Chicago Classical Review

Kalena Bovell made her Grant Park Orchestra podium debut Wednesday night, leading what was to be a program of 20^th– and 21^st-century American music. The Panamanian-American conductor’s Millennium Park bow was cut short, however, as the orchestra’s favor with the summer weather gods ran out and thunderstorms prematurely ended the evening.

A small, intrepid audience was treated to the briefest overture and an evergreen American concerto before being asked to take shelter near the Grant Park garages, with the concert ultimately getting called amid the passing downpours.

The truncated concert opened with the Grant Park Orchestra’s first performance of Jessie Montgomery’s Starburst, a three-minute vignette for string orchestra written for the Sphinx Virtuosi in 2012. Arpeggiated busy-ness swirls around insistent repeated pitches, conveying the titular phenomenon’s generative combustion. Bovell deftly directed Montgomery’s aphoristic opus, and the composer was on hand to receive the audience’s appreciation.

Barber’s Violin Concerto followed with Queen Elisabeth Competition laureate William Hagen as soloist. Hagen forthrightly delivered the Allegro’s rhapsodic strains without indulging in schmaltz, with Bovell emphasizing Barber’s piquant orchestral writing. The violinist insistently posed the movement’s probing questions and Bovell facilitated a fluent dialogue with the orchestral backdrop.

Principal oboe Mitchell Kuhn luminously opened the Andante, with Hagen’s solo entrance anxiously disturbing the placid atmosphere. Bovell drew a supportive bed from the orchestra to support the Juilliard grad’s winding path to an ardent G-string statement of the movement’s main theme.

There was controversy about the last movement of Barber’s concerto even when it was premiered, and 90 years later it still feels like a non sequitur. Even with Hagen’s unimpeachable reading of its pyrotechnics, how the concluding Presto in moto perpetuo connects with the preceding narrative remains opaque. Bovell seemed nervously buried in the score but kept things on the rails, all the way through Hagen’s blistering coda.

After the Barber it was announced that the concert was in a 30-minute weather hold, and patrons should exit to the east and seek shelter in the Grant Park garage tunnels. Ominous thunderclaps seemed to seal the deal, and the remainder of the performance was cancelled in short order.

Peter Boyer’s Ellis Island: The Dream of America, from 2001, was the evening’s casualty, and was to have featured actors from the Lookingglass Theater Company. One of the most popular American orchestral works of this century, it was heard in Chicago in a 2018 performance by the Chicago Sinfonietta, and one hopes local audiences will soon have another opportunity to experience Boyer’s multimedia score.

The Grant Park Orchestra performs 6:30 p.m. Friday and 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Harris Theater. Edwin Outwater conducts Jimmy López’s Loud, Lou Harrison’s Symphony No. 2 (“Elegiac”), Amy Woodforde-Finden’s Kashmiri Song, and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with soloist Sara Davis Buechner. grantparkmusicfestival.org

Posted in Performances
No Comments