The Chicago Symphony Orchestra podium, which has functioned as a men`s club for the better part of its 100-year history, made a rare break with precedent and admitted a female member at Thursday night`s subscription concert in Orchestra Hall.
Catherine Comet, who directs the American Symphony Orchestra and the Grand Rapids Symphony, proved to everyone`s satisfaction that being able to produce alert, firmly shaped symphonic music has nothing to do with gender but everything to do with talent.
Throughout her varied program of American, French and Russian scores, Comet exhibited a quiet kind of authority that told the orchestra she knows her business. She directed in clear, direct gestures, disclosing a thorough understanding of the musical content. In this day of podium narcissists who conduct audiences rather than music, her self-effacing, no-nonsense manner was greatly to be admired. Let`s have her back.
If Chicago has neglected the best female conductors, it has also neglected the best local composers. Comet began with the CSO premiere of Leo Sowerby`s Concert Overture, written nearly 50 years ago. The score combines frisky American syncopations with the polyphonic mastery so characteristic of Sowerby; apart from some unwanted thickening of textures, the CSO gave the overture its due.
Of course, there are more substantial Sowerby works lurking in the CSO archives-the Third Symphony, commissioned for our orchestra`s golden jubilee, for example. But because it is unlikely that the centennial season will bring us any of them, we must be grateful for guest conductors bearing gifts.
Comet`s two French offerings, Ravel`s ”Valses Nobles et Sentimentales”
and Franck`s ”Le Chasseur Maudit,” also lent distinction to this first CSO concert of the new year.
The Ravel had the clean, crisp sonority plus the essential flexibility of rhythm these Gallicized waltzes require; the tangy sound of our ”French”
woodwinds was a joy.
The neglected Franck symphonic poem (known in English as ”The Accursed Huntsman”) gave our horn section an opportunity to sound its most plangent hunting calls, but Comet also brought out romantic atmosphere with great sensitivity to the idiom; the final hellish gallop could hardly have been more rousingly achieved.
Comet concluded her program with an almost totally forgotten Russian score, Vasily Kalinnikov`s First Symphony (1897), untouched by the CSO for nearly 82 years. It is a sturdily constructed work in the Borodin tradition, full of ravishing tunes, whose slow movement breathes an oh-so-Russian nostalgia that brings Rachmaninov to mind.
Most concertgoers will wonder why so attractive, if relatively lightweight, a score could have lain dormant for so long; I am wondering the same thing myself. In any case, Comet is just the conductor to convince you that its best pages are as fine as anything in the Russian late-romantic repertory; one could have nothing but the highest praise for her performance. The program will be repeated Saturday and Tuesday nights.
