CIVIC ORCHESTRA OF CHICAGO
Still, when a spring collaboration between the Civic and New Music Chicago was announced, that seemed like a good excuse to hear the group again. Michael Morgan, who had proved himself time and time again with the CSO, would be conducting. And even if the group was too much for Morgan, there was a slew of new pieces to listen to.
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The new CSO administration under Henry Fogel has overseen a number of exciting changes, among them the splitting of Mazer’s old job into two full-time conducting positions that were filled by Michael Morgan and Kenneth Jean, both talented and eager young conductors who have rebuilt the Civic into an instrument worthy of their talents. Also, the arrival of the CSO’s first composer in residence, John Corigliano, has ensured that the Civic takes an active interest in new music, regularly performing new works on their concert programs and sight-reading new scores for composer competitions twice a year. And Civic concerts are now free, though tickets must be ordered in advance. All this has given the Civic an entirely new and enthusiastic audience that overflows Orchestra Hall every concert.
Corigliano was represented by a work that demonstrates the worst qualities of this fad, Fantasia on an Ostinato, a piano work composed for recently deceased Chicago pianist Sheldon Shkolnik five years ago, here orchestrated. The piano version was heard in its entirety before the concert, the orchestral version within the concert. I was puzzled at Corigliano’s bragging to the audience that players of the New York Philharmonic did not recognize his use of the funeral march from the Beethoven Seventh Symphony until the climax, where it is shamelessly lifted note for note, for its emergence is so telegraphed from the first measure that you’d have to be tone-deaf not to catch it. (The same cliche was used in Corigliano’s birthday piece dedicated to Sir Georg Solti.) The composition worked better orchestrated than as a piano piece, but one hearing was more than enough.
The performances of these new scores by the Civic Orchestra were of a very high quality, particularly in the brass and woodwind passages. As in the CSO, the strings were the weakest sections of the orchestra, but their playing was of a much higher caliber than past incarnations of the orchestra I have heard. Conductor Michael Morgan showed considerable imagination and sense of detail in each piece. Sometimes a conductor’s job is like a lawyer’s–the job is to present the “case” of the composer as best you can, whatever you may happen to think of the music itself. Morgan is a master of this, and it’s not as easy as one might think (I have always found playing uninteresting music an intolerable experience).
The adagio too was marred by the various weaknesses of the strings, who found it very difficult to sustain the long phrases Morgan demanded of them. The tempo was definitely too slow for the Civic, but in struggling to achieve it the players learn much more than they would if Morgan sped it up to cover their weaknesses. That is what an effective training orchestra is all about.
