Monday’s Civic Orchestra concert wasn’t supposed to be a memorial.
Earlier that morning, however, the Chicago Symphony’s longtime training ensemble lost one of its own: former principal conductor Cliff Colnot, 76, who died Feb. 12 after a long illness at a retirement home in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood. (Colleague and friend David Bloom confirmed Colnot’s death to the Tribune; a cause was not provided.)
Colnot assisted former CSO conductors Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez at the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and Lucerne Festival Academy, respectively. He was also a versatile composer whose wingspan covered lucrative commercial jingles — many with late writing partner Terry Fryer — and heady chamber arrangements of Stravinsky, Messiaen and Shulamit Ran.
Details for a public service are pending, but in the meantime, Civic’s concert was a fitting stopgap. Colnot led from 1998 to 2016 under various titles, and the long list of artists and ensembles he collaborated with included the new-music sextet Eighth Blackbird, making an unusual co-appearance with Civic on Monday.
It proved a charmed collaboration — it was hard not to be, when working with music as charismatic as Viet Cuong’s “Vital Sines.” Commissioned for the Eighth Blackbird and the U.S. Navy Band before being adapted for orchestra, the 15-minute piece is a smiling tribute to Cuong’s upbringing in wind bands, and to his late father. Eighth Blackbird layers glittering, virtuosic lacings over chord cycles that nod to Philip Glass; later, brass and drum kit swagger in with rousing drumline rhythms. At its fun, exhilarating conclusion, conductor Lina González-Granados and percussionist Matthew Duvall locked eyes and mirrored a cutoff gesture for his final crotale flourish.
The Blackbirds, lightly amplified onstage per Cuong’s score, took some time to adjust not just to the orchestra but to themselves. Eighth Blackbird strings Christopher Whitley (stepping in for roster violinist Maiani da Silva) and Aaron Wolff, among the cellists auditioning to join the ensemble this season, are players of quicksilver brilliance that could have benefitted from more love on the mic. On the other side of things, pianist Lisa Kaplan plays with a concerto bravura that has overshadowed her colleagues in the past; so it was again on Monday.
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Those balance issues only worsened in Einojuhani Rautavaara’s “Cantus arcticus” (1972). The late Finnish composer threads amplified birdsong through “Cantus arcticus’s” three movements — the birdsong recorded in the remote wilderness of the Arctic Circle. The orchestra mimics, then dialogues with, their desolate calls. It’s gorgeous and meditative, if calibrated carefully. But on Monday, too-loud electronic elements easily overtook a frail-sounding orchestra and chased off the score’s serenity.
I have a hunch why, at least in part. After “Vital Sines,” Eighth Blackbird’s instruments and equipment — a concert grand, percussion setup and kit, Wolff’s riser and mics galore — were simply abandoned onstage for the Rautavaara. Civic had to play behind the flotsam, pushing them about 10 feet upstage and partly blocking audience sightlines. In Orchestra Hall, even that distance can sober an ensemble, particularly if it hasn’t had a chance to adjust.
Breaking down and moving the equipment would have necessitated another short intermission — a logistical headache, maybe, but surely not worse than Monday’s compromise. The Chicago Symphony would never be so disrespected by performing behind a bunch of extra equipment onstage. Why should the Civic Orchestra?
After so many sound snafus, the Mason Bates piece capping Monday’s program was, thankfully, one of the DJ-composer’s purely acoustic numbers: his “Anthology of Fantastic Zoology” (2014). Inspired by the writing of surrealist Jorge Luis Borges, the multi-movement work was commissioned and recorded by the CSO while Bates was its composer-in-residence from 2010 to 2015. (Imagine something between Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” and Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Carnival of the Animals,” updated to the new millennium, and you’ll land within striking distance of Bates’ “Anthology.”)
This restlessly inventive work is always welcome back at Orchestra Hall, and Civic Orchestra — sounding robust and variegated, now that they’d assumed their proper place downstage — did right by its demanding score. The dovetailing solos all over “Anthology” were expertly realized by Civic winds. Strings confidently seized the high-wire ensemble writing for those instruments, whether lines ricocheting from stand to stand in the “Sprite” theme or tasking two violins (Ran Huo and Sheena Lan, well-matched and expressive) with playing opposite one another offstage.
Of truly standout percussion work in the Bates, timpanist Tomas Leivestad earns the evening’s medal of honor for covering 10 timpani on the floor and four more suspended above. “Anthology’s” rambunctious final stretch sent Leivestad diving backwards like an outfielder to play them all.
Formerly the CSO’s conducting apprentice, González-Granados seemed much more in her element in Monday’s repertoire than in her substitutions for an infirm Riccardo Muti two seasons ago — probably unsurprisingly, as she’d covered for the then-music director on warhorses with little to no notice. One often sought a more opinionated, elastic command of the Bates, with its ample opportunities for lyrical ebb and flow. But on the whole, it was easy to see why González-Granados has become an increasingly in-demand interpreter of new work, her podium bearing one of both scrupulousness and relish.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.
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