Commentary: In concerts preceding the Requiem, Riccardo Muti spotlighted the CSO’s stellar principal trumpet, Esteban Batallán.

By Nancy Malitz

Is there a more riveting manner in which the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus could have closed out its 2024-25 season at Orchestra Hall? Not from where I sit: The 1874 Requiem Mass of Giuseppe Verdi – conducted by perhaps its greatest living interpreter in Riccardo Muti and boasting a superb quartet of solo singers in addition to the fiery CSO and Chorus – resounded