Chicago Classical Review

On Wednesday night Carlos Kalmar and the Grant Park Orchestra seemed to pick up right where they left off at the end of the Austrian conductor’s 24-year tenure as music director two years ago. In the second of two Kalmar-led programs, the GPO played with fluent rapport in a lineup featuring a 21^st-century concerto and a Romantic warhorse that recalled Kalmar’s inspired programming throughout his time at the orchestra’s helm.

The evening opened with the Chicago premiere of Drum Circles, a five-movement concertante work by Christopher Theofanidis that featured Chicago’s own Third Coast Percussion in their Grant Park debut. Kalmar led the world premiere of the work with the Oregon Symphony in 2019, and his fluency with the score came through in his deft direction.

The opening movement “Rivers and Anthems” begins with shimmering tintinnabulation in the xylophones, its modal proclamations punctuated by chimes. The solo quartet is rhythmically at odds with the orchestra for most of the movement, coming together at the end in a grand final statement. “Sparks and Chants” proceeds with dry, interrogatory gestures in the claves creating a primeval atmosphere that ultimately gives way to a hypnotic marimba melody.

“How Can You Smile When You’re Deep in Thought?” starts skittishly, and here one encountered the problem of the soloists’ unpitched instruments inevitably sounding like accompaniment, a difficulty endemic to writing for solo percussion with orchestra. “Spirits and Drums” went with tribal propulsion with the orchestra percussion section fully joining TCP members Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, and David Skidmore. (The musicians were unlisted in the thin program flier).

Traffic horns and sirens bedeviled the closing “Three Chords and the Truth (or, Learning to Breathe Again)” though subsided to make way for a closing chorale-like theme in the marimbas and a bookending return of the first movement’s material. 

The gentlemen of TCP were dedicated protagonists as they circulated among their vast battery of solo instruments, bringing their trademark electricity now familiar to Chicago audiences. Still, one felt the paradox that this is music that must be seen to really be heard, benefitting substantially from the soloists’ visual choreography, and that Grammy-winning ensemble actually makes an even stronger impression in their solo recital appearances.

The audience was treated to extended historical vamping from Kalmar about Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2 in D Major during the complex stage change that followed, ending with applause for the small army of stage technicians who pulled it off.

Kalmar knit the many cells of Sibelius’ opening Allegretto into a breathing, organic whole and fully projected the stoic austerity of the Andante, emphasizing its thwarted lurching toward resolution. Wednesday’s concert had been pushed back from the customary 6:30 p.m. start to 8:15 to allow noise from the first day of the Taste of Chicago to subside. Unfortunately, this meant running into Navy Pier’s 9 p.m. fireworks shortly into the Sibelius, with explosions disrupting the first two movements and drawing laughter from the audience.

The Vivacissimo felt like an icy blast and principal oboe Mitchell Kuhn conveyed the keening ardor of its famous solo. Kalmar built up a cinematic swirl to lead attacca into the Finale, where the shadows soon return. Kalmar was attuned to these subtleties, bringing the orchestra to an ominous hush before the coda, closing a performance that captured the work’s musical essence while avoiding the pitfalls of schmaltz.

Leonard Slatkin leads the Grant Park Orchestra in Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 and Joseph Schwantner’s Violin Concerto with soloist Yevgeny Kutik 8:15 p.m. Friday and Saturday at Millennium Park. grantparkmusicfestival.com

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