Guerrero, Koh delight Grant Park Festival audience with potent premieres
As the Grant Park Music Festival heads into its final week of concerts for the season, one thing at least seems abundantly clear.
Conductor Giancarlo Guerrero already appears to have put his own stamp on the summer series. He has done so not only by devising attention-getting programs that combine standard symphonic repertory with thoughtfully chosen contemporary classical discoveries, but also with the remarkably vital performances he has been summoning from the musicians of the Grant Park Orchestra.
The festival’s new artistic director and principal conductor has, in short, made their work ethic his work ethic, and that has made a crucial difference in the music.
Such was again the case on a sultry Friday evening at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, where Guerrero led a meaty agenda of 20th and 21st century music that, for the most part, ventured well beyond your typical hot-weather festival fare.
Unfamiliar and more familiar scores by Benjamin Britten and Igor Stravinsky, respectively, bracketed the Grant Park premieres of recent works, both striking, by two of America’s most widely performed women composers—Jennifer Higdon’s The Singing Rooms and Lera Auerbach’s Icarus.
Part concerto, part choral song cycle, Singing Rooms (2007) sets allusive, sometimes elusive, poems by Higdon’s former conservatory colleague Jeanne Minahan for solo violin, chorus and orchestra. The composer regards a house of separate rooms as a metaphor for life, each of the seven sections evoking different emotional states that come together quite wonderfully at the quiet close. The work’s unusual scoring calls to mind that of Vaughan Williams’ Flos Campi, as does its prevailing mood of English pastoral serenity. It is among her most powerful works, deeply personal yet universal in resonance.
Higdon’s post-neo-romantic idiom is like a musical pond in which restlessly shifting events teem beneath calm surfaces. The violin part is intensely lyrical and meditative—wordless commentary on what the chorus sings and the orchestra plays, becoming more agitated as the dramatic mood heightens. The movements are played without pause and reach a climax in the penultimate section, where solo violin and obbligato English horn converse with God.
Jennifer Koh’s artistry has long been grounded in the power of storytelling through her violin, and it was fascinating to behold the sheer tonal beauty and deeply introspective lyricism the Chicago-born virtuoso brought to the difficult solo part—qualities deftly matched by conductor, orchestra and chorus (the latter prepared by Christopher Bell).
Inevitably certain sonic nuances were sacrificed to the ambient noises of the downtown lakefront on a steamy summer weekend. On the whole, however, Friday’s skilled performers overcame the alfresco hurdles handily, and Higdon’s absorbing score drew a vociferous reception, as did the composer herself, who introduced the performance.
Also evocative, but in a rather more direct way, was Auerbach’s Icarus (2006).
Based on the familiar myth about a Greek youth who flies too close to the sun and falls into the sea, the 12-minute tone poem begins in a whirl of darkly turbulent activity in the lower strings before dissolving into an extended violin solo (nicely taken by concertmaster Jeremy Black) over chiming harp and percussion before the elegiac fade to nothingness.
As if this relatively new Americana weren’t challenging enough for players and listeners, Guerrero threw in another Grant Park first, Britten’s rarely-heard The Building of the House. He ended with Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite—no pushover summer-party piece despite its popularity.
Given its metaphoric link to the Higdon work that followed it, also its brief choral component, the Britten rarity—written for the 1967 opening of the first, ill-fated Snape Maltings Concert Hall (home of the composer’s Aldeburgh Festival)—was a clever choice to begin the program.
There really isn’t much to this late opus other than clangorous bustle, but even minor Britten is worth hearing. Guerrero and friends went at it with hammer and tongs, while the full chorus rose mightily to the embedded setting of Psalm 127.
They closed with an atmospheric Firebird Suite (1919 version) in which Stravinsky’s splashes of luxuriant instrumental color and biting balletic rhythms were writ large. An unusually tender Berceuse gave way to a truly grand finale that gave the traffic on adjacent Columbus Drive some formidable competition.
If Guerrero continues to breathe fresh life into standard repertory such as this, festival goers are in for some exciting summers ahead.
The program will be repeated 7:30 p.m. Saturday. grantparkmusicfestival.org
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