The season-opening mystique is hard to shake. We want opening nights to be transformative, something matching the magnitude of a change in season and scenery.
Friday’s kickoff to the Chicago Symphony’s 87th summer residency at Ravinia fell far short of the moment, despite its grand — let’s even say grandiose — aspirations. The main event was a reconfigured version of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, first cooked up by artistic director and chief curator Marin Alsop for Beethoven’s 250th anniversary year. Her expansion makes way for two musical interludes inserted between its movements without pause — a West African drumming ensemble and a jazz combo — and a new text replacing Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in the fourth movement. In Alsop’s version with the Baltimore Symphony last year, Baltimore-based rapper Wordsmith contributed the text; the version heard on Friday uses a poem commissioned for an earlier performance by Tracy K. Smith, formerly the U.S. Poet Laureate.
It’s not a project that will go down easy for purists. The Ninth is one of the closest things the classical canon has to a holy text; tinkering with it no doubt amounts to sacrilege for some listeners. If done tactfully, however, it embraces the same teeming human mix as Beethoven and Schiller’s original, just on 21st century terms.
Indeed, the concept shows promise and claims some unexpected coups. The greatest of these is Smith’s eloquent text: In performance, it impressively fit the scansion and spirit of Schiller’s original, some whiffs notwithstanding. (A big one: Smith’s version unconvincingly sets the opening baritone cry, sung searingly by bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green, to “O friend” — a pale replacement for the German original “O Freunde,” short one syllable and a juicy diphthong.) What could have been an awkward intercession instead became this “Ode’s” most compelling asset, especially under the stewardship of an incandescent Chicago Symphony Chorus.
The interludes are likewise well-placed and curated. The percussive ending chords of the first movement made for a sensible handoff to the driving rhythms of the Ayodele Drum & Dance ensemble, a local all-women troupe, whose high-energy set likewise primed us for the dotted-rhythm declamations starting the Scherzo. Saxophonist Jim Gailloreto, in a trio with guitarist Mike Allemana and bassist Christian Dillingham, also bridged the Scherzo and Adagio with a brief, rather literal set that quoted the heads of both movements.
Which made Friday’s execution all the more frustrating. Though Beethoven was the obvious anchor of the entire concept, it sounded totally sidelined in performance, Alsop revving every movement into a speed run. The Mach 1 tempos sheared the Beethoven of any profundity and tied the hands of the CSO, who did the best they could under the circumstances. So did a well-blended, peerless quartet of vocal soloists, who deserved a far better frame for their performance: soprano Janai Brugger, mezzo-soprano Ashley Dixon, tenor Paul Appleby and Green.
Not that the interludes fared much better. Clumsy stage choreography meant the Ayodele musicians were standing onstage in silence longer than they actually played, and the jazz trio’s performance felt similarly abbreviated and uncertain. Start to finish, the evening was over in a little more than 80 minutes — and that included Reena Esmail’s “See Me,” the short a cappella work performed at evening’s beginning. How ironic that this Ninth, in attempting to embrace humanity more expansively than Beethoven’s original, left the humans onstage out to dry.
On Saturday, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 was everything that Beethoven should have been: thoughtful, nuanced, exhilarating and cleanly performed. Comparisons to the CSO’s performance of the symphony just two weeks before, under the baton of CSO music director Riccardo Muti at Millennium Park, were nigh inevitable, and, in the broadest, crudest strokes, characteristic of both conductors: where Muti’s Tchaikovsky was elegant and intricate, if not hugely individual, Alsop’s was more propulsive and personality-packed. It worked in the symphony’s favor on Saturday, rapturous solo work and emotionally unified tuttis assuring the strongest showing all weekend.
That program’s other, greater draw was violinist Miriam Fried, bidding farewell to Ravinia after heading up the chamber division of the Steans Music Institute, its preprofessional training program, for 30 years. (Fellow violinist Midori takes up that mantle beginning next summer.) Between that and her teaching post at New England Conservatory, Fried, turning 77 later this summer, has coached countless now-famous soloists and chamber groups — a multigenerational legacy that will be celebrated more fully in a chamber program next week.
Saturday offered a now-rare opportunity to hear Fried solo with orchestra, in Brahms’ magisterial violin concerto. If technical elements were shakier than they once were, they didn’t muddy Fried’s lucid vision for the work, which strengthened in execution as it went on. The Adagio was more man than monument, its earnestness established at the outset by oboist William Welter’s troubadour-like solo and held aloft by Fried’s semi-parlando delivery. The third movement also stood out for its subtle resistance to performance clichés, Fried choosing sunny lightness where other violinists stoke bombastic blazes. At the end of the performance, CSO string players waved their bows in silent applause for the esteemed pedagogue.
The contemporary works leading both programs, connected to Ravinia’s Breaking Barriers initiative, rose to the top of a profoundly mixed weekend. CSO brass and percussion sailed over the formidable ensemble hurdles and sky-scraping tessituras of Shulamit Ran’s “Chicago Skyline,” a taut fanfare first premiered by the orchestra in 1991. The night before, Esmail’s “See Me,” designed as a companion piece to Beethoven’s Ninth, had wrapped Pavilion audiences in vocal splendor. Singing onstage, the Chicago Symphony Chorus sprouted from the same wide-open sonority which opens the Ninth into an excerpt of the Nasadiya Sukta, a Sanskrit hymn on the origins of the universe from the Rigveda. Meanwhile, the Adrian Dunn Singers
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and a student ensemble from Senn High School filled the aisles, echoing the CSO Chorus on the English verses of “See Me’s” second half.Laced by gloriously pealing solos by sopranos Megan Bell and Bethany Clearfield, the result was nothing short of magical, as if hearing the work inside a Pavilion-sized standing bell. Those are the reverberations I’ll choose to remember from this year’s opening night.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.
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