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Verdi Requiem: Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Chorus, Riccardo Muti, conductor, Barbara Frittoli, soprano, Olga Borodina, mezzo-soprano, Mario Zeffiri, tenor, Ildar Abdrazakov, bass, Orchestra Hall, Chicago, 17.1.2009 (BJ)


First of all, full disclosure: Riccardo Muti, I feel privileged to say, is a friend of mine. I served for seven seasons as his program annotator, and in various other capacities, when he was music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra. So anyone disturbed by that connection may feel free to disregard this review–though my admiration for him is entirely independent of that association, and was first expressed in highly favorable reviews long before we met.

Muti left his Philadelphia Orchestra post in 1992, feeling no longer able to sustain the pressure of leading both that institution and La Scala, Milan, with the intensity and dedication both roles demanded. Now that he is no longer at La Scala, he has felt able to accept the music directorship of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; he will take up the post in the autumn of 2010, and the performances of the Verdi Requiem he led this January inaugurated his position as music director designate.

The orchestra and its public must be thanking their lucky stars, and there was certainly no mistaking the ebullience and zest with which Muti is embarking on this new venture. I attended the third of the three concerts, and it was by a wide margin the greatest performance of this masterpiece in my long experience. The orchestra played like gods, and Duain Wolfe’s chorus sang like angels. Muti himself is lucky in a way, because, in contrast with his 1980 takeover of a Philadelphia Orchestra depressed by too many years of the artistically unimaginative Eugene Ormandy, and with his predecessor Daniel Barenboim’s 1991 inheritance of a Chicago Symphony whose standards had declined in the fading years of Solti’s tenure (to the point where there were only two dynamic levels, fortissimo and mezzo-forte, with nothing in between, and certainly nothing below), Muti is now in the happy position of leading an ensemble restored by Barenboim to something like its best.

The solo quartet was fully worthy of this stellar setting. All four singers excelled, and their voices, distinctly different as they were in timbre, blended luxuriously. Pure of tone, Barbara Frittoli was both lyrically exalted and, when that was appropriate, as in the concluding “Libera me” movement, intensely dramatic. Olga Borodina’s rich mezzo provided apt contrast, and she sang with comparable expressive power (though I was slightly troubled by her tendency to take breath between a subject and a verb). Mario Zeffiri, Greek despite his Italian-looking name, shaped the tenor part with warmth and rare delicacy. And the bass, Ildar Abrazakov, is quite simply one of the greatest singers I have ever heard. This young Russian has everything: sensitivity, musicianship, good looks, a sound method, and a voice of ravishing quality that seems totally even throughout the range. (Returning home, I immediately ordered all four of the recordings listed for him on the excellent ArkivMusic site: Rossini’s Moïse et Pharaon, orchestral songs by Shostakovich, and, with Muti, Verdi’s Oberto and Cherubini’s E-major Mass. I can’t wait.)

But a great Verdi Requiem is not on the cards without a great conductor, and it was Muti’s unerring judgement, stylistic sensibility, technical mastery, and combination of tigerish intensity with surpassing tenderness that forged all these elements into a consummate whole. The pianissimo at the start was positively unearthly. The chorus’s delivery of “Quantus tremor est futurus,” in a denatured whisper, curdled the blood, in just the way we might expect the Last Day to do when we encounter it. But perhaps the most revelatory aspect of the interpretation was the way, even in the most delicate and seemingly tranquil moments, the vehemence of “Dies irae, dies illa” could be sensed in the background, eager to make another incursion, and devastating when it did.

I have never subscribed to the common view that Muti is a conductor in the Toscanini mold. Yes, he admires Toscanini, and he possesses a full measure of his celebrated Italian predecessor’s precision. But interpretatively he is closer to the expressive warmth of such conductors as Furtwängler and Mengelberg (whom he also admires, though without sharing the Dutchman’s penchant for occasionally excessive effects).

I had only one serious regret. It seems to me a pity that Muti had reseated the orchestra in the too-long-common 20th century configuration, with all the violins on house left, and the cellos and basses on the right. I know he has used this pattern throughout his career, and is thus presumably most comfortable with it. But at a time when orchestras across the US, from Philadelphia under Christoph Eschenbach to Seattle under Gerard Schwarz, have adopted the older configuration with first and second violins split across the stage, and cellos and basses on house left behind the firsts, it would surely be a good moment for him to change to a pattern important for the realization of many antiphonal string effects, not only in the Viennese classics, but also in the work of such composers as Bruckner, Elgar, and Mahler.

In that respect, I shall hope for a re-think. But in every other way, the kind of music-making we were given on this memorable occasion is earnest of a new golden age to come for one of the world’s finest orchestras.

Bernard Jacobson

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