of their American counterparts.
Admirable, too, over at Orchestra Hall, was the subscription series debut of Bramwell Tovey, whose previous appearances with the CSO had been at Ravinia. The British-born, Vancouver-based conductor devoted his pair of concerts to two first performances by the orchestra: William Walton’s "Orb and Sceptre" and the complete Act 2 of Tchaikovsky’s "Sleeping Beauty" ballet.
The ballet’s second act contains some of the composer’s richest mature invention and is hardly ever heard apart from dance performances; it made a refreshing change from the overplayed Tchaikovsky symphonies. An experienced ballet and symphonic conductor, Tovey drew a sumptuous reading from the CSO, and there were fine solo contributions all around. Concertmaster Robert Chen ably dispatched the nearly 10-minute mini-violin concerto Tchaikovsky wrote for the virtuoso fiddler Leopold Auer, years before the latter came to America to head the violin department of Chicago Musical College.
As articulate in his spoken introductions as he is with a baton, Tovey made snappy work of the exuberant march Walton wrote for the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. He also pulled out all stops for the British companion piece, Britten’s "The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra." This grand set of variations on a rondo by Henry Purcell was designed to display the mettle of each orchestral choir, and it fulfilled its purpose at the expertly led performance given Saturday.
John von Rhein is a Tribune critic.
jvonrhein@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @jvonrhein
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