Review: CSO's season opens at Ravinia, egging on hopes for the Pavilion renovation

Chicago Tribune

2 days ago

The Chicago Symphony's return to Ravinia? Make it double.
On July 11 and 12, the orchestra and chief festival conductor Marin Alsop opened its season with two twinned programs. Both began with engrossing contemporary American openers: Carlos Simon's 'AMEN!' on Friday, Jessie Montgomery's 'Strum' on Saturday. Those were followed by gripping performances of piano cornerstones: Rachmaninoff's 'Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini' played by Bruce Liu, then Gershwin's Concerto in F, played by Jean-Yves Thibaudet. Each ended, customarily, with a symphonic juggernaut: Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' and Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6, 'Pathétique,' respectively.
While the actual music varied between the two concerts, their overall takeaways did not. Prime among them: The Ravinia Festival's Pavilion renovation, to be unveiled next summer, cannot come soon enough. Thanks to a study commissioned by Threshold Acoustics, a consultant to the renovation, the festival is armed with more empirical data about the perils of its stage than ever before.
Despite that, the pain points of an over-responsive Pavilion ached all weekend. Über-familiar repertoire works jiggering out of sync as often as they did is a sure sign orchestra musicians are having trouble hearing each other — and the same seemed to go for Alsop, sometimes twisting to get a straight sightline of both soloists' hands. All the while, nuclear brass and percussion sat somewhere on the spectrum between 'unbalanced' and 'unpleasant.'
Of course, at Ravinia, CSO musicians are rarely just contending with a punishing acoustic. Lightning shuddered during the opening bars of Friday's 'Rite,' as though being conjured by the music itself. A mounting breeze rippled across the orchestra's music stands before a storm sprayed the Ravinia lawn. As though the weather was its own release, this very animalistic performance settled into more subtlety in its latter half, if never conquering those core ensemble issues.
Thankfully, Liu and Thibaudet were undisputed peaks of a rocky weekend. Liu, 28, is a Chopin Competition winner of vertiginous agility, and he remained so on a sticky opening night. The young Canadian made Rachmaninoff's Olympian technical matters sound dégagé. Perhaps he lacked a sense of true sentimental abandon. Then again, hearing this heart-wrencher with its histrionics thoughtfully muted — even in the famous 18th variation — provided its own cool relief.
For his encore, Liu followed the Rhapsody with yet another Paganini riff by a great virtuoso pianist-slash-composer: Liszt's superhuman 'La Campanella.' He doubled down on the savoir-faire that distinguished his Rachmaninoff, this time without emotional equivocation. The music poured from Liu unstoppered — as did the sweat from his temples, dramatically documented by Ravinia's mondo LED screens.
Thibaudet brought the same troubadour spirit to the Ravinia stage the following evening. The best Gershwin accounts capture the effervescence of improvisation in the context of a wholly composed work. It's no surprise Thibaudet struck that balance, his phrasings feeling at once fresh and natural — this concerto is straight out of central casting for the French pianist. The transporting second-movement cadenza had the warming calm of a daydream.
The movement ended with a tender moment between Thibaudet and guest principal flutist Minha Kim, locking eyes and swaying together for their duet. But for the most part, Saturday's was a harried meeting between orchestra and soloist, down to the bungled gong hit at the piece's climax. Afterwards, Thibaudet offered Brahms's Intermezzo in A Major as a salve, cutting through its buttery richness with the semplice touch of a lullaby.
The ensuing 'Pathétique' wasn't exempt from the weekend's brass overzealousness, or the awkward fit of ensemble puzzle pieces. But on the whole, this was an interpretive highlight of the weekend, in keeping with Alsop's Tchaikovsky 5 two summers ago. She maintained the symphony's songfulness end-to-end, her tempos intuitive and often satisfying. An assured sense of super-structure gave Tchaikovsky's obsessive repetition direction and gravitas — discrete, punctuated utterances for woodwinds and brass at the end of the first movement, a weightier arrival in the last statement of the third. Oddly, though, that didn't apply to the most important moment of all: The trombone incantation and bass-led sighs ending the entire symphony passed more or less unremarked upon.
Where Alsop excels consistently, however, is in her preparation of new repertoire, choosing pieces which unite popular appeal with striking craft. Simon's 'AMEN!' and Montgomery's 'Strum' are very much in that lineage. A rafter-shaking, crisply inventive tribute to the Black Pentecostal worship tradition, 'AMEN!' is the rare contemporary work that lives its name to the hilt. Blues harmonies sparkle under hammy, crooning trombones, blooming into a larger-than-life gospel cadence for tutti orchestra.
The CSO's performance of 'Strum,' for string orchestra, was just as clean and confident — familiar fare for the ensemble, having played it before and worked with Montgomery for three seasons as its composer-in-residence. Even so, this was an impressive performance by any metric, sections sounding as unified as Montgomery's original version for string quintet, and featuring distinguished first-desk cameos aplenty.
Now, if everything goes according to plan, imagine how all that could sound in a new Pavilion next summer. Amen, indeed.