This week, the Grant Park Music Festival notches two major anniversaries: its 90th season, and its 25th and final year led by artistic director and principal conductor Carlos Kalmar.
Those milestones aren’t without their growing pains. With Kalmar ceding his Grant Park seat — initially to focus on teaching at the Cleveland Institute of Music, though he’s now suing the floundering conservatory — it’s anyone’s guess what becomes of the festival’s future. The generous guest allotments this summer to Ludovic Morlot, Giancarlo Guerrero and Eric Jacobsen imply the search for Kalmar’s successor, in progress since he first announced his departure three years ago, is rounding a corner. Whoever inherits the role, one hopes they, at minimum, continue resisting the populist tilt of summer music series everywhere.
Another major change this year: the elimination of program books. Attendees now receive lean pamphlets with QR codes for the concert webpage. The pamphlet does have enough room to exhaustively list donors and sponsors — but, ironically, not the festival musicians, who get QR-antined.
Grant Park will always toddle on the tightrope of making the festival free and open to all while satisfying the ticket buyers who make that possible. In turn, they, with each passing year, increasingly seem to demand the pastoral of Ravinia in a downtown setting. Even Kalmar stepped offstage on Friday in a futile attempt to quiet amplified buskers on Michigan Avenue. It doesn’t help that the city is still blocking entrances from that major arterial, leading to long queues and huffy patrons.
Dvořák Cello Concerto June 12
For that alone, no one can blame the festival for its running start to Wednesday’s opening night. The first few bars of “Masquerade” by Anna Clyne — once in-residence at the Chicago Symphony — sound like the thwack of a baseball bat against a wasp’s nest: a crack in the percussion, then buzzing agita in the strings.
It’s great fun, but a brutal cold open for a concert, especially the season’s very first. Chaos reigned in the strings, and the cheery jig which comes later — “Juice of Barley,” an old English drinking song — settled uneasily.
German cellist Alban Gerhardt righted the ship upon taking the stage for Dvořák’s cello concerto. His performance was pleasantly variegated: light-footed and wiry in the first movement, hammy in the second and third, and singing with the swagger of an operatic tenor throughout. An intentionally dry accompaniment by Kalmar and orchestra kept things springy, dotted rhythms cracking and popping.
Gerhardt cuts a gentlemanly presence onstage. He leaned towards concertmaster Jeremy Black in their third-movement duet, deferentially ducking his sound under the violinist’s. Later, during the ovation, Gerhardt returned to stage to funnel applause towards principal horn Jonathan Boen, whose opening solo was out-wailed by a passing siren. (All the horns, caught off guard by the shoutout, stood in appreciative confusion.)
A Dvořák like that would have been a perfect sendoff. Instead, the evening ended with Benjamin Britten’s 15-minute “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” — or, excuse-moi, “The Chicagoan’s Guide to the Orchestra,” with original narration delivered by CBS News evening anchor Irika Sargent.
Whatever its moniker, the new insertions read like the handiwork of a summer intern who’s lived in the city for six days. Some choice excerpts: violas are the “deep dish pizza” to the violins’ tavern-style, the percussion section gets compared to the Bucket Boys, and harpists glissando because they’re flicking Italian beef jus off their fingers. (Who knew?)
Even the kids in attendance surely rolled their eyes. Shunting the family-friendly piece to the end of the program, after an hour of “serious” music, probably did parents no favors, either.
Dvořák Cello Concerto June 14-15
Friday’s program, with a repeat on Saturday, set a far finer standard. Festival regular Christian Tetzlaff took on Elgar’s Violin Concerto, so gnashingly hard that few fiddlers tackle it. Tetzlaff never betrayed any such angst: his phrasing was swooningly expressive, his subtle shades and bravura passagework nothing short of astonishing. His technique is limber and relaxed enough to permit some rock-frontman bodily contortions — lifting a knee, swiveling the torso, bucking his violin. None of it dimpled his sound.
If you’ve never heard this concerto live, go. Tetzlaff’s rendition is as pristine a mold as you’ll hear.
After Elgar’s nearly hour-long behemoth, Tetzlaff tossed in the Andante from Bach’s solo Sonata No. 2, filigree and sweetly wistful — just ’cause he could. Apparently, Gerhardt wasn’t the only German gentleman headlining this week: after his performance, Tetzlaff joined his preteen child in the audience for the even-rarer rarity on the concert’s second half.
That would be “The Cloud Messenger,” a deep cut for orchestra and chorus by “Planets” composer Gustav Holst. Holst composed it during a period of keen interest in Indian literature and culture, inspiring his operas “Sita” and “Savriti,” and “Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda.”
For “Cloud Messenger,” Holst takes inspiration from the 5th-century lyric poem “Meghadūta,” about an exile who asks a cloud to deliver a message of love to his wife. Holst’s translation from the original Sanskrit is awkward, but “Cloud Messenger’s” score wins the day. No orientalist pastiche, Holst’s writing is inspired and, often, strikingly beautiful. Cascading descending passages describe falling rain, and once the cloud “reache(s) the snowy peaks of Kailasa,” high strings and glockenspiel tingle like icy air.
Alas, the piece’s undercooked 1913 premiere scared off repeat performances. “The Cloud Messenger” has been recorded just once, and exists, officially, only in hand-written parts.
Luckily for us, choral-orchestral rarities get special play at Grant Park, thanks to its phenomenal in-house chorus. During Friday’s performance, sections were so seamlessly blended they sounded as one.
An alto soloist sings for just a few minutes at “Cloud Messenger’s” middle. But Lauren Decker — sporting a very apropos cloud-patterned gown for the occasion — spun her brief appearance into the standout showing one has come to expect from the young contralto. Her voice has an unadorned, old-school quality, with a live-wire vibrato and profound tone.
All this “Cloud Messenger” needed was a little love. Kalmar’s programming acumen tends to outpace his interpretive one, and Friday’s performance followed that pattern. Kalmar’s leadership and the orchestra’s stellar ensemble work made a powerful case for the piece, but not so much for its tenderhearted narrative. That, like the peaks of Mount Kailash, came off a tad frosty.
Grant Park Music Festival in the Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph St.; free entry with paid seating starting at $27; grantparkmusicfestival.com.
