Not every newcomer to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra podium can be entrusted with an important world premiere, but, then, Kent Nagano is far from your average newcomer.
Management took its time in engaging the young American music director of the Lyons Opera (who also holds symphonic posts in Manchester and London), a wait that with hindsight seems to have been prudent. Thursday night, Nagano clearly was ready to take on the CSO on his terms and they were prepared to engage with him as if they had been sharing the concert stage for years.
A musical dynamo with brains, Nagano gave the audience at Orchestra Hall as serious and unusual a calling card as could be imagined. Sofia Gubaidulina’s Concerto for Viola and Orchestra was the latest in a series of CSO commissions sponsored by the Mrs. Harold C. Smith Commissioning Fund. It was performed by its Russian dedicatee, Yuri Bashmet, who also was making his subscription-series debut.
Finally, a substantial new work the CSO doesn’t have to apologize for presenting. The Tatar-born Gubaidulina, who lives near Hamburg, Germany, is regularly greeted with extravagant praise in the Western musical press, where she has been hailed as the leading former-Soviet composer of the post-Shostakovich generation. Nothing about her haunting and challenging Viola Concerto makes one want to disagree with that accolade.
This isn’t so much a conventional concerto as an existential landscape in musical sound. The solo viola broods, cries, whispers and wails in moody, glissando-laden soliloquies that interrupt the large orchestra’s static, chantlike figures but are hardly affected by them. Soft, slow, austere and almost painfully withdrawn for much of its 30-minute length, the single-movement concerto creates a gripping sense of expectancy.
When the viola and orchestra finally unleash their pent-up emotions in a cataclysm of rapidly shifting meters and eerie col legno effects, one feels a tremendous catharsis has taken place even if the viola’s last thoughts end the piece with a quiet question mark. Are the mysteries of music ever truly resolved, asks Gubaidulina. Is life?
I wouldn’t hesitate to call her work a masterpiece of the late 20th Century–a major addition to all-too-slim repertory of modern viola concertos. Its interior virtuosity was, of course, tailor-made for Bashmet, and his febrile intensity and troubled poetry will give other soloists a fearsome act to top. Nagano and the orchestra were fully inside this music, as well, while Gubaidulina was present to share in the audience’s warmly positive reception.
Nagano went to the other end of our century for the concert’s second half–the complete Stravinsky “Firebird” ballet, in the 1910 scoring.
How much greater this score sounds when heard with all its connective tissue. Nagano is an imaginative man of the theater and his performance evoked images of Diaghilev dancers in costumes by Bakst. Each of the guest conductor’s interpretative choices was motivated by a thorough understanding of the music, a firm grasp of the inner workings of the ballet that allowed him to balance the wealth of exotic color and narrative detail while awakening our own sense of wonder and fantasy.
Let’s have the uncommonly talented Kent Nagano back at the CSO, and soon.
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The program will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday at Orchestra Hall, 220 S. Michigan Ave. Phone 312-294-3000.
