Chicago Classical Review

Sat Aug 16, 2025 at 10:53 am

It was a hot, sticky and sweaty Friday evening at Millennium Park. 

Such qualities also suited the occasion with Carl Orff’s lusty Carmina Burana as the main work on this final program of the 2025 Grant Park Music Festival.

One of the pleasures of Giancarlo Guerrero’s first season leading Chicago’s lakefront music festival—in addition to the consistently excellent performances—has been the thoughtful thematic thread of his programming. For this final weekend of the season, Guerrero devised yet another clever lineup with three contrasted works that explore dynamic tensions between the sacred and secular/profane.

The most intriguing item was the evening’s centerpiece, Alan Hovhaness’s Mysterious Mountain, aka his Symphony No. 2. 

Hovhaness (1911-2000), an American composer of Armenian and Scottish heritage, found his artistic voice early in his career. Though the dizzyingly prolific composer would write more than four hundred works over his long life—including 67 symphonies—Mysterious Mountain remains his most famous and characteristic work.

Premiered in 1955 by Leopold Stokowski and the Houston Symphony, the work found immediate popularity and quickly became a repertory mainstay. (Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra made a celebrated recording in 1958 that still serves as the gold standard.) Sadly, like many American works of the 20th century, it soon fell out of the repertory and performances have been rarities since the 1970s. 

All credit to Guerrero for reviving this beautiful and compelling work. A secular spirituality and nature element suffuse Hovhaness’s 19-minute symphony, qualities richly brought out in Friday’s performance. Guerrero drew organ-like string sonorities in the hymn-like opening Andante and the conductor’s alert observation of the con moto marking kept the music moving, skirting any hint of indulgence or sentimentality. The Grant Park strings brought crackling virtuosity to the central double fugue, and Guerrero invested the final movement with a sense of inevitable return as the chorale-like opening theme is reprised, ending the performance with a quiet benedictory glow.

The symphony was preceded by Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture, which opened the evening. At 15 minutes, the work is more of a tone poem, than mere curtain-raiser. Here too, the sacred and secular gracefully commingle, Rimsky drawing on Russian Orthodox chants that alternate with pagan Easter-tide revelry in typically iridescent scoring.

Guerrero led a dexterously balanced, atmospheric performance in which one could almost smell the incense in the Orthodox themes. The conductor avoided peaking too soon and brought propulsive drive to the brilliant, if somewhat repetitive, latter section, building to a rousing slam-bang coda. Concertmaster Jeremy Black’s expressive violin solos reminded one that Rimsky was working on Scheherazade simultaneously with the Overture, and Jeremy Moeller served up an aptly monastic and eloquent trombone solo.

And so on to Carmina Burana. Carl Orff’s greatest (and only) hit is the most unlikely of works to achieve mass popularity: an hour-long choral symphony composed in Bavaria during the Nazi era that draws upon 13th century pagan texts in Medieval Latin and Middle High German to celebrate the joys and vicissitudes of all the divers country matters— spring, love, drinking, and sex, set against the merciless, ever-turning wheel of fate.

Carmina Burana may not be the most subtle work ever written for chorus and orchestra but on Friday night it was certainly the noisiest. As with the Mahler Symphony of a Thousand a year ago the amplification was boosted to a fierce and relentless level that made the many massive climaxes painful for those sitting in the front section of the Pritzker Pavilion. Hopefully, those in charge of twiddling the knobs will take it down a few notches and tame the sonic excess for Saturday’s repeat.

That apart, this was otherwise a blazing and hugely exuberant performance of Orff’s oddball “scenic oratorio.” Guerrero clearly has an idiomatic feel and sensibility for the score’s combustible mix of the mock-sacred and profane, and this boisterous performance still managed to bring out the subtleties—yes, there are some –in the score. The Grant Park Orchestra musicians were at their considerable finest with polished, virtuosic and thrilling playing across every section, the brass especially.

The performance benefited immensely from some superb solo singing. The baritone has the most opportunities and Troy Cook served up about as ideal a rendering of this challenging assignment as one is ever likely to hear. Signing with a firm line and robust tone with an apt hint of grain, Cook fully inhabited all his solos, whether depicting a despairing lover, embittered sybarite or bibulous Abbott.

It was good to have a genuine countertenor in the role of the roasting swan rather than the usual pushed-up tenor. Reginald Mobley wholly avoided the unfunny exaggeration and mock pathos most soloists bring to their single moment in the piece. Instead, Mobley sang his solo straight and with a simple, plaintive expression that made the dying swan, for once, oddly moving.

Jana McIntyre provided more mixed rewards than her male colleagues. The soprano possesses a youthful girlish timbre suitable to the guileless Court of Love solos, and handled the stratospheric “Dulcissime” securely. Yet her “In Trutina”—the loveliest moment of the work—proved a misfire Friday night, undone by the singer’s wide vibrato and inability to sustain an even line.

The stars of the evening, as usual in this work, were the talented and hard-working members of the Grant Park Chorus. The massed ensemble delivered daunting power,  striking agility and remarkably clear diction, even at some very challenging tempos. Kudos to chorus director Christopher Bell and his singers for delivering the finest choral performance of the year in Chicago.

The young singers of Uniting Voices Chicago provided lively readings of their brief moments as well.

Five retiring festival musicians were recognized in a brief ceremony after intermission for their longtime service:

Mary Stolper, principal flute, 37 years
Patrick Brennan, violist, 30 years
Linc Smelser, cellist, 33 years
Joel Cohen, assistant principal percussionist, 47 years
Jan Jarvis chorus bass, 52 years

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One is pleased to report that the festival provided hard-copy texts and translations for the Carmina Burana performance, a welcome 180 from their previous no-paper-program policy. Clearly, the ongoing criticism from reviewers and audience members alike had some effect.

Let us hope that the festival admin and board do some serious reevaluation of this dubious policy during the off-season and restore programs and texts for all concerts in 2026. It is a disservice to their new artistic director, the Grant Park musicians, the program annotator, and, especially, audience members, for the festival to fail to fully credit the artists and provide essential information about the music being presented.

The program will be repeated 7:30 p.m. Saturday. gpmf.org 

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