Giancarlo Guerrero & Jennifer Koh
REVIEW: Giancarlo Guerrero & Jennifer Koh at Grant Park Festival
“If Guerrero continues to breathe fresh life into standard repertory such as this, festival goers are in for some exciting summers ahead.”
Guerrero, Koh delight Grant Park Festival audience with potent premieres
By John von Rhein
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.
From Classical Voice North America
Two Concerts Tell Tale Of Classic Adventures At Summer Festivals
By Kyle MacMillan
Because summer music festivals tend to take place in a relaxed atmosphere, draw more open-minded attendees, and operate with different financial structures than their fall-to-spring counterparts, they can veer from the conventional and take artistic chances.
That was certainly true of concerts on successive days that had a lot of to say about the two nationally known and wonderfully complementary Chicago summer classical extravaganzas where they took place.
The performance Aug. 8 was part of the 10-week Grant Park Music Festival, which continues through Aug. 16 in downtown Chicago’s ultra-contemporary, Frank Gehry-designed Pritzker Pavilion, with the city’s striking skyline as a backdrop.
The program featured the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus, violinist Jennifer Koh, and Giancarlo Guerrero, former music director of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, who is in his first season as the festival’s artistic director and principal conductor.
The concert the following night took place under the auspices of the 121-year-old Ravinia Festival, which runs from May through September on a verdant, 36-acre campus in Highland Park, a suburb just north of the city.
It featured eight singers from the vocal component of Ravinia’s Steans Institute, a summer training program that draws top young artists who are typically finishing their schooling or beginning professional careers.
The two concerts could hardly have been more different in terms of repertoire or scale. The first performance featured scores of singers and musicians and took place in a massive amphitheater, while the next day’s matinee was held in the small-scale confines of the 450-seat Bennett Gordon Hall.
What tied the two performances together was the sheer adventuresomeness of the programming. The lone work on either line-up that could be called “standard repertoire” was Grant Park’s 1919 Suite (one of three Stravinsky compiled) from The Firebird. Celebrated impresario Sergei Diaghilev commissioned the then-unknown Igor Stravinsky to write the 1910 ballet for the Ballets Russes, and it catapulted the composer to international fame.
Guerrero led the Grant Park Orchestra, an assembly of musicians from top orchestras and music-school faculty from across the country, in a big, full-bore performance that aptly captured the exotic flavors and vibrant energy of this beloved work. It featured a multitude of first-rate solo performances, including those of principal clarinetist Dario Brignoli, acting principal French hornist Patrick Walle, and pianist Christopher Guzman.
Guerrero’s debut in his new position, on June 18, had been marred by rain that started at the end of the first work and never stopped, forcing the several hundred brave souls clustered near the stage to move to more sheltered seats under a stage overhang, with many fleeing after the second selection. The weather was more cooperative this time out, giving the new maestro a proper opportunity to show off his obvious rapport with the orchestra and audience.
After his appointment, Guerrero pledged to continue the festival’s practice of juxtaposing familiar classics with intriguing combinations of little-heard works from the past with new creations, especially those by women and people of color. All of that was in evidence on this meaty program, which opened with the festival’s first-ever performance of Britten’s choral overture The Building of the House, which he wrote in 1967 for the opening of a concert hall at England’s Aldeburgh Festival, which the composer co-founded.
The Grant Park Festival is one of the rare such events to have an in-house professional chorus, and a very fine one at that, and it got to show off its talents in this rousing performance as well as in the first half’s main event, The Singing Rooms (2008), an oratorio-like concerto for violin, choir, and orchestra by Jennifer Higdon, who was present.
With settings of poems by Jeanne Minahan, the work manages to be both intimate and immense, a nearly 40-minute, seven-movement odyssey that touches on notions of time, memory, God, and history but also offers closed-in percussion interludes and a quiet, pensive opening that was almost lost in the ambient sounds of the festival’s outdoor setting. Like all of Higdon’s works, there is something down-to-earth and direct about her writing in The Singing Rooms — no gimmicks, no trying to be new just for novelty’s sake.