T.G.I.F.
Winding up the “work week” of concerts and board meetings, there were three concerts on Friday.
At lunchtime, the regular Music Without Borders series at the Cultural Center featured a Caribbean/Creole jazz ensemble from Guadalupe, “Glawdys N’Dee”. It was fairly mellow jazz with sax, keyboard, drums and vocals with a French Colonial accent.
After a short walk down to Orchestra Hall, I heard the CSO play a US premier by Detlev Glanert called “Theatrum bestiarium, Songs and Dances Large Orchestra”. But unless you read the program notes, you wouldn’t have known the music was supposed to represent some of the most unsavory evil-doers in history, Caligula, Hitler & Stalin. The music was good despite me missing the programmatic point. The second half of the concert was the (billed as monumental) Mahler 5th Symphony. It’s a paltry 72 minutes long, but the adagietto movement for strings foreshadowed some of the great slow moments to come from Mahler. Soviet ex-pat Semyon Bychkov conducted, and from the back he looks like I imagine an aged Gustavo Dudamel would (as I jump on the recent Dude hysteria).
The last stop for Friday was Northwestern’s Music School production of John Corigliano’s opera “The Ghosts of Versailles”. With its mind-bending plot, mixed-up with supernatural dead French aristocrats, imaginary opera characters from the pen of playwright Beaumarchais, and set during the French Revolution, there’s a lot to ponder as Figaro bungles his way through attempts to save Marie Antoinette from the guillotine (yes really). The music was new to me, but it fully supported the first rate vocalists of the NWU cast. Somehow, I missed this opera in 1991, but seeing it now in this great production by NWU was totally eye-opening.
–
Bruce
