If you are at all familiar with “The Four Seasons” by Verdi, chances are you’re a ballet person. It was Jerome Robbins who in 1979 took this incidental music, written somewhat reluctantly for the Paris Opera premiere of “The Sicilian Vespers” in 1855, and choreographed a gracefully ironic study of the influence of climate on human relations. For Verdi, ever concerned with dramatic pacing, the nearly 30-minute-long ballet was a forced nod to the conventions of French grand opera, and he was content to see it cut from later productions of “Vespers.”
On Tuesday, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Riccardo Muti, gave “The Four Seasons” a rare outing on the concert stage on program that also included a simmering overture to Bellini’s “Norma” and a sumptuous reading of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4. During his tenure as this ensemble’s music director, Muti deliberately introduced Italian opera into its repertoire as part of his mission to teach it “to sing,” as he put it in a recent interview. That lyrical fluency, coupled with a smoothly blended sound, is now a hallmark of the orchestra as it awaits the arrival of Klaus Mäkelä, its designated new music director, in 2027.
In truth, no amount of idiomatic playing and gorgeous sound can paper over the length of Verdi’s “Seasons.” Touches of exquisite sound painting — a glacial string shudder in “Winter,” the flute’s drowsy flutter over a gurgling harp in “Spring” — too often make way for sequences of formulaic curtsies and reverences.
Still, there were memorably expressive wind solos, including the rueful yearning of Stephen Williamson’s clarinet in “Spring” and the heavy-limbed sensuality of William Welter’s oboe in “Summer.” In those passages, Muti could be seen fussing over accompanying parts with the solicitous care of an opera conductor. The pockets of freedom he created for individual players hinted at a second reason opera belongs in the regular diet of a symphony orchestra: It teaches the kind of dynamic, responsive listening to soloists that is the lifeblood of music theater.
The Tchaikovsky showcased the formidable discipline of the Chicago sound under Muti, with the orchestra’s famous brass section gleaming in the fearsome fanfares that function as the fate motif anchoring the symphony. Here, too, Muti’s attention often went to subsidiary voices. In a transitional moment during the first movement, he brought the chugging rhythmic figures in the violins to the fore just as the winds seized and stretched the melody, so that the tension between forward momentum and a blindsiding change of mood came through as a physical tussle.
In the Andantino, the wistful melody that is passed around different sections gained emotional depth through the coloristic details Muti brought out in the accompaniment. By the time the bassoonist Keith Buncke played it one final time the noble resignation he brought to it was reinforced, heartbreakingly, by the unusually prominent, heaving sighs in the violins.
It was easy to project a sense of retrospective melancholy onto this concert at a moment when Muti, 83, is leaving the orchestra in the hands of his 29-year-old wunderkind successor. As an encore, Muti offered a tender rendition of Giuseppe Martucci’s “Notturno,” a rueful, openhearted reverie shimmering with echoes of Mahler.
In remarks introducing the encore, Muti recalled a commemorative concert planned for Martucci in Bologna in 1931, which was canceled at the last minute when the conductor, Arturo Toscanini, refused repeated demands, accompanied with threats and physical violence, that he also play the Fascist anthem.
“Dictators were never interested in music,” Muti said, drawing knowing laughter from the capacity crowd at Carnegie, “because culture is the most effective weapon.”
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