It’s always something on Grant Park’s opening week.
Last year, sweltering temperatures and high winds made an obstacle course out of the festival’s opening night. In other recent years, monsoon-level rains have deterred picnickers but never the inaugural festivities.
In the 2023 installment of “Grant Park Musicians vs. the Universe,” the orchestra and chorus bundled up for unseasonably low temperatures in the 50s and 60s. But for audiences, the festival’s two opening-week programs warded off the cold like a piping hot meal: a scattershot but satisfying orchestral opener on Wednesday and Dvorák’s moving, underheard “Stabat Mater” on Friday.
The head chef was, as usual, Carlos Kalmar, leading the concerts amid a Title IX investigation into his behavior at the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM), where he teaches. After that investigation was made public several weeks ago, the Grant Park Music Festival stood by its maestro, with festival CEO and president Paul Winberg telling the Tribune in a statement that CIM’s ongoing investigation “has thus far not found evidence that Carlos Kalmar engaged in any harassment.”
In the seated section of the Pavilion, subscribers appeared to stand by Kalmar, too. When he strode onto the podium on Wednesday, many rose for a full-throated standing ovation.
Kalmar planned to leave his Grant Park post next season to focus on his CIM duties. If that all happens according to plan, doubtlessly the most-cited of his gifts will be his knack for tying together eclectic programs. Wednesday night’s was such a concert, preceding Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 4 with a Saint-Saens violin concerto and once-recorded
More Top Picks Best Hands Free Magnifiers For Reading
rarity by the late Chicago-born composer Robert Muczynski.Muczynski composed that opening romp, “Symphonic Dialogues” (1965), the same year he decamped to Tucson to head up the University of Arizona’s composition department, with which he remains most associated. But the piece, with jazzy syncopations and deliciously tart harmonies, endorsed greater appreciation of Muczynski around these parts, as did the orchestra’s supercharged performance. His centenary is approaching in 2029 — presenters take note.
From there, beloved Grant Park concertmaster Jeremy Black stepped into his first solo spotlight in many seasons for Camille Saint-Saens’s Violin Concerto No. 3. Black proved himself just as poised and understated a soloist as he is a concertmaster, playing with grace and alacrity if not heaps of personality. He especially soared in the middle Andantino, achieving a stirring, somewhat pastoral quality that was profoundly moving but never maudlin. Ensemble and soloist nicely put over the work’s finer-grained orchestrational detail, from the tremolos opening the work to a delicate string chorale in the third movement.
Black gamely reassumed his concertmaster perch for a striking Schumann. More sprawling symphonies have said less in more time, but Schumann’s half-hour symphony — with four movements which melt into one another — is a masterwork of emotion and economy. Under Kalmar, it unfolded like a living, breathing organism while remaining well-meted from first to last. I can think of several Orchestra Hall performances this season which were not nearly so fresh and thoughtfully plotted. That achievement is all the more remarkable in the hands of a seasonal ensemble, whose members mostly hold full-time posts elsewhere.
The same goes for the Grant Park Festival Chorus. Given the great quartet of vocal soloists assembled for Dvorák’s “Stabat Mater,” it’s high praise to posit the chorus might have been Friday’s runaway stars, but that was patently true on Friday night. The tenors’ first entrance was deeply felt and iridescent, and chorus sopranos, with a limpid, straight-toned delivery in the upper reaches of their register, all but carried the later “Virgo virginum praeclara” movement.
The festival landed a most impressive “get” in tenor John Matthew Myers, who recently starred opposite Thomas Hampson and Renée Fleming in Opéra de Paris’s “Nixon in China.” He astonished from his thrilling entrance in “Stabat Mater” and kept listeners at the edge of their seats wherever he appeared, his voice a thing of poignance and power. Mezzo-soprano Siena Licht Miller was also an exquisite blend of vocal brilliance and profound depth, never more clear than in her solo in “Inflammatus et accensus.” Bass-baritone Joseph Beutel was vibrant and assured if not as fluidly emotive in “Fac, ut ardeat cor meum,” a movement which likewise could have been stewarded more sensitively by Kalmar at key moments, and soprano Olivia Boen — the daughter of orchestra members John Boen (principal horn) and Laura Miller (playing principal second violin for these performances) — was most brilliant at the sun-streaked top of her register.
Dvorák’s “Stabat Mater” might be three times as long as Schumann’s Fourth, but on Friday it largely winged by on the same interpretive winds which lofted the Schumann. And the orchestra deserves special kudos for faring as well as they did against the chill — one would have expected far more intonation woes than it actually faced on Wednesday and Friday. Oboist Mitchell Kuhn, who joined the orchestra last season, and clarinetist Dario Brignoli were standouts in this week’s programs, and the Grant Park brass sounded particularly eloquent, playing with notable finesse and sensitivity.
Whether it feels like it or not, summer is here — and not a moment too soon.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.
The Rubin Institute for Music Criticism helps fund our classical music coverage. The baiduhai maintains complete editorial control over assignments and content.