After a set of Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts last week in which Riccardo Muti led two much-played, canonic works by Ludwig van Beethoven, things took a more adventuresome turn in his return Thursday evening to Symphony Center, and the result was a very different kind of program.
Front-and-center was the world premiere of Osvaldo Golijov’s “Megalopolis Suite,” which the CSO commissioned for Muti, who is now the orchestra’s music director emeritus for life.
The suite repackages excerpts from Golijov’s score for Francis Ford Coppola’s sprawling, big-budget film, “Megalopolis,” which divided critics and struggled at the box office when it opened Sept 27 after debuting at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
Both Golijov and Coppola were in attendance Thursday evening — the composer coming on stage after the performance and the celebrated director waving from a box — giving the concert a real feeling of an Event with a capital E.
As this high-profile debut makes clear, Golijov, 63, one of the most respected composers of our time, is enjoying something of a career resurgence four years after what the New York Times called a decade of near silence.
He follows in a long line of classical composers, including Sergei Prokofiev, Aaron Copland and Philip Glass who have lent their talents to the movie world. Golijov provided the music for three smaller, earlier Coppola films — “Youth Without Youth” (2007), “Tetro” (2009) and “Twixt” (2011). Golijov’s “Megalopolis Suite” comes off as a striking departure from his other music, which often draws on his own intermingled heritage as someone born in Argentina to Jewish parents who immigrated from Romania and Ukraine. His works usually manage to sound old and distinctively new at the same time.
Francis Ford Coppola, the director of the recently released film “Megalopolis,” waves to the audience in Orchestra Hall following the Chicago premiere of composer Osvaldo Golijov’s “Megalopolis Suite” with Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Amy Aiello Photography
In “Megalopolis,” he did not look back, not at earlier periods in classical music (with a notable exception of two) or ethnic flavors of folk music. Instead, as he made clear in his accompanying notes for the piece, just as the sprawling, sci-fi movie makes references to multiple scenes from earlier films, so, too, does the score.
Since the film takes place in both ancient Rome and the 21st century, the opening of the suite offers a shockingly on-point re-creation of Miklós Rózsa’s famed score for “Ben-Hur” and other cinematic allusions to this time with an opening gong, chimes, brass fanfares and sweeping strings all vividly realized by Muti and the CSO. Later, there are hints of Bernard Herrmann and other film scores and even a non-cinematic homage to Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet.”
The result is big, lush and, of course, decidedly cinematic music, but the problem is that there is little that is particularly original or especially fresh about any of it. Instead, the suite just sounds like a pastiche, well-crafted in many ways, but a pastiche nonetheless. Golijov’s own voice is oddly missing.
The other problem is that the four-movement suite runs about 18 minutes, and it often sounds like Golijov tried to pack too much into the limited space that he had, with sections and segues that come off as unwieldy at times.
That’s not to say there are not some striking moments, such as the second movement, “Love is in the Air,” with a breezy, jazzy and familiar-seeming feel reminiscent of Jerry Goldsmith’s atmospheric music in “Chinatown.” Anchoring the whole section is an achingly fetching tenor-saxophone solo line that was beautifully performed by Timothy McAllister.
The adventurousness didn’t stop there. Well, it’s hard to call the evening’s opening, the Overture to Gaetano Donizetti’s popular 1842 opera, “Don Pasquale,” exactly adventurous, but this reading was nonetheless the CSO’s first-ever subscription-series performance of it. Muti was completely in his element. With suitably flexible phrasing and tempos, he delivered a light, spirited performance that completely captured the wit, ebullience and sheer fun of this opera. Just wonderful.
Like so many Muti programs, several inner themes or connections ran through the evening, including a strong emphasis on dance and the conductor’s love for opera, especially Italian opera, and the works of Giuseppe Verdi for which he is rightly acclaimed. With its many moods and evocative effects, the evening’s high point was arguably “The Four Seasons,” a largely stand-alone ballet that Verdi wrote for the 1855 Paris Opera debut of his opera “I vespri siciliani (The Sicilian Vespers).”
Following the “Megalopolis Suite,” Muti finished the concert in grand style, with sparkling, high-stepping takes on two Spanish-tinged works, Emmanuel Chabrier’s “España” and Manuel de Falla’s Suite No. 2 from “The Three-Cornered Hat.”
Golijov’s “Megalopolis Suite” might have had its shortcomings, but it was a great night for the CSO.