GRANT PARK SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
But match a second-class orchestra with a first-class conductor, and something very special begins to happen; do it often enough, and it is the orchestra’s standards–not the conductor’s–that will change. Early this month (fortunately just after Taste of Chicago), the Grant Park Symphony Orchestra proved this with its most adventurous weekend of the season, a Friday night concert under the direction of John Adams and a Saturday night program (repeated on Sunday) led by Andrew Parrott. This was a Chicago debut for Adams, a minimalist composer who has lately been garnering a reputation as a conductor; he is one of three conductors (along with Christopher Hogwood and Hugh Wolff) overseeing the activities of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. For Parrott the weekend was a triumphant return to the site of his American debut, a thoroughly magical concert given here in 1987; the founder of Britain’s first period-instrument orchestra (yes, pre-Hogwood and Pinnock) and one of its most prestigious choral ensembles (the Taverner Choir), Parrott is just starting to achieve the recognition that many of his less-deserving colleagues have long enjoyed.
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Whenever I hear An American in Paris I am astonished anew that it was only Gershwin’s third “serious” composition (that is to say, involving an orchestra). In fact, it was only his second actual encounter with orchestration: arranger Ferde Grofe scored Rhapsody in Blue. Gershwin was so unsure of his ability to bring off a totally symphonic work (both Rhapsody and the Concerto in F are piano concertos) that he went to Europe to see what he could learn from the continent’s leading composers. Much legend surrounds Gershwin’s meetings with such luminaries as Stravinsky and Ravel–both of whom, it was said, knew and admired Gershwin’s work–but in the end Gershwin’s trip provided him with more inspiration than technique. He called An American in Paris a “tone poem for orchestra,” thinking of Liszt and Richard Strauss, even though the sound world that he created in the piece owes little to those composers.
I was also skeptical about how well Adams’s own work, The Chairman Dances, would go; Grant Park’s forays into minimalism have generally been quite scrappy. Minimalism often sounds simple, but repetitious phrases played tightly together across a large orchestra, varying slightly, are nightmares of counting and concentration for even the most accomplished players. Further I was aware that the work was an offshoot of Adams’s controversial 1987 opera, Nixon in China, which I found an insufferable bore. If Adams has a sense of how to write for the human voice, he did not display much of it in Nixon. Moreover I was put off by the opera’s unlikely combination of a minimalist score with a conventional linear libretto. Philip Glass’s Satyagraha, a minimalist opera that I found rewarding and memorable, does not attempt to tell the Gandhi story in a traditional Western sequence of events; rather it is a series of tableaux or meditations, in which the underlying musical repetition becomes a sort of public mantra, fitting the cyclical Eastern ethos and the mystical and sacred character of the Sanskrit verses that serve as the libretto. As for Nixon, there appears to be no particular reason why a minimalist style, versus, say, a serial style, was used for this opera’s subject matter.
Grant Park manager and artistic director Steven Ovitsky has consistently tried to bring in early-music conductors to lead programs of early repertoire, and though the results have been mixed, he is to be congratulated for taking the risk. The last such conductor brought in to do Beethoven was Dutchman Frans Bruggen, probably the greatest living Baroque recorder player, who had taken up conducting as well. The results were disastrous–either Bruggen had failed to get his ideas across to the orchestra, or his ideas were abysmally boring. I never realized how many repeats Beethoven had put in the Eroica Symphony–every one went by very slowly and with no dynamic contrast whatsoever. This was Beethoven slower and more lifeless than that of even the most ardent Romantic conductors.
Following the familiar overture was a performance of virtually the complete incidental music that Beethoven wrote for Goethe’s play Egmont, a historical fiction concerning the 16th-century Flemish count who led a resistance movement against Spanish rule and became a martyr in the cause of freedom. The pieces, including two lovely and rarely heard songs for Egmont’s beloved Clarchen (nicely sung by an overmiked Diane Ragains), were connected by a summary of what goes on in the play, cleverly adapted by radio dramatist Yuri Rasovsky and convincingly narrated by Chicago actor Joe van Slyke. Van Slyke also took the role of the count for the rousing finale, in which, to Beethoven’s heroic strains, he calls out that his blood shall free the land from Spanish occupation, and encourages his countrymen to follow him to glory.
