CSO, Riccardo Muti return in triumphant program following strike settlement

The biggest news from Thursday evening’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert is that the event took place at all.

After a seven-week strike, the orchestra returned to Orchestra Hall for the first time following the management and musicians signing a new labor agreement last weekend with the intervention of Mayor Rahm Emanuel. And the audience was clearly glad to see the ensemble back.

A homemade sign with the words, “Welcome Home,” hung briefly over the side of the balcony above the stage. And when the lights brightened above the stage signaling the imminent start of the concert, applause and cheers began, growing in intensity as concertmaster Robert Chen came out to take his bow.

More cheers and a partial standing ovation greeted music director Riccardo Muti when he took the stage. He launched the orchestra into a performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which it usually plays at the start of each season, but this concert felt like a kind of new beginning and the gesture seemed appropriate.

Beyond the much-anticipated restart of the 2018-19 season, Thursday’s program was marked with some other notable milestones and historical connections. First off, two of the featured composers, Georges Bizet and Hector Berlioz, were both winners of the much-coveted Prix de Rome competition.

In January 1926, Ottorino Respighi traveled to Chicago to serve as soloist in his then-new piano concerto and to lead performances of his now-celebrated symphonic poem, “Pines of Rome,” just days after its American premiere in New York under Arturo Toscanini.

Thursday evening opened with the Chicago Symphony’s first complete performance of Bizet’s “Roma” since 1894, a bizarrely long time considering the innate appeal of this overlooked early suite, which the composer began writing in his early 20s during his residency in Rome. (Muti has a knack for musical rediscoveries like this.)

Like “Pines of Rome,” which concluded the concert, “Roma” offered the ideal festive spirit for this reprisal of the season, with its rich orchestrations, fetching harmonies and scene-setting imagery. This was easy-listening in the best sense of the term.

Muti and the orchestra brought an appropriately light, relaxed feel to this music, delivering apt doses of gentleness during the pastoral sections and rhythmic thrust in the more upbeat moments, including plenty of snap and sparkle in the lively second movement. Deserving special note were principal clarinetist Stephen Williamson’s handsome solos sprinkled throughout and the exuberant French horn calls in the first movement.

The musical meat of this concert came at the beginning of the second half with Berlioz’s setting of Pierre-Ange Vieilliard’s poem, “The Death of Cleopatra,” which the composer wrote in 1829 as his third attempt to secure the Prix de Rome.

The celebrated mezzo-soprano, Joyce DiDonato, made her belated Chicago Symphony debut in 2016, and this work, which has not been heard in Orchestra Hall since 1995, provided the perfect vehicle for her return. She remains at the peak of her powers, with more than enough vocal force to reach the farthest seats in Orchestra Hall as well as pinpoint intonation, spotless technique and, most important, piercing expressive intensity.

DiDonato presented not just a vocal performance but a biting dramatic portrayal, conveying the power and grandeur of this once-mighty ruler as well as the pain and ignominy of her defeat at the Battle of Actium. Muti and the orchestra were with her every step of the way, supporting and accentuating the work’s often brooding, dark emotions. The climax came at the end as DiDonato delivered Cleopatra’s final stanzas with a befittingly halting, hollow quality, tellingly conveying the sense of the ruler taking her final breaths – the last words uttered as little more than a labored whisper.

Rounding out the program was the ever-popular “Pines of Rome” – the first time Muti has led the work with the orchestra since his debut concert in Millennium Park as music director in September 2010.

Inspired by locales in Italy, this four-movement symphonic poem offers bright, penetrating harmonies with a big, augmented orchestration that includes piano, celeste, organ and even recorded bird sounds. For Respighi, there didn’t seem to be any such thing as excess. Muti led a full-bore performance, reveling in the work’s innate showiness and bringing forth a lush, opulent sound from the orchestra, with thrilling, high-spirited moments and spellbinding, sighing takes on the slower sections.

It was a fitting conclusion to what turned out to be a welcome, celebratory renewal of the 2018-19 season.

Kyle MacMillan is a local freelance writer.