Opening nights at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra always are fraught with a certain amount of drama. But Friday’s concert at Orchestra Hall, a musicians pension fund benefit that began the CSO’s 104th season, added a jolt of cliffhanging suspense.
When the dressy crowd left the hall, some 2 1/2 hours after music director Daniel Barenboim had given the downbeat, a new labor contract was still in negotiations and no one could say for certain that Saturday’s first subscription concert would take place as scheduled. Contract talks were continuing at press time.
But if there was uncertainty behind the scenes, the mood in the sold-out auditorium was entirely upbeat, determinedly festive. The orchestra players sported boutonnieres and the stage was festooned with fall flowers. Kathleen Battle, the diva guest of honor, sustained the floral motif by wearing a stunning yellow-gold gown with appliqued flowers, wrapped in a heavy magenta cape she had to keep picking up to avoid knocking over music stands.
Since the Metropolitan Opera dismissed her earlier this year, Battle seems to have confined her appearances pretty much to concerts. No harm in that, for the American soprano still can light up the concert stage with plenty of charm that reduces audiences to happy submission. So it was at Friday’s concert.
This listener-obviously a minority listener-had to worry, however. Battle’s program turned out to be an oddly schizophrenic affair, one that sought to portray her as a diva maid-of-all-work. The soprano began with eine kleine Mozart music and worked her way through a group of Richard Strauss songs before crossing over into Catfish Row and Broadway and related territory. Too bad her classics didn’t have the snap and crackle of her pops.
For all the darting agility of her coloratura, Battle’s soprano has lost some of its earlier sweetness and float; top notes are no longer purest silver, but, rather, a baser metal. Perhaps as compensation, her interpretations have become mannered, studied, coy. It’s as if the diva now possesses every gift save the gift to be simple.
Thus Mozart’s “Exsultate, jubilate” (complete with the cadenza Richard Strauss wrote for soprano Elisabeth Schumann) sounded more muted than exultant, even against Barenboim’s classical complement of strings and winds. The Strauss songs (“Standchen,” “Morgen” and “Ich schwebe”), in which she dispensed with the orchestra in favor of piano accompaniment, were prettily but blandly sung. Here Barenboim’s collaboration suggested a ripe inwardness of expression that simply was not Battle’s to command.
Ah, but the crossover portion of her program introduced us to an entirely different singer, one who cradled Gershwin’s “Summertime” with a ravishing tone and great tenderness; who drove home the bluesy “Take My Mother Home” (from Andre Previn’s song cycle, “Honey and Rue”) with such fervor and pride it was as if she became the music. There was a sincerity and commitment here one missed in the more classical fare.
Oddly enough, Battle resorted to amplification for Bernstein’s “Somewhere” and Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday,” and this turned her light lyric voice into a weird kind of soubrettish-Nilssonian dramatic soprano. All that might not have been necessary had she used smaller orchestrations.
For their portion of the program, Barenboim and the CSO presented a beautifully hushed, elegiac Schubert “Unfinished” Symphony and a brashly rambunctious Gershwin “An American in Paris,” complete with Bud Herseth’s bluesy trumpet solo.
