Throughout June, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has been celebrating American music for the nation’s 250th birthday. Current events and today’s political climate make for an unusual backdrop to such a survey. This is especially true for the program performed on Thursday evening, which at times painted an idyllic vision of the American idea — celebrating one of its greatest leaders and exploring one immigrant’s view of the nation that gave him refuge.
Among my friends, the CSO’s month-long festival has been a point of friendly debate. Some feel the programming centered too narrowly on a handful of familiar voices, representing only a small slice of American classical music. In calling for greater diversity, they point to the Grant Park Music Festival as a counterexample — an organization that seems always ready to explore the hidden nooks of the American canon. These are valid arguments. Yet what the CSO assembled feels more closely aligned with the orchestra’s own history — not to mention the city’s and the state’s — through its connections to jazz, the Central European immigrant experience, and the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln.
The final concert of the series was led by the American conductor and podcaster Joshua Weilerstein, who helmed a program that jumped quickly through time, history, and musical vernacular. Because this concert effectively closed out the subscription season, it felt somewhat anticlimactic — a quiet end to both the season and the American survey. Placed at the start of the month, this exact program would have made an intriguing opening, serving to frame the rest of the survey and leading toward what could have been a rousing conclusion with Wynton Marsalis and Marin Alsop. The difficulty of scheduling world-class artists likely made a more persuasive ordering impossible.
Five short works by five distinct composers filled the evening. The concert opened with Jessie Montgomery’s rhapsodic Banner and closed with Duke Ellington’s large-scale symphonic jazz work, Harlem. In between came Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, Bohuslav Martinů’s The Rock, and Charles Ives’s Three Places in New England. Collectively, this was as earnest and noble a program as one could desire to exalt America.
Copland’s Lincoln Portrait anchored the evening’s populist spirit. The CSO boasts a storied history with this piece — past narrators have ranged from the most recent Illinoisan to occupy the White House, Barack Obama, to Copland himself. For this occasion, acclaimed actor Harry Lennix joined the orchestra. Lincoln lived in Illinois, represented the state in Congress, and set off from here to serve as President, making the piece feel like part of the state’s history. Lennix was occasionally blurry in sound, perhaps due to the hall’s amplification, but he delivered the text with deep theatrical passion, the orchestra swelling and receding behind him on cue.
Two of the other works on the program shared a related impulse. Montgomery’s Banner is not a straightforward arrangement of The Star-Spangled Banner, but instead a collage of fragments, weaving in other cultural anthems and folk songs to ask what a national anthem can mean in a diverse twenty-first-century culture. Ives’s Three Places in New England operates similarly — bits of old tunes float in and out of impressionistic textures, the piece functioning like a musical “Magic Eye” poster. Stare long enough and the whole picture comes into focus.
Thursday’s performance of Ives had real peaks. Its final movement, “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” was a triumph. Weilerstein and the CSO captured the lifting haze over the river before the current culminated in an unsettling, powerful surge. “Putnam’s Camp,” the middle movement, would have benefited from more textural clarity, though the mashup of marching bands remained thrilling.
Ellington’s Harlem closed the evening and provided the program’s most visceral pleasure — a bustling, serious portrait of the neighborhood whose high-octane demands suited the CSO’s virtuosity. Unlike an earlier festival concert featuring Marsalis and his jazz orchestra, this performance put the CSO’s own musicians front and center, oozing a muscular character as a result.
Martinů’s The Rock felt the most out of place. The logic of its inclusion is understandable — Martinů and the wave of composers who escaped Europe during the Second World War contributed immensely to our musical fabric, and we are a nation of immigrants. But despite Weilerstein’s passionate verbal defense during a stage change, the piece never quite shed the feeling of a historical aside.
No matter. Thursday’s performance succeeded because it was presented with earnestness and optimism, and that is something we need right now — both as a city and as a nation. Weilerstein conducts as a true believer in this music, and the program embodied the idea of art that lifts us up while carrying our highest ideals.
Originally published on Seen and Heard International
Around Chicago
Hannah Edgar, Chicago Tribune
Go figure, then, that the two trickiest pieces on Thursday largely came off best: Ives’s “Three Places” and Ellington’s “Harlem.” The Ives was mostly fine-spun and attentive — a too-burly “Housatonic at Stockbridge” aside — and the CSO threw itself, joyously, into Ellington’s swinging, rumba-ing tone poem, supported by a slithering quintet of Chicago-based saxophonists.
John von Rhein, Chicago Classical Review
More than a century after it was finally assembled, the music’s sheer audacity remains hardly diminished. Weilerstein really came into his own with this one, and so did the orchestra. He managed to clarify the knotty polyrhythms and raucous dissonances, sorting out the dense harmonic layers with a precision that did not skimp on tenderness or atmosphere.
Jan DeGaetani and Gilbert Kalish’s classic recording of “The Housatonic at Stockbridge”
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