CHICAGO — Because summer music festivals tend to take place in a relaxed atmosphere, draw more open-minded attendees, and operate with different financial structures than their fall-to-spring counterparts, they can veer from the conventional and take artistic chances.
That was certainly true of concerts on successive days that had a lot of to say about the two nationally known and wonderfully complementary Chicago summer classical extravaganzas where they took place.
The performance Aug. 8 was part of the 10-week Grant Park Music Festival, which continues through Aug. 16 in downtown Chicago’s ultra-contemporary, Frank Gehry-designed Pritzker Pavilion, with the city’s striking skyline as a backdrop.
The program featured the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus, violinist Jennifer Koh, and Giancarlo Guerrero, former music director of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, who is in his first season as the festival’s artistic director and principal conductor.
The concert the following night took place under the auspices of the 121-year-old Ravinia Festival, which runs from May through September on a verdant, 36-acre campus in Highland Park, a suburb just north of the city.
It featured eight singers from the vocal component of Ravinia’s Steans Institute, a summer training program that draws top young artists who are typically finishing their schooling or beginning professional careers.
The two concerts could hardly have been more different in terms of repertoire or scale. The first performance featured scores of singers and musicians and took place in a massive amphitheater, while the next day’s matinee was held in the small-scale confines of the 450-seat Bennett Gordon Hall.
What tied the two performances together was the sheer adventuresomeness of the programming. The lone work on either line-up that could be called “standard repertoire” was Grant Park’s 1919 Suite (one of three Stravinsky compiled) from The Firebird. Celebrated impresario Sergei Diaghilev commissioned the then-unknown Igor Stravinsky to write the 1910 ballet for the Ballets Russes, and it catapulted the composer to international fame.
Guerrero led the Grant Park Orchestra, an assembly of musicians from top orchestras and music-school faculty from across the country, in a big, full-bore performance that aptly captured the exotic flavors and vibrant energy of this beloved work. It featured a multitude of first-rate solo performances, including those of principal clarinetist Dario Brignoli, acting principal French hornist Patrick Walle, and pianist Christopher Guzman.
Guerrero’s debut in his new position, on June 18, had been marred by rain that started at the end of the first work and never stopped, forcing the several hundred brave souls clustered near the stage to move to more sheltered seats under a stage overhang, with many fleeing after the second selection. The weather was more cooperative this time out, giving the new maestro a proper opportunity to show off his obvious rapport with the orchestra and audience.
After his appointment, Guerrero pledged to continue the festival’s practice of juxtaposing familiar classics with intriguing combinations of little-heard works from the past with new creations, especially those by women and people of color. All of that was in evidence on this meaty program, which opened with the festival’s first-ever performance of Britten’s choral overture The Building of the House, which he wrote in 1967 for the opening of a concert hall at England’s Aldeburgh Festival, which the composer co-founded.
The Grant Park Festival is one of the rare such events to have an in-house professional chorus, and a very fine one at that, and it got to show off its talents in this rousing performance as well as in the first half’s main event, The Singing Rooms (2008), an oratorio-like concerto for violin, choir, and orchestra by Jennifer Higdon, who was present.
With settings of poems by Jeanne Minahan, the work manages to be both intimate and immense, a nearly 40-minute, seven-movement odyssey that touches on notions of time, memory, God, and history but also offers closed-in percussion interludes and a quiet, pensive opening that was almost lost in the ambient sounds of the festival’s outdoor setting. Like all of Higdon’s works, there is something down-to-earth and direct about her writing in The Singing Rooms — no gimmicks, no trying to be new just for novelty’s sake.
The chorus and violin cover an extraordinary range of emotions from intoxicating dreaminess to agitated intensity, with Koh, who is at her best in contemporary works like this, delivering the kind of focused, expressive, and even raw playing the concerto demands. Likewise, Guerrero, who has a long history of engagement with new music, seemed right at home, adroitly handling its overlapping forces and shifting emotions and infusing it with a compelling drive and vibrancy.
