Once upon a time, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s musicians pension-fund concerts were serious artistic events. These days, they feel more like quickly assembled pitches for populist favor. The program given by the orchestra Saturday night at Symphony Center smacked of that kind of cynical weightlessness. It was built around the talents of opera star Denyce Graves, which unfortunately weren’t enough to lift it beyond the ordinary.
The alluring American mezzo-soprano sang a handful of favorite French and Italian opera arias, including Carmen’s two showpieces from the Bizet opera that had given her a triumphant Lyric Opera debut in 2005. An uncommonly beautiful woman, on Saturday Graves had the audience eating out of her pretty hand before she had sung a note. And her two glam gowns turned the diva sighting into a veritable fashion show.
Too bad she looked better than she sounded.
Only in arias from Verdi’s “Don Carlo” and Cilea’s “Adriana Lecouvreur” did she rise beyond vocal flaws to make something special of the material. Elsewhere, her singing was patchy, with some gleaming top notes and smoky chest tones surrounding a rough middle register, curtailed legato phrasing and expressive values externally applied.
A pair of spirituals also came up short, and the powerful text of “Witness” was drowned out by the blunt and brusque baton of Emmanuel Villaume. Graves favored the crowd with a single encore, the Seguidilla from “Carmen,” her signature role.
The CSO filled out a relatively short vocal menu with symphonic tidbits by Saint-Saens, Chabrier, Bizet, Verdi, Puccini and Mascagni, but there was nothing really distinguished about these slam-bang readings either. To judge from the frequent eruptions of applause, however, the audience believed it got its money’s worth.
*Orchestra Hall has heard Myung-Whun Chung a great deal this season as both CSO guest conductor and as director of his own Paris-based Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra. On each occasion I was impressed by the integrity of his musical ideas and the vigor and intelligence with which he carried them out. His subscription concerts with the CSO last week were Chung at his best.
“L’Ascension,” four symphonic meditations by Olivier Messiaen, was the high point of the program.
An early work, “The Ascension” (1933) has most of the mystical French Catholic composer’s fingerprints in nascent form. The opening section, a chorale for brass and winds, suffuses the orchestra in a blindingly brilliant sunrise. Two “allelujah” sections, the first serene, the second ecstatic, bring us to the final meditation in which the strings climb through radiant E Major triads before glimpsing the bliss of eternity. Chung drew a needle-sharp reading from the CSO.
Each section of a suite from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” ballet was given its apposite color and character, the quick sections sustained at brilliant speeds, without a hair out of place. The love music was drawn with exceptional tenderness, and I admired Chung for not sentimentalizing the tragic atmosphere of the final pages.Chung’s fluid direction of Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloe” Suite No. 2 gave the various balletic episodes a shimmering presence in the theater of one’s mind, and he whipped up plenty of orgiastic excitement in the finale. Mathieu Dufour sang the shapely flute solo on a seamless stream of breath.
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jvonrhein@tribune.com
