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Contemporary American Composers
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Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Riccardo Muti
Durata totale: 67 minuti
Montgomery Hymn for Everyone
Aprile 2022, Orchestra Hall, Chicago
Raimi Three Lisel Mueller Settings
Elizabeth DeShong mezzo-soprano
Marzo 2018, Orchestra Hall, Chicago
Glass Symphony No. 11
Febbraio 2022, Orchestra Hall, Chicago
Riccardo Muti
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Record Label: CSO Resound
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Contemporary American Composers: Glass, Montgomery, Rami
– Pwyll ap Siôn | Luglio 2023
Riccardo Muti’s tenure with the CSO came to an end in June this year with three performances of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, just shy of 50 years after the Italian first conducted the orchestra in July 1973.
Philip Glass’s association with the orchestra extends even further, albeit in a more indirect way. A recipient of the University of Chicago’s accelerated college programme, the precocious 15-year-old student attended several CSO concerts during the early 1950s, hearing Fritz Reiner in Bartók, Mahler and Bruckner.
The influence of Bruckner in particular is heard in the large-scale architectural sweep of Glass’s three-movement Symphony No 11 (2017). The first movement begins and ends with pulsing G minor chords in low brass and woodwinds heard against uncertain five beat ostinato patterns in harp, piano and strings. A sense of suppressed energy is maintained throughout the lyrical second movement, while the symphony’s metric complexity is further ratcheted up in a powerful polyrhythmic finale that surges towards a dramatic three-note, fate-like climax on repeating B flats.
Muti and the CSO take a more measured approach than do Dennis Russell Davies and the Bruckner Orchester Linz. Muti makes less of the tempo changes in each movement, which enables him to better integrate the work’s block-like design. A neater balance is provided between the orchestra as a whole and the cameo roles for piccolo, E flat and contrabass clarinet, harp and a large percussion section. The military-style opening to the final movement is especially effective.
The album also features Max Raimi’s Three Lisel Mueller Settings, each song cleverly pairing Elizabeth DeShong’s deep mezzo-soprano respectively with solo clarinet, bassoon and double bass, and Jessie Montgomery’s promising Hymn for Everyone. Montgomery’s neatly constructed single-movement work opens with a hopeful rising and falling five-note melody, which hovers around the fifth of the scale before resting on a turn-like figure. The work culminates in an effective Coplandesque, fanfare-like ending.
Muti’s legacy with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will most likely be remembered for his interpretations of more classical repertoire; but ‘Contemporary American Composers’ stands as testimony to the Italian master’s innate ability to bring out the best in almost everything he conducts.
Pwyll ap Siôn, Gramophone, luglio 2023
Muti and the CSO soar in Contemporary American Composers, a surprising swan song
– Hannah Edgar | 16 giugno 2023
Italian maestro Riccardo Muti has served as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s music director since 2010, but he’s never quite managed to outrun his detractors’ most stubborn criticisms, even when they’re exaggerated or unfair: He doesn’t do enough contemporary music. He’s too much of a traditionalist. During his tenure, he embraced the orchestra but never Chicago. The list goes on.
Muti is stepping down from his role this month, but he’ll remain the orchestra’s guest of honor for the foreseeable future, guiding the organization through its search for his replacement. And with the brand- new Contemporary American Composers (CSO Resound), his last album with the CSO in his official capacity, he gives his critics a decisive shove. This remarkable album opens with Jessie Montgomery’s Hymn for Everyone, the first time a CSO composer-in-residence’s music has been recorded by the ensemble since the era of Mason Bates and Anna Clyne nearly a decade ago. (Montgomery relocated from New York to Chicago last year, so she’s literally “in residence” these days.) It continues with Three Lisel Mueller Settings, a 2018 song cycle composed by CSO violist Max Raimi. This kind of spotlight on an orchestra member is all but unheard-of in the classical world, but Raimi’s haunting, heartbreaking, uncannily hopeful work (crowned here by the expressive might of mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong) is wholly deserving of that boost.
Likewise, the ever-traditionalist Muti conducting a symphony by minimalist Philip Glass probably wasn’t on anyone’s 2022 bingo card. But last February’s performances of Glass’s Symphony No. 11 crackled—as have Muti’s unexpected affinities with American symphonists such as Bates and Florence Price. Interpreters tend to prioritize Glass’s offbeat hypnotism, as though looking down on his music from space: this smooths out its topography, renders its lines crisp and neat, and shrinks its emotional furrows to ant-size inconsequentiality. That god’s-eye view frames the only other commercial recording of the symphony, by conductor Dennis Russell Davies and the Bruckner Orchester in Linz, which has long been Glass’s first port of call for his large-scale works.
Here, Muti and the CSO dare to zoom in on the details. Why shouldn’t a repeated phrase be sumptuously shaped, as though on each recurrence we’re hearing it for the first time? Why do we so often forget that Glass, during his formative teenage years at the University of Chicago, soaked in not just modernists like Prokofiev and Bartók but also Romantic symphonists like Bruckner and Mahler? If this is Muti’s final recorded word with the CSO, it’s a powerful mike drop.
Hannah Edgar, Chicago Reader, 6 giugno 2023
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