{"id":14627,"date":"2022-04-07T11:32:39","date_gmt":"2022-04-07T09:32:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.riccardomuti.com\/2022\/04\/07\/riccardo-muti-dirige-la-cso-nella-premiere-mondiale-di-missy-mazzoli\/"},"modified":"2022-04-07T15:47:40","modified_gmt":"2022-04-07T13:47:40","slug":"riccardo-muti-dirige-la-cso-nella-premiere-mondiale-di-missy-mazzoli","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.riccardomuti.com\/en\/2022\/04\/07\/riccardo-muti-dirige-la-cso-nella-premiere-mondiale-di-missy-mazzoli\/","title":{"rendered":"Riccardo Muti conducts CSO in the world premi\u00e8re of Missy Mazzoli"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018Muti conducts Mazzoli and Mahler at CSO\u2019: With an underworld-inspired world premiere and heavenly \u2018R\u00fcckert-Lieder,\u2019 an embarrassment of riches<\/span><\/h3>\n

– Hannah Edgar | April 1, 2022<\/span><\/p>\n

Maestro Finally, it was Missy Mazzoli\u2019s moment.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Brooklyn-based composer\u2019s residency at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra ended last year without its promised performance of \u201cOrpheus Undone,\u201d her 13-minute orchestral commission set to premiere in April 2020.<\/span><\/p>\n

Audiences finally heard Mazzoli\u2019s suite \u2014 inspired, as you\u2019d guess, by moments from the Orpheus myth \u2014 on Thursday night in the capable hands of the CSO and director Riccardo Muti. It was worth the wait,bif sowing fresh regret that the pandemic wrested more such world premieres away from the Mazzoli-CSO partnership. With Mazzoli\u2019s recent output tilting toward large-scale operatic works, as well as solo showcases for virtuosi like violinist Jennifer Koh and Third Coast Percussion, purely symphonic forays like \u201cOrpheus Undone\u201d have become increasingly rare for the composer.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even without text, \u201cOrpheus Undone\u2019s\u201d architecture flexes Mazzoli\u2019s obvious flair for narrative. Mazzoli writes that the piece\u2019s launching point is \u201cthe baffling and surreal stretching of time in moments of trauma or agony,\u201d represented by a quarter-note pulse clacked out on woodblock that changes pace throughout the piece. Twice, strings are directed to play a figure \u201cas fast as possible\u201d before slackening back into measured time.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those funhouse-mirror distortions warp not just tempo but timbre and pitch. The woodblock pulse is sometimes taken up by clanging cowbell, slashed chords, or the ominous, clocklike ticking of bowsticks against strings. In a memorable exchange, an open-string violin solo \u2014 fleetly executed by concertmaster Robert Chen \u2014 meets its antihero in brambly passage for solo viola, played with enviable facility and contour by beyond-excellent guest principal viola Beth Guterman Chu, visiting from the St. Louis Symphony.<\/span><\/p>\n

When \u201cOrpheus Undone\u201d evaporates into thin air, the denouement is ambiguous at best. Whether Orpheus\u2019s journey into the underworld is to be celebrated or disdained remains up to our interpretation. Muti kept it that way, directing authoritatively but sans podium pyrotechnics. He trusted audiences to draw their own conclusions.<\/span><\/p>\n

That same subtle touch made his and the orchestra\u2019s later performance of Anton Bruckner\u2019s Symphony No. 2 soar \u2014 no small feat for the composer\u2019s often-turgid symphonies. Their interpretive challenges are manifold: their monumental length, their pockmarked pauses, their obsessive motivity, and, most vexing for conductors, their many, many extant versions. The Symphony No. 2 alone has two versions and about four times as many editions, with Bruckner interpreters living and dying by their preferred cut. (For the record, Muti conducted a version based on Bruckner\u2019s 1877 revision, edited by the late musicologist Leopold Nowak.)<\/span><\/p>\n

