Wednesday was a night for Grant Park Music Festival diehards.
First, those present had to brave the 90-plus degree heat, which bit a sizable chunk from opening night crowds in both the Pritzker Pavilion and on the Millennium Park Great Lawn. Festival orchestra musicians visibly sweltered in their concert blacks, with some busting out shorts and sandals for the concert.
Nor was the evening’s bluster any help. High winds yanked sheet music from stands, sent program books fluttering and caused a pair of speakers to swing perilously several yards above the head of Carlos Kalmar, Grant Park’s artistic director and principal conductor, for most of the evening.
But if soloist Michelle Cann won’t forget her festival debut anytime soon, it probably wasn’t because of the weather. The pianist has become one of the most visible exponents of the music of Florence Price, who launched her career in Chicago and enjoyed rare institutional recognition here as a Black female composer. But as Cann told Grant Park audiences in an emotional address, despite concertizing a new, authoritative version of Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement (1934) for more than a year now, she’s never performed Price’s music in the composer’s home city.
One wagers Grant Park audiences won’t soon forget Cann, either. In her mighty performance of Price’s concerto, Cann didn’t just surmount the acoustic challenges of the Pritzker Pavilion stage: She sailed over them with the grace and flexibility of a high jumper, her powerful fingerwork crisply enunciating her interplay with the orchestra. After a big-boned exposition, Cann toggled easily to the luscious, unaffected sincerity of the lyric middle section — with gorgeous solos by oboist Mitchell Kuhn and cellist Walter Haman — and later still, to the heady exhilaration of a ragtime-like Allegretto.
No comments:
Post a Comment