Few composers today write more original, thrilling music than Lera Auerbach, a Soviet-born American who, despite the fame she has achieved, still seems sorely under-recognized. The Grant Park Orchestra’s first-ever presentation of Auerbach’s Icarus (2006) showed why. She packs so much into this riveting 12-minute work, which revisits the familiar allegory of Icarus’ high-flying ascent too near the sun, resulting in his devastating crash and elegiac aftermath. Auerbach takes rich, full advantage of every voice in the orchestra, as well as a few additions like the disorienting, intoxicating vibraphone (substituting for the theremin called for in the score), with some penetrating dissonances along the way. Guerrero made sure it all added up to a sometimes explosive, sometimes pensive whole.
James Conlon served as music director of Ravinia from 2005-2015, overseeing the annual summer residency of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and he has returned regularly. He was back on this occasion, along with dramaturg Cori Ellison, not to conduct but to serve as host, curator, and coach for an art-song program titled Liberated Voices: 80 Years of Broken Silence.
Since the 1990s, Conlon has done more than almost anyone in the classical-music world to rediscover and advocate on behalf of the dozens of composers whose music was suppressed or whose lives were ended by the Nazi regime. This unusual program was an illuminating and moving continuation of that effort. Sure, these young singers need to know their Strauss and Fauré, but here was an extraordinary opportunity to stretch their musical horizons and be part of a larger recovery mission, and they were all clearly committed to the project.
The program, which marked the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, was divided into four sections: Songs of the Jewish Prisoners; Great Voices Stilled in the Camps; Gay, Romani, and Catholic Comrades; and Emigré Composers. The second section featured five composers who died in concentration camps. Four are fairly well known: Gideon Klein, Hans Krása, Viktor Ullmann, and Pavel Haas, but the big revelation was Ilse Weber (1903-44), a Moravian author and playwright who wrote 60 poems while imprisoned at Theresienstadt (Terezin) and set many of them to music, accompanying herself on guitar as a kind of singer-songwriter.
Although some of her songs have been recorded by the likes of mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter and baritone Christian Gerhaher, they remain neglected. The vivid literary imagery and the simplicity and directness of the musical settings give these works an immediate appeal, and the singers performing the four Weber selections, including “I Wander Through Thresienstadt” and “The Rain Falls,” seemed to really connect with them, especially mezzo-soprano Alice Chung. She delivered a hushed, transporting take on the lullaby “Wiegala,” deftly rendering each return of the line beginning “Wiegala, wiegala” with a slightly different emphasis and tone.
The most recognized composers — Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Darius Milhaud, Mario Castlenuovo-Tedesco, and Kurt Weill — came at the end in the emigrés section, but none of the selections were well known, thus providing more musical discoveries. The concert concluded with all eight singers taking the stage for “After the Destruction” from Weill’s The Eternal Road, a mammoth, multi-hour pageant that encompassed 245 actors and singers and traversed some 2,000 years of Jewish history. The show’s one production ran for 153 performances in 1937 at the Manhattan Opera House in New York and was promptly forgotten, a victim in part of its overblown scale.
The intimacy of art song requires its own set of vocal skills, and even some of the greatest opera singers are not especially adept in this repertoire. The pitfalls are many. Invest these works with too little inflection and idiomatic flavor and they wither. But come on too strong, and they are easily overwhelmed. Examples of both extremes were heard on this program, as these singers worked to get their footing in this challenging vocal form, but there were also many stand-out moments. Especially impressive was the singers’ willingness to take on multiple languages, with Chung even rendering the folk melody “Aušvicate hi kher báro” in Romani and doing so convincingly.
Soprano Rachel Blaustein displayed a real feel for art song, starting with her expressive, a cappella take on the opening Jewish chant “Ani ma’amin” alongside tenor Evan Katsefes and continuing with the stunning, faraway quality she brought to Korngold’s “Sonnet for Vienna,” shaping the final line with artful, soothing swells.
Tenor Dylan Morrongiello first made his presence felt in Krása’s Five Songs for Voice and Piano, Op. 4, in which he managed to quickly and smartly convey the mood of each of these very short, contained works. But he was at his best in Mischa Spoliansky’s “The Lavender Song,” an underground gay anthem from the 1920 cabaret world of the Weimar Republic written under the pseudonym Arno Billing, delivering a spirited take that captured the work’s theatrical, defiant quality. And Chung shone throughout the program, singing with a real sense of line and expressiveness. Also featured were soprano Maia Aramburú, soprano Kaylyn Taylor Baldwin, mezzo-soprano Elise Miller, and baritone Emilio Vásquez.