So, ups to Muti and the CSO for a nuanced reading that not only smoothed out the symphony\u2019s many seams but wasn\u2019t shy to give even its most exalted moments a troubled tinge. The cutoffs to the first and third movements washed over the body like a plunge into a cold pool, exhilarating and shocking in heir might. The wistful opening lines of the second movement ached underneath its lyricism, violin accents like the pang of something loved but no longer had. Similarly, when Muti and orchestra summitted the major-key arrival of the fourth and final movement, the glittering modulation was specked with grit, as though acknowledging that this was a victory far too hard-won. Principal horn David Cooper, brass shapeshifter par excellence, shone throughout. It\u2019s been a long time since I\u2019ve heard a Bruckner this intriguing and completely, consummately rendered from start to finish \u2014 maybe never.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOrpheus Undone\u201d and that brooding Bruckner would have been enough to vault this program into the must-hear pantheon. Then, Latvian mezzo-soprano El\u012bna Garan\u010da took the stage for Gustav Mahler\u2019s \u201cR\u00fcckert-Lieder.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Garan\u010da recorded the songs last year in a plummy Deutsche Grammophon release with conductor Christian Thielemann and the Vienna Philharmonic. Thursday\u2019s performance arguably outshone it. Spring for interpretations by legendary mezzo Christa Ludwig (with whom Muti recorded the \u201cR\u00fcckert- Lieder\u201d in 1992, in the Vienna Philharmonic\u2019s 150th anniversary concert) if you want effulgence and sheen. I somehow prefer Garan\u010da\u2019s wine-dark instrument and stately reserve, her vacillation between guardedness and pliancy making the songs\u2019 sentimental sweep all the more profound.<\/span><\/p>\n

It helped that the CSO performed the \u201cR\u00fcckert-Lieder\u201d in the order printed by the Vienna Philharmonic\u2019s publisher, starting with the impetuous \u201cBlicke mir nicht in die Lieder\u201d (\u201cDo not look into my songs\u201d) and ending with the haunting \u201cUm Mitternacht\u201d (\u201cAt Midnight\u201d). Many interpreters shuffle the order \u2014 after all, Mahler didn\u2019t specify one himself when he set Romantic poet Friedrich R\u00fcckert\u2019s verse at the turn of the 20th century, and the printed order consigns the set\u2019s most heart-melting songs to the middle.<\/span><\/p>\n

Garan\u010da made a case for the Vienna Phil\u2019s printed order \u2014 though one gets the sense her \u201cR\u00fcckert-Lieder\u201d would have stunned in any configuration. Her \u201cBlicke mir nicht in die Lieder\u201d played down the usual cheek, instead landing on the ears as an unusually bald-faced admission of vulnerability. Take what I\u2019m about to say with a grain of salt, Garan\u010da seemed to say, before nothing less than the truth unspooled from her lips.<\/span><\/p>\n

Her voice softened as though melting into an embrace in \u201cIch atmet\u2019\u2026\u201d, strings wafting sweetly under her, and the more twee \u201cLiebst du um Sch\u00f6nheit\u201d \u2014 the only song in the set never orchestrated by Mahler, a job taken up instead by his onetime copyist Max Puttman \u2014 managed to shrug off some of its usual artifice.<\/span><\/p>\n

And even embedded in the middle of the set, it was impossible for Garan\u010da\u2019s \u201cIch bin der Welt abhanden gekommen\u201d (\u201cI am lost to the world\u201d), the song at the cycle\u2019s heart, to be eclipsed by any of the other songs. Orchestra Hall was utterly, reverently still as she sang the song\u2019s final refrain, cradled by the orchestra and Scott Hostetler\u2019s doting English horn: \u201cI live alone in my heaven \/ In my love, in my song.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

A glimpse of heaven, indeed. But perhaps the great triumph of this program was all it had to say about the messy beauty of what happens right here on Earth, between Mazzoli\u2019s underworld and Mahler\u2019s pearly gates. The bitter bad makes such moments of serenity taste all the sweeter.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hannah Edgar, Chicago Tribune<\/em>, <\/span>April 1, 2022<\/span><\/p>\n

Missy Mazzoli\u2019s \u2018Orpheus Undone\u2019 receives superb debut by CSO, Muti<\/span><\/h3>\n

– Kyle MacMillan | <\/span>April 1, 2022<\/span><\/p>\n

With such notable milestones as her designation as Musical America\u2019s 2022 composer of the year and a <\/span>commission from New York\u2019s Metropolitan Opera for her fifth work in the form, Missy Mazzoli has taken <\/span>her place as one of the major composers of her generation. <\/span><\/p>\n

Local audiences got to know the 41-year creative talent in 2018-21, when she served as the Chicago <\/span>Symphony Orchestra\u2019s composer-in-residence, a position that heightened her international profile even <\/span>more. <\/span><\/p>\n

