NEW YORK – With the final blasts of brass and percussion at the end of Respighi's "Feste Romane" rattling Carnegie Hall to its foundation, Riccardo Muti ended the American leg of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's October tour in triumph Friday night.
It was hard to say which was the best concert of the three the CSO and Muti performed here, since they hit their stride with "Carmina Burana" on the first night and maintained the high standard from there on. It then simply became a matter of maintaining the energy level, the fine-honed discipline, the power laced with Muti's brand of Italianate elegance. This the maestro and his band unquestionably did.
Observing at close range how these virtuoso players respond to Muti's urgings, and he to theirs, one came away feeling there is now something extrasensory about the way they relate to one another. One felt it at the rehearsals, relaxed but always musically purposeful. And here was the finished product, everything the music director worked to achieve brilliantly in place.
Muti's view of Dvorak's sorely neglected Fifth Symphony brought a bucolic freshness that situated the music far closer to Mediterranean waters than the Moldau of the 34-year-old composer's native Bohemia.
For the Carnegie finale Muti gave the super-attentive audience the two infrequently heard early 20th century Italian pieces with which he had begun the subscription season just before the musicians' strike back home: Martucci's "Notturno" and the Respighi "Feste Romane" ("Roman Festivals").
The maestro dedicated the performance of the Martucci rarity to the great American mezzo-soprano, Marilyn Horne, who beamed from a box in the grand tier. Muti then unfolded the Puccini-esque miniature with the utmost tenderness, like an aria without words.
In the wrong hands, the final panel of Respighi's Roman triptych can feel tawdry, its noisy opening trumpet fanfares calling to mind Hollywood gladiator epics before the fact. Muti's are the right hands. He had his players reveling in the score's Technicolor opulence without making the music sound more vulgar than it already is. The audience leapt to its feet, roaring its approval. Many people lingered, hoping for an encore. But Muti, in keeping with the two previous concerts, offered none. Perhaps he's saving them for Mexico.
CSO outreach events
It's worth noting that several CSO musicians, creative consultant Yo-Yo Ma and Charles Grode, vice president for the orchestra's Institute for Learning, Access and Training, are taking part in various educational, networking and community outreach events during the tour here and in Mexico.
As part of a two-day conference at New York's Hunter College, CSO assistant concertmaster Yuan-Qing Yu joined Ma, CSO Association President Deborah Rutter and Damian Woetzel, a retired dancer with New York City Ballet, in a discussion of some of the Citizen Musician strategies Ma has been developing through the CSO learning institute. This Aspen Arts Strategy Group, as the event was called, was a program of the Aspen Institute Arts Program under Woetzel's direction.
Yu spoke of how she and her colleagues of the Civitas Ensemble, the service-minded chamber group she founded in Chicago last year, bring musical balm to the community, particularly to hospitalized children who suffer from life-threatening illnesses.
"It's proven that music helps healing," said Yu, whose group later performed for the 25 or so arts administrators attending the conference. "Back home in Chicago, we want to expose these children to high-quality music, not just by bringing music into hospitals but making it a part of the therapy. I want us to be more effective in terms of helping families and patients connect within the hospital environment, so they can have something beautiful to share."
Ma spoke of the artistic and humanistic values that inform his work and how art encourages the development of the imagination, flexibility and innovation.
Woetzel raised the question why musicians should be the only Citizen Musicians – why can't dancers, actors, painters and sculptors be involved as well? Artists of all descriptions, he said, should be thinking of the role that the work they do can play in their communities toward improving the quality of life.
"We were there to begin that conversation, using the work we've been doing in Chicago as a foundation," Grode told me afterward. "Hopefully we were able to charge people in the room to move that objective forward in their various disciplines, beyond performance spaces."
Yu and the Civitas Ensemble also performed for about 500 junior high school students Friday afternoon at Edward Bleeker School in the New York borough of Queens. Their performance was followed by a question-and-answer period with the school's band and orchestra members.
The CSO will embark on the second and final leg of its tour Monday, when it is due to perform in Guanajuato, Mexico, as part of the 40th anniversary Festival Internacional Cervantino (International Cervantes Festival). The tour will conclude Wednesday night at the historic Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. The two concerts will mark the orchestra's debut in Mexico.
Follow all of John von Rhein's dispatches from the CSO tour at chicagotribune.com/vonrhein.
Twitter @jvonrhein
