Pritsker overflows with Grant Park, Scottish choruses

Understandably, the Grant Park Music Festival is doing everything it can to show off the various attributes of its beautiful new Millennium Park home this season.

Choral music was the focus at the Grant Park Orchestra’s concerts at the Pritzker pavilion on Friday and Saturday. The big work was William Walton’s stirring oratorio “Belshazzar’s Feast”. This coming weekend, another major 20th Century British choral piece, Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” will fill the bill.

The Grant Park Chorus has a distinguished history, but it is sounding especially impressive these days under the direction of Christopher Bell, who became chorus director in 2002. The chorus sounds lithe and agile, powerful and full-throated when called for, but also is capable of lean-lined clarity.

Friday night’s performance, conducted by Bell, displayed the chorus’ full range, with some help from the visiting National Collegiate Chorale of Scotland and the singers of Grant Park’s Apprentice Chorus.

The program opened with an intimate, a cappella choral performance of John Corigliano’s “L’Invitation au Voyage” and closed with the large-scale forces of “Belshazzar’s Feast”.

In between came a non-choral work, the colourfully scored “Veni, Veni, Emmanuel” a concerto for solo percussionist and orchestra by Scottish composer James MacMillan inspired by the ancient hymn “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”.

Walton composed memorable film scores, most notably for Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet” and “Henry V” in the 1940s and its clear from “Belshazzar’s Feast,” which was composed in 1931, that he had the gift for setting a scene. “Belshazzar’s Feast” concerns one of the Bible’s most dramatic stories, moving from the Jews mourning their captivity in Babylon to the debauchery of King Belshazzar’s court to the episode of the handwriting on the wall to Belshazzar’s death and the Jews ultimate liberation.

With Bell setting a crisp pace, baritone soloist Nathan Berg helped the orchestra and chorus spin an engrossing tale. The oratorio opened with a few brief, bold strokes from the brass before the a cappella chorus demanded attention with an authoritative “Thus spake Isaiah.” This performance of a rarely done work seized the imagination from its first bars.

Berg’s flexible, dark voice made him the perfect narrator, and the chorus and orchestra explored all highlights and shadows of Walton’s score. Heavily mournful in the opening stanzas, the chorus soon became agitated as it described suffering. But as Walton’s melodic lines smoothed out and became quiet, their full despair in attempting to “sing the Lord’s song” in captivity was evident.

The mood was much less troubled in Corigliano’s “L’Invitation,” a setting of a short text by Baudelaire. The youthful voices of the Collegiate Chorale, co-founded in 1996 by Belfast native Bell, was a celestial presence. With its descriptions of a lush, dreamy heaven, “L’Invitation” was both seductive and serene.

Chicago Sun Times, August 16 2004
Wynne Delacoma
Classical Music Critic