One of her crowning achievements of that time, a commission titled \u201cOrpheus Undone,\u201d was supposed <\/span>to premiere in April 2020 but had to be delayed because of the COVID-19 shutdowns. The 15-minute <\/span>work finally received its world premiere Thursday evening in the first of three concerts with conductor <\/span>Riccardo Muti, and it proved well worth the wait. <\/span><\/p>\n

It was constructed from musical fragments left over from Mazzoli\u2019s 2019 ballet, \u201cOrpheus Alive,\u201d which <\/span>she has described as a \u201cmessed-up retelling of the Orpheus myth.\u201d This smaller orchestral work zeroes <\/span>in on that moment when Eurydice dies and Orpheus decides to follow her into the underworld. <\/span><\/p>\n

In her program notes, Mazzoli writes that she wanted to explore the \u201cbaffling and surreal stretching of <\/span>time in moments of trauma and agony.\u201d And that sense comes through clearly in this work, starting in <\/span>the percussion with insistent, disturbing quarter-note taps on a wood block and steel brake drum\u2013tick <\/span>tock, tick tock, tick tock. <\/span><\/p>\n

This ominous, unsettled and almost eerie piece, with its two interconnected movements, comes off as <\/span>kind of organized disorganization. It is undone, as the title suggests, almost collapsing at times into a <\/span>cacophonous chaos, with the strings bowing almost out of control. <\/span><\/p>\n

Nothing really flows, nothing comes to together until the last five minutes or so, when longer, more <\/span>defined musical lines emerge in the vibraphone and elsewhere, but there is never really anything that <\/span>could really be called a resolution. <\/span><\/p>\n

Instead, there are intersecting, overlapping bursts of sound\u2013disorienting dips, slides and wavers and big, <\/span>isolated, stereophonic chords. The piano (capably played by Peter Henderson, primary ensemble pianist <\/span>for the St. Louis Symphony) enters prominently at times, but it seems lost, its solos oddly unsteady and <\/span>aimless and weirdly repetitive. <\/span><\/p>\n

Despite all the seeming disunity, there is a unity to this work, a definite sense of drive and build-up. As a <\/span>whole, \u201cOrpheus Undone\u201d is an intriguing, entrancing work with just the kind of fresh, imaginative <\/span>sound world that we have come to expect of Mazzoli.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Chicago Symphony lavished the same care and attention on this new creation as it would on some <\/span>prized masterpiece from the past, with Muti skillfully negotiating its every unsteady twist and turn and <\/span>drawing forth its full emotional impact. <\/span><\/p>\n

The orchestra moved back into familiar territory for the second part of the first half, offering its first <\/span>performances of Gustav Mahler\u2019s \u201cR\u00fcckert-Lieder,\u201d a 1901-02 set of five settings of poems by Friedrich <\/span>R\u00fcckert for voice and orchestra. <\/span><\/p>\n

Mahler is one of the great composers of art song, and this grouping includes a few of his finest examples <\/span>including the meditative \u201cI am lost to the world,\u201d with touching solo work here by English horn player <\/span>Scott Hostetler, and the culminating \u201cAt midnight.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Making her Chicago Symphony debut as soloist was Latvian-born singer El\u012bna Garan\u010da, with her dark- <\/span>hued mezzo-soprano voice and probing, introspective approach suiting these songs well. She was at her <\/span>best in the doleful \u201cAt midnight,\u201d as she returned to the title\u2019s repeated phrase, each time with a slightly <\/span>altered vocal shading and delivery reflecting the subtly shifting emotions of pathos and regret. <\/span><\/p>\n

The second half was devoted to Anton Bruckner\u2019s hourlong Symphony No. 2 in C minor, and Muti and <\/span>the orchestra delivered a resounding and masterful take, deftly highlighting every peak and valley of this <\/span>sweeping musical journey and making sure listener attention never flagged. <\/span><\/p>\n

With these concerts, Muti and the orchestra have presented six of Bruckner\u2019s 11 symphonies, including <\/span>a June 2016 set of performances of the Symphony No. 9 that was released as a live recording on the CSO <\/span>Resound label. <\/span><\/p>\n

There were highlights aplenty from the bright, kinetic take on the third movement Scherzo to the subtle <\/span>drama of the slow second movement, with every instrumental section getting moments in the spotlight <\/span>along the way, including the orchestra\u2019s first-rate if sometimes overlooked double-bass players.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kyle MacMillan, Chicago Sun Times<\/em>, April 1, 2022<\/span><\/p>\n

Watch the photos:<\/p>\n

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