Dutoit ends season with emotional effort

July 24, 1999

By Daniel Webster

PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER MUSIC CRITIC

Music meant as a dramatic and festive close to the summer season paled beside Charles Dutoit's surprise announcement Thursday that he was resigning as artistic director of the Philadelphia Orchestra's Mann Center for the Performing Arts season.

Speaking just before he conducted Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, Dutoit joked that the audience was hearing the orchestra for the last time in that building - in this century. Then he recalled his 20-year association with the orchestra - including 10 years as artistic director of the summer concerts at the Mann and at the Saratoga Arts Festival in Upstate New York - and said he was leaving. Turning to the music, Dutoit then led an energized, pulsing reading of Orff's cantata on the stage crowded with the orchestra, the Mendelssohn Club chorus, and the American Boychoir.

The work invites many interpretations. Dutoit's found more than the usual poetry in the lyrical sections, and a haunted echo in even the most boisterous passages extolling drinking and love. Listeners could read all kinds of emotion into this farewell piece.

Besides that, Dutoit was leading forces honed to meet the rhythmic demands of this theatrical work. Treating the text with more than usual care, the conductor guided the orchestra through the music's many representations of a tavern orchestra, a sweetly singing string ensemble, and a virtuosic percussion group. In this pure concert setting, he made the score's theatricality all the more vivid.

He was helped, too, by soloists able to make musical sense of writing that often taxes voices. For once, the tenor solos, sung by Stanford Olsen, did not sound strangled, but became distinct and comic additions to the work. Baritone Stephen Powell moved easily through the wide range, finding an expressive weight to meet the textual nuances. Mary Dunleavy put her pure, accurate voice to the service of the scenes of love's innocence. Dutoit moved the big choral forces quickly in a reading of high expressive value and fierce energy.

The work was a farewell for another orchestra figure. Bassoonist Bernard Garfield, principal since 1957, played the high solos in the Orff music with the wit and eloquence listeners have come to accept as a norm.

Before the intermission, Dutoit led Bernstein's Chichester Psalms. The performance reminded listeners how eclectic Bernstein was, drawing liberally on his own other music and taking ideas from Copland, Ives and a dozen others. Countertenor Daniel Taylor lent his creamy voice to a reading full of choral vigor and instrumental vitality.