Chicago Classical Review

Neither heat nor humidity nor thick plumes of smoke spurred by Canadian wildfires could stay the ever-resilient Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus from their musical obligations.

There were relieved sighs all around early Friday afternoon when, after canceling the morning rehearsal, Grant Park Music Festival officials deemed the health hazard sufficiently reduced to warrant going ahead with the concert that evening at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park.

A good thing, too, for the program of 19th- and 20th-century choral works represented a high-water mark amid the festival’s ongoing tribute to Christopher Bell’s 25th anniversary as Grant Park Chorus director.

In the larger scheme of things, these weekend concerts celebrate one of the great partnerships in recent American choral performance.

Among the nation’s leading symphonic choirs, Bell’s Grant Park contingent remains several cuts above the competition—a remarkable reflection of his diligence, caring musicianship and impeccably high technical standards.

Dapper as ever in his spangly vermilion blazer, the Scottish master of massed choral voices led performances of works by Fauré, Vaughan Williams and James MacMillan that exemplified the extraordinary artistic level the Grant Park choristers have achieved under his stewardship.

MacMillan’s Cantos Sagrados (Sacred Songs) and Vaughan Williams’ Toward the Unknown Region are both miniature cantatas, though their musical means and expressive reach could hardly be more dissimilar.

The former composer’s 1989 choral drama marries Latin liturgical texts to contemporary poems by the Argentinian writers Ariel Dorfman and Ana Maria Mendoza about violent political repression in Latin America. It is an enormously powerful piece, tingling with troubled, even harrowing, intensity.

It was in 1997 that Bell, a friend of MacMillan’s since their days as university classmates, commissioned and premiered the version of Cantos Sagrados for chorus with orchestra that Grant Park introduced to the summer series on Friday.  

The anguished confusion of choral voices ricocheting against the fierce pizzicato thwacks of double basses and cellos in the opening section set the overall tone of collective rage—offset by pages of prayer and meditation that are never far from numbed grief.

Bell’s thorough command of the music and the troubled emotions that sear its soul told in the firmness of his direction as well as in the clear articulation, secure intonation and deftly balanced sound his choral charges brought to their sung and spoken words. He dovetailed long choral phrases with his usual sensitivity to text, MacMillan’s music intensifying the words’ impact.

If Sacred Songs pinned the audience to the backs of their chairs, Vaughan Williams’ setting of poetry by Walt Whitman offered contrasting heart-ease. This is early Vaughan Williams, still in thrall to English choral tradition, although glimmers of his later, more original manner peek through the rather stolid textures.

Bell and friends did the British composer’s mini-cantata proud even if the amplification tended to overload the big climax near the end.

Some of that same electronic distortion also affected parts of the admirable account of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem that came after intermission.

This gentlest of the great musical settings of the Latin mass for the dead—transformed by Fauré into a rite of consolation for the living—is not the first Requiem that comes to mind when you consider suitability for outdoor performance (think Verdi and Beethoven).

No matter. Even given the ambient noise of thumping boom boxes and ambulance sirens wailing just beyond the park, there was much to enjoy in Friday’s warmly sensitive account.

Bell clearly had rehearsed his choir to the eyeteeth with respect to clear enunciation and transparent textures; a pity that the sound system did not always give back a luminous reflection of what the performers were doing. The sopranos sounded properly angelic, especially in the final section, “In Paradisum,”  whose “Et lux perpetua” gleamed like a celestial laser beam.

The rest of the voices were on their best behavior as well, while the orchestra reinforced their warm sonority without overbalancing it.

Of the two soloists, Janai Brugger brought a soprano of shining purity and childlike innocence that proved ideal for “Pie Jesu.” Baritone Sankara Harouna had the right lean, rather Gallic timbre for his two solos, which he delivered with sensitivity and conviction.

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

Posted in Performances
No Comments