Sometimes, lives are better measured not in years but in genres, playlists, and opus numbers. How else could music wafting from the radio (or a certain Stockholm-born streaming platform) make us feel, uncannily, like we’re children again?
I’d love to know whether clarinetist Anthony McGill was similarly transported Friday night, playing Copland’s Clarinet Concerto at Ravinia with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. As reported by Wynne Delacoma in Chicago Classical Review, the combination of McGill, the CSO, and the Copland make this a full-circle occasion: McGill played that lushly romantic concerto — completed in 1949, just before Copland was seduced by serialism — for his formative teacher-to-be, former CSO principal Larry Combs, at just 12 years old.
Thirty years later, McGill — now the principal clarinetist for the New York Philharmonic — selected the same work for his CSO debut, an occasion so belated it hardly feels true. McGill, who grew up in Chatham and performed “Simple Gifts” at Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, has been home several times over the past decade, often with his brother Demarre (the principal flutist of the Seattle Symphony, and with whom he recorded “Winged Creatures,” a 2019 Cedille Records release also featuring the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra; the McGill brothers are CYSO alums) and in chamber arrangements (two appearances at the University of Chicago Presents since 2014, and a 2016 American Music Project concert with JACK Quartet).
Yet the freshness of McGill’s CSO encounter was unmistakably that of an introduction between hometown band and hometown hero, facilitated by Ravinia chief conductor Marin Alsop. McGill had a way of hesitating at the peak of the soaring opening theme, a suspension so luxurious it even seemed to enrapture the cicadas into momentary silence. The CSO, pliable and plush, sounded similarly engrossed, buttressing his phrasing handsomely. A Copland-composed cadenza, suavely tossed off by McGill, bridges the concerto’s lyrical first half with its jouncingly playful second, slap-bass (primly echoed by the harp several bars later) and all. The clarinet and orchestra ping-pong snippets between one another toward a rollicking end — but not before one last moment of divine suspension, when the orchestra falls away and McGill, like a high-diver, exquisitely plummeted from the clarinet’s highest note to one more than three octaves down.
To say McGill’s was a triumphant debut risks understatement. Audiences took to their feet for an extended, much-deserved standing ovation.
The subtle humor of the slap-bass/harp moment recalled the evening’s opener: Haydn’s Symphony No. 60, “Il distratto” (literally “The Distracted”), a symphony so goofy it could be an Igudesman and Joo shtick. The 18th century composer wrote the work as theater music and only later strung it together as a “Sinfonia,” hence its many gags — petered-out phrases, shameless quotations from previous symphonies, and a moment in which “distracted” violins retune their woefully flat instruments — and six movements rather than the conventional four. (That’s the most of any numbered Haydn symphony, but it’s not the symphonist’s only work employing funkily tuned violins: Symphony No. 67 covers that and all sorts of edgy string acrobatics.)
To be sure, there’s a tricky compromise to be made when interpreting “Il distratto”: Haydn’s wit is best administered in low doses, but alas, his 60th symphony would much rather whoop you upside the head. Ideally, the humor lands and the smirking delivery stays at home. Maybe the most successful example of this in Friday’s performance was when the CSO concluded a fourth movement so turbocharged that Ravinia audiences erupted upon its conclusion, only to sheepishly pipe down when they realized they had two more movements to go. But there was little else even chuckle-worthy: Alsop’s interpretation erred on the safer side, frequently losing sight of the symphony’s levity.
She and the orchestra regained their footing in a strikingly lustrous account of Brahms’s “Variations on a Theme by Haydn” (a misnomer, because researchers have concluded that said theme almost certainly didn’t spring from the same brain that penned “Il distratto”). Alsop maintained momentum throughout — crucial in this often ponderous warhorse — and masterfully phased character changes within variations. The CSO responded with the most sumptuous orchestral playing of the evening, with special kudos to principal oboist William Welter for his many soulful solos.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.
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