This weekend, Carlos Kalmar — the Grant Park Music Festival’s Uruguay-born, Austria-raised artistic director and principal conductor — steps down after 25 years on the podium.
But to parrot a phrase immortalized by one of Kalmar’s countrymen, he’ll be back. A preconcert ceremony on Friday bestowed Kalmar with the Nikolai Malko Award— the festival’s first, named for its inaugural chief conductor — and a conductor laureate title, accompanied by assurances that he’ll return in seasons to come.
If one is to step away from this festival, Mahler’s Eighth Symphony is the way to go out. In many ways it’s the ultimate choral-orchestral work, dubbed, against Mahler’s wishes, the “Symphony of a Thousand” because of the musical hamlet necessary to mount it. Friday’s performance didn’t quite cram a thousand people onstage — a festival spokesperson counted 262 — but the personnel was still overwhelming: eight vocal soloists, a double choir and a Mahler-sized orchestra, offstage brass and all. Add a children’s chorus specially flown in from Kalmar’s native Austria — and directed by his daughter, Katja — and you have yourself one blowout finale.
Sitting in the pavilion, your eardrums, too, could be blown out. This performance was loud. (Some musicians onstage wore earplugs.) Auxiliary brass, usually placed offstage at Mahler’s request, got their own onstage risers in the beginning and finale. Later, as the unearthly Mater Gloriosa, Gemma Nha — a thrillingly evocative soprano, and an incoming Ryan Opera Center singer to watch — sang from the very back of the choral loft, sounding every bit like a voice from heaven. Those placements were pure musical pageantry, in the best way.
Alongside Nha’s runaway festival debut, Grant Park favorites of seasons past made this Mahler not merely sensational but sublime. As he proved in last season’s opener, tenor John Matthew Myers has one of those rare, full-package voices, with impeccable diction, a radiant tone and unflagging stamina as Doctor Marianus. Maeve Höglund also returned, her explosive voice making a marvel out of the balkworthy upper soprano part ending the “Veni, creator spiritus” section.
Where Höglund’s soprano sparkled, Jane Archibald’s was smooth, trailing after Höglund like a benevolent shadow in the final Chorus Mysticus. Earlier, as Faust’s Penitent/Gretchen, the unflecked purity of her voice was an ideal bridge between her feature and the Gumpoldskirchner Spatzen chorus’s, clad in traditional Austrian garb and sounding both crisp and sweet.
Rod Gilfry, a piquant baritone, seized his feature as the Pater Ecstaticus, his voice cannonball-like in its impact. Following him as the Pater Profundis, Kevin Short’s delivery was less in-your-face but lofted by a ringing tone that handily mastered the teeming orchestration underfoot. Along with Myers, mezzo Susan Platts built out the solo chorus’s sturdy core; her mezzo colleague Kayleigh Decker was lither but refined as the Samaritan.
The usual Grant Park forces were at the very top of their ever-tall game. The chorus was the lifeblood of this vital performance, balancing Olympian grandeur with pastel subtlety and perfect, bell-like intervals. The brass section, essential to pulling off most Mahler, were the heroes of the orchestral corps, with silkily blended horns and stratospheric solo work. Adding to the valedictory spirit of Friday’s performances, Amy Schwartz Moretti — the former concertmaster of the Oregon Symphony, where Kalmar was also the longtime music director — sat first chair and dispatched those solos with lacy elegance.
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For all the proceedings’ potential sentimentality, Kalmar isn’t a sentimental interpreter. In Mahler — that extravagant, aching music — the right amount of clear-eyed objectivity can be a tonic. Kalmar’s driving, enunciated, eyes-on-the-prize interpretation was mostly that, if selling some introverted moments short. The enigmatic instrumental prelude to Part II, in particular, seemed to ponder devolving into the domineering, martial character from before.
At the precipice just before the instrumental conclusion, sometimes you’ll hear conductors tantalizingly stretch out that final return to E-flat major. Kalmar held onto the chord just long enough, but he’s not one to linger. The chord resolved with all the catharsis of homecoming.
It wouldn’t be a Grant Park concert without a little open-air excitement. Sirens wailed just before downbeat — because of course they did, to knowing laughter from Kalmar and the audience. And in the sonic tsunami that is the symphony’s final few minutes, the skies, too, roared, splitting open with rain and thunder. You couldn’t invent a more epic auf Wiedersehen if you tried.
Leave it to the festival to be on-brand till the bitter end. As Kalmar’s final word, there’s none better than the symphony’s last stanza: “The indescribable here is done.” Sure was.
Program of Mahler Symphony No. 8 repeats 7:30 p.m. Aug. 17 at Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph St.; www.grantparkmusicfestival.com
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.
The Rubin Institute for Music Criticism helps fund our classical music coverage. The Chicago Tribune maintains editorial control over assignments and content.
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