Guest conductor Mark Wigglesworth’s third series of concerts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra this weekend at Symphony Center are notable mainly for making possible the local debut of a major vocal find, German soprano Christine Schafer. Her singing of Mozart arias and Alban Berg songs lifted Thursday’s program well out of the ordinary.
I discovered Schafer’s special gifts last year in Paris where she delivered a performance of Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” under Pierre Boulez’s direction, which actually made that difficult music moving. Thursday found her back in Viennese atonalism with Berg’s five orchestral songs to picture-postcard texts by Peter Altenberger. She entered their strange Expressionist world with a real feeling for the music’s shifting colors and intensities, while the inordinately wide range of the vocal line troubled her not at all. Some listeners might have longed for a richer voice (hers is almost vibrato-less) but I thought its “instrumental” quality blended beautifully with the ripe Mahlerian scoring.
Schafer’s two Mozart concert arias — “Vorrei spiegarvi, oh Dio” (K.418) and “Mia speranza adorata! Ah non sai qual pena sia” (K.416) — were even finer. Mozart wrote them with a special soprano voice in mind — that of Aloysia Weber, the beloved who spurned his offer of marriage. Both pieces show us heroines in major emotional distress and Schafer went directly to the expressive heart of each. She has the purity of tone, elegance of line and impeccable coloratura technique this music demands, not to mention an amazing high extension that allowed her to scale the horrendous vocal leaps like a champion hurdler.
Wigglesworth had large and small versions of the CSO at his command for the Berg and Mozart selections, respectively. He made much of the hothouse late-Romantic atmosphere of the “Altenberg” Lieder, just as he brought welcome detailing to the Mozart arias. The music director of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales had rather more mixed results with Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” and the Sibelius Second Symphony.
His languid and soft-textured Debussy was distinguished primarily by the liquid flute solos of Donald Peck, who recently announced he is retiring from his principal’s position next season after 42 years with the orchestra.
Wigglesworth’s Sibelius No. 2 had the misfortune of following close on the heels of Colin Davis’ memorably inspired account of the same work with his London Symphony given here last December. By comparison, Thursday brought a workaday Sibelius Second. The younger Briton seemed to want to point the work forward to the more austere style of the Finnish composer’s maturity but he was unable to sustain enough intensity to argue a convincing case for his modernist view. Spongy attacks created ensemble problems, while the finale felt driven and lacking in majesty until the final pages.
The program will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday.
