Chicago at Carnegie

Philip Glass’s music comes in two flavors. One is the active dancing of The Light or his interludes from the CIVIL warS, which reward engagement of the mind and body. You want to tap a toe and wiggle a leg as you track bits of snappy trumpet or a flash of tambourine. It’s repetitive but exciting music made for dance, singing, and celebration.

Then there’s the Glass of The Triumph of the Octagon (recently performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, led by Ricardo Muti), which requires sitting back and settling down. It’s the kind of music where thinking too hard will hamper your experience—it’s meant to wash over like a wave and subsume.

Octagon is a quasi-arch form, with sections in a six-beat pulse beginning bookending sections of five and four. Arpeggiations are constant, as Glass is prone to do. The work opens with clear and short woodwind solos—first flute, then bassoon—with a percussion- and brass-less orchestra.

Tempo seemed to be an issue, but it’s hard to tell whether Muti (for whom the piece was composed) or something else—the players, the hall—is to blame.  Many times, it felt as if he was trying to energize Chicago’s strings from a languorous haze; yet other times, the string arpeggios pushed forward while Muti held back, creating rhythmic misalignment.

The end result for me was a relatively uninspired torpor. It’s unclear exactly what the music has to do with its namesake, a 13th century castle, but the uneven performance did not pique my interest. A faster overall tempo or more varied orchestration might make for a better concert opener, but I have no desire to hear the music again.

Our orchestra was in happier form after the addition of bassoons, horns, trumpets, and timpani, plus a slight reduction in the string ensemble, for Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 (“Italian”). The opening is delightfully springy, accompanied by staccato woodwind chords, which Chicago blended seamlessly with sustained energy and vigor.

During the second movement, Muti favored a string-forward sound, using woodwinds only to highlight string lines. I would prefer featuring those woodwind additions to contrast the sound, rather than blending them into the background.

In the third movement’s martial B section, I was particularly impressed with the bassoon, who mimicked the role and timbre of third and fourth horns. This idea happens three different times and, after the second, I’m convinced they congratulated each other with smiles and the discreet thigh pats. (Well-deserved, I might add). Being able to witness these human moments mid-performance, remind us why music is meant to be experienced not just streamed. The genuine intimacy of live performance can’t be replicated. The third movement has a kind of trick ending that left a smile on my face. Muti’s abrupt resumption of music in the final key is clever to audiences like myself who can pick out the Mozartian “ending” rhythms without the gift of perfect pitch to know we’re still in the wrong key.

Once the third movement actually ends, the vigorous attaca beginning of the final movement was quite surprising. I was impressed by the string ensemble’s clean and generous sound despite the music’s rapidity. Articulated woodwind melodies nod to the clipped chords from the symphony’s first movement, bringing us full circle motivically. Though woodwind contingent didn’t always feel aligned with string entrances, solo lines were tight and impressive.

Muti’s ability to end pieces succinctly is admirable. He shows and cuts off the final chords shockingly quickly, as if to say, “It’s over. We’re done.” There’s no showy romanticism, the point is not belabored. Perhaps this is purely characteristic of both the Mendelssohn and Strauss pieces on display, but I’d like to hear his Mahler as a point of comparison.

A quick ending was appropriate for Strauss’s Aus Italian which, despite interesting ideas throughout, overstayed its welcome. It was composed after his first two symphonies—a title he never used again—but before the first official tone poem (Don Juan) or any of his operas. With its programmatic music and content, it’s interesting as an artifact of transition to Strauss’s most well-known works.

“In the Country” is pastoral, full of wide, open spaces, perfect for letting the Chicago Symphony’s [in]famous brass section let loose. Muti gave extra time for cadences to bloom over Carnegie’s gilded arches before allowing the music to resume. As a section, the brass is loud and intimidating—almost to the point of tinnitus. Some control may be warranted, but there is a beauty in the raw power of their sound. However, there is also beauty in agreeable intonation, unfortunately missing from some unisons. I feel they play better as a harmonized section, like in the final movement’s final moments where for a moment I stopped breathing as to not disturb the final notes. A woman behind me audibly gasped in delight.

The second movement, “Amid the Ruins of Rome,” was well-played, but nothing other than an unbalanced piccolo player sticks in my memory. I tensed up throughout the entire piece whenever I saw the player with instrument at their lips, anticipating a sharp, unwelcome sound. Strauss gets plenty of mileage out of the jaunty opening figure—perhaps it’s Nero dancing on the wreckage.

As with the pushy brass, perhaps a less-than-familiar hall is to blame. The music for “On the Shores of Sorrento” seems to end four or five times before it actually does, littered throughout with obvious birdsong ideas. It careens too long: Strauss clearly didn’t want to leave the beach, but I was sonsick. “Neapolitan Folk Life,” the final movement, features a tune tossed here and there across the orchestra. Any listener can find joy in tracking the well-known “Funiculì, Funiculà” as it’s tossed from section to section. The tune—not a folksong as Strauss believed—was also familiar to its original composer, Luigi Danza, who sued and won.