CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Solti’s stay was short this season–only two weeks of concerts–largely because the performances were really warm-ups for the orchestra’s east-coast tour last week. Yet because of the enormous weight and importance of the works performed, the length of his stay seems irrelevant.
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There was a time when Arnold Schoenberg would also have been viewed as an early-20th-century giant–and he still is to some extent. But the 12-tone system he developed seems more and more a historical dead-end. Ironically, most of his enduring works are not 12-tone works, and his disciples Alban Berg and Anton Webern did much more with the system than the master. Today, one is hard-pressed to find a significant die-hard serialist. Even Pierre Boulez, who 30 years ago claimed that serialism was “the only musical direction of the future,” has largely abandoned it.
Thus the pairing of two of Bartok’s most important works–conducted by his former pupil and greatest living interpreter, Georg Solti–is an important event, and it is understandable that Solti would want to take this program on tour, showcasing Bartok, himself, and the CSO.
At the end of the evening, after the complete performance of Bluebeard’s Castle, a woman in the row ahead of me remained in her seat long after the thunderous applause had stopped and the many curtain calls were over. She turned to me with a puzzled look and said, “I don’t get it. When did Bluebeard murder his wife? I must have missed it.” When I told her that Bluebeard never murdered his wife, she was even more confused. “The program says that he murdered his wife,” she insisted. “The program,” I told her, “is mistaken.”
The performance was perfection, if that can ever be said to truly exist in the concert hall. The two singers, Hungarian mezzo-soprano Klara Takacs and the Scandinavian bass Aage Haugland, are ideal, vocally and dramatically, for their roles. Takacs’s text painting of the Hungarian libretto was one of the most effective operatic portrayals I have ever heard–it literally sent chills down my spine at the appropriate moments. I have no doubt that the pair mesmerized the New York public last week, despite the fact that the Met is now running its own production, featuring no less a cast than Jessye Norman and Samuel Ramey.
The next week saw Solti back at the podium, leading a world-premiere performance of a trombone concerto scored for CSO principal Jay Friedman by composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. It is the first of two trombone concerti that the Pulitzer prize-winning composer will write for the CSO; the other, for bass trombonist Charles Vernon, will premiere two seasons from now.
