Muti, Chicago Symphony at Carnegie Hall

Chicago Symphony のMusic Director に昨年秋に就任しながら，シーズン開幕時には過労ということで休演してしまい，今年に入って，リハーサルまで行いながら，その途中に指揮台から失神状態で前に倒れて，顎と頬の骨折を負ってしまい，その治療と，そもそも失神の原因として心臓のペースの乱れが発見され，ペースメーカーを埋め込んでから，すっかり回復して，まずイタリアでオペラで完全復帰してから，ようやくChicago Symphony の指揮台に立ったRiccardo Muti が，かねて予定されていたCarnegie Hall 公演に登場して，Muti フアンを大いに安心させたようです．

時恰も，Muti がかつてMusic Director を勤めたPhiladelphia Symphony の破産宣告が報じられて，いっそうMuti-Chicago Symphony の関係に関心が高まっていたこともあったのです．　

The main thing a listener wanted from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s visit to Carnegie Hall this weekend was a sense of how this great ensemble was faring under the baton of Riccardo Muti, whose tenure as its music director began in September. You had to have a strong set of mental blinders not to think, in the moments before Mr. Muti walked onstage, about the alarming illnesses that have kept him off the podium much of the season, and that naturally brought to mind the health problems that led James Levine to give up his directorship of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Those concerns were amplified by the news, announced just hours before the Saturday evening concert, that the Philadelphia Orchestra — Mr. Muti’s previous American podium — had declared bankruptcy.

演奏曲目は，日曜日が　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” at the start　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, at the end　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　土曜日は All Berlioz で，　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　“Symphonie Fantastique,” 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　“Lélio, ou le Retour à la Vie” (“Lélio, or the Return to Life”)　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　だったようです．

Mr. Muti, lithe and energetic, drew such a glorious sound from his players, and interpreted the music with such insight and clarity, that a listener had to be fully in the moment. 　とすっかり聴衆を満足させる素晴しい演奏だったそうです．

the Shostakovich brought the best out of the orchestra. The strings were lush, the woodwind playing was beautifully chiseled, and the brasses had the kind of spectacular power and precision that made the section legendary during the Fritz Reiner and Georg Solti eras.　と，細かな点は別として，絶賛しています．

 

Music Review

Berlioz, Shostakovich and Gérard Depardieu

Daniel Barry for The New York Times

Chicago Symphony Orchestra, led by Riccardo Muti at Carnegie Hall on Sunday. On Saturday, the orchestra performed an all-Berlioz program.

By ALLAN KOZINN

Published: April 18, 2011

The main thing a listener wanted from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s visit to Carnegie Hall this weekend was a sense of how this great ensemble was faring under the baton of Riccardo Muti, whose tenure as its music director began in September. You had to have a strong set of mental blinders not to think, in the moments before Mr. Muti walked onstage, about the alarming illnesses that have kept him off the podium much of the season, and that naturally brought to mind the health problems that led James Levine to give up his directorship of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Those concerns were amplified by the news, announced just hours before the Saturday evening concert, that the Philadelphia Orchestra — Mr. Muti’s previous American podium — had declared bankruptcy.

So one measure of Mr. Muti’s triumph at these concerts was that from the moment he cued the orchestra’s flutes and clarinets, in the opening of Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” at the start of the Saturday evening performance, to his final downbeat on the plangent chord that closed Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, at the end of the Sunday afternoon concert, worries about the state of American orchestras and those who lead them disappeared.

Mr. Muti, lithe and energetic (the Shostakovich included a balletic leap or two, both feet off the podium), drew such a glorious sound from his players, and interpreted the music with such insight and clarity, that a listener had to be fully in the moment.

The Saturday evening concert was a repeat of the all-Berlioz program that Mr. Muti offered as his season opener in Chicago, a pairing of the “Symphonie Fantastique” and its rarely heard sequel, “Lélio, ou le Retour à la Vie” (“Lélio, or the Return to Life”).

From the start, “Symphonie Fantastique” benefited from the keen sense of drama Mr. Muti has developed as an opera conductor: moments of dreamy introspection were calm, leisurely and unusually serene in Mr. Muti’s reading, and the more passionate sections that propel the work (including the hallucinatory execution and the Witches’ Sabbath) were played with all the tension, drive and volume you could want. Beyond those broad contours, Mr. Muti dealt in nuance, focusing on voicings and details that are often lost in Berlioz’s narrative sweep.

“Lélio” is more diffuse; in fact, it is actually a handful of pieces — songs with piano accompaniment, larger orchestral and choral fantasies — strung together with a narration that includes reflections on Shakespeare, semiautobiographical musing (in the character of the artist-hero of “Symphonie Fantastique”) and even comments on the music at hand. In 19th-century terms, it is completely loopy. But nowadays orchestras and new-music groups that present similar quasi-theatrical, mixed-genre programs are praised as groundbreaking.

As in Chicago, Gérard Depardieu gave an alternately manic and depressed reading of the narration, in French. Mario Zeffiri sang the tenor arias with a sweet fluidity, and the bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen gave a strong account of the “Song of the Brigands.” In the larger pieces, particularly the fantasy on Shakespeare’s “Tempest,” the orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Chorus were solid and supple.

The Sunday afternoon concert was originally to have included Varèse’s “Arcana” and a new work by Anna Clyne, as well as the Shostakovich. Mr. Muti’s recent illness kept him from rehearsing the Varèse and Clyne works, so he substituted Cherubini’s Overture in G, an alternately graceful and splashy curtain-raiser that Mr. Muti made into a smart, trim glimpse of early Romanticism, and a dazzling, cohesive performance of Liszt’s symphonic poem “Les Préludes.”

There was room to quibble about Mr. Muti’s reading of the Shostakovich. Whenever a tempo was slower than Allegro, Mr. Muti lingered over it, replacing its tartness with an unwarranted beauty. Those touches created a striking contrast with the fast, loud and intensely bitter sections that invariably followed, but Shostakovich’s slow music should not be defanged.

That said, the Shostakovich brought the best out of the orchestra. The strings were lush, the woodwind playing was beautifully chiseled, and the brasses had the kind of spectacular power and precision that made the section legendary during the Fritz Reiner and Georg Solti eras. All that made it easy to forgive a touch of interpretive oddness. But the way I see it, Mr. Muti still owes us an “Arcana.”