Musical dream transports crowd back to Babylon

The unseasonable cold air mass that had settled over Millennium Park Friday night made a stark contrast with the hot-blooded frenzies of sound kicked up by the platoons of performers on the Pritzker Pavilion stage.

The Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus presented William Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast, a giddy, brazen oratorio that invariably raises temperatures on both sides of the footlights. Its noisy extravagance gave the new sound system a demanding workout, but one that it passed with flying Technicolors.

Christopher Bell, Grant park’s Belfast-born, Edinburgh-based chorus master, presided over forces numbering more than 200, including a large chorus, big orchestra and extra brasses, like a man enthralled by the music, but not so seduced by its proto-Hollywood lushness as to vulgarize it.

He had brought his own chorus, the national Collegiate Chorale of Scotland, all the way from Edinburgh for the weekend concerts, also next week’s performances of Britten’s War Requiem These gifted young singers covered themselves with glory. Indeed, the energy and discipline of their singing set the bar high for their hosts – the solid Grant park Chorus and the apprentice Chorale, an ensemble newly formed by Bell and made up of voice students from DePaul and Roosevelt Universities.

Belshazzar’s Feast was written in 1931 and it provided film composers of a later generation with a banquet of biblical effects in which to wallow. For a conductor, the trick is keeping its frenzied waves of sound, changing meters and jazzed-up rhythms under firm control while giving the illusion of Babylonian abandon. Bell could have sharpened the percussive punctuation in the “Praise ye” chorus more forcefully. But this was a small complaint amid an exciting account. Nathan Berg made a sturdy bass-baritone soloist, utterly commanding in manner and delivery. Grant park failed to supply the audience with a text leaflet, but the combined chorus’ crisp diction and tonal power helped to offset the lack of one. Bell began the concert with Grant Park resident composer John Corigliano’s sensually beautiful 1971 setting of the Baudelaire poem L’Invitation au Voyage, as translated into English by Richard Wilbur. The choral sound retained a lovely shimmer and fullness, even at its hushed, sustained close.

Chicago Tribune, August 15 2004
John von Rhein