CHICAGO STRING ENSEMBLE
at Saint Paul’s United Church of Christ September 22
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
As such, it was in good hands with CSE music director Alan Heatherington, who was able to elicit a beautiful, full, rich sound from his mere 22 players. The ensembling was tight, the phrasing very musical, and the piece’s inner and outer structure were meticulously revealed. Heatherington has a wonderful flare for form, for building tension and climaxes. His tempi were convincing, his leadership stable. It is rare to hear such glorious string tone in Chicago, but Heatherington pulled it off with great style–and with much younger and more supple players than typically play in the Lyric Opera or Chicago Symphony orchestras. Concertmaster Virginia Graham played a low violin solo in the third movement so elegantly it was virtually cellolike. My only problems with this reading were that the second movement was heavy-handed and the finale a tad slower and less lively than I would have liked. Balancing, too, became an issue in the finale, as the “Greensleeves” melody in the lower strings did not cut through the rest of the orchestra enough. Even so, the voices were well layered and beautifully executed.
Hansen seems far more suited to this style of singing than the early music he usually struggles through in groups such as Music of the Baroque. His voice is gravelly, but rich in color and technique, at least for this work. He was, not surprisingly, difficult to understand with all the horn noise going on, but his text painting and depth of interpretation were superb (the full English text was generously provided in the program). The only piece that gave him trouble was the “Hymn,” which contained some runs that he was unable to deliver cleanly.
It is difficult to understand the enormous popularity of the four Vivaldi violin concerti that open his concerto series “The Contest Between Harmony and Invention.” The Four Seasons, each “season” consisting of three short contrasting movements, is so shamelessly programmatic that Vivaldi composed lame poetry to indicate exactly which seasonal episodes are depicted in the music. The music is certainly not terribly interesting, although it is so familiar that a distanced perspective is virtually impossible. Perhaps its continuing grip has to do with the fact that the piece was rediscovered during the Romantic era, when people were obsessed with programmatic associations in music. Even though Romantic program music and Baroque program music exist in different sonic solar systems, the fact that listeners had instructions as to what they should listen for–unlike the more abstract, at least by 19th-century aesthetics, art of Bach or Handel–may have made all the difference. In any case, the piece endures–in the concert hall, in film sound tracks, even in salad-dressing commercials.
The biggest problem came from the bizarre decision to split the work in half and present the parts between the Vivaldi seasons. Apparently the purpose was to ensure maximum variety over the evening. But while the Vivaldi is a series of separate concerti that were not intended to be heard all together in the first place, the Bach was intended as a unit. His overall architecture was completely and needlessly obliterated.
