GRANT PARK SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
It’s always a great treat when George Cleve comes to town. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra hasn’t brought back this extraordinary conductor since he made a stellar one- concert debut with the CSO at Ravinia three years ago (proving beyond all doubt that arts administration in Chicago is primarily a matter of politics–Cleve’s capabilities rival those of any of the conductors who stand before the CSO and exceed the majority of them). Well, the CSO’s loss is Grant Park’s gain. And ours, since the CSO probably wouldn’t let Cleve do an all-Mozart program, given that it prefers a lush Romantic approach for this music.
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That’s a pity, for in addition to being a completed work, it features a moving tenor aria and a blockbuster coloratura aria that can stand with any of his best-known operatic arias (though the two can’t be excerpted because of the way each modulates from and into its surrounding sections). So to hear these arias, you have to hear Davidde penitente complete–which is quite interesting because most of the music is familiar, while the text is not. The text is in many ways a paraphrase of the C Minor Mass text, which could never have been performed outside the church during the 18th century (Mozart put together Davidde penitente for a musicians’ benefit concert without fee, which may explain why he wasn’t anxious to compose a wholly new work). But if it weren’t for the C Minor Mass, this would doubtless be one of Mozart’s most popular works. For it offers a fascinating glimpse of Mozart’s creative process and it can be a powerful and beautiful work on its own.
Conductor Andrew Parrott is not as much of a household name as many of his less-deserving early-music colleagues. Yet he was one of the movement’s earliest and most experimental pioneers, and he remains one of its guiding lights. The Parrott-conducted Grant Park programs are always among the most interesting of the year, not only because they spotlight unusual repertoire, but also because they give us a fresh perspective on more familiar works. This year’s program combined two relatively unknown works, Beethoven’s ballet The Creatures of Prometheus and a work by the little-known Czech Baroque master Georg Benda, Medea.
It is easy to fault the work on many counts. It is, as Paul describes it in the program notes, “kaleidoscopic,” in that it never settles on an overall point of view or musical approach. Overall it is an exercise in unabashed, lush Romanticism, even though it is highly chromatic. It has some undeniably beautiful sections, and unlike the work of so many late-Romantic composers, it is not simply a series of sequences strung together but is chock-full of musical ideas. In fact, that is the work’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness–there are too many interesting things going on, and they pass too quickly, never to be fully developed or taken to their natural conclusions. Still, the ideas are brilliant and show a fertile musical imagination at work–Paray is a master of orchestral and choral color. It is quite accessible and rather short as mass settings go (there is no Credo and the rest of the mass takes about 35 minutes), and so could easily be revitalized for liturgical use on grand occasions.
It was quite a contrast after the Cleve and Parrott concerts, and it demonstrated the difference between solid direction and leadership and hack conducting. The orchestra and its audiences deserve better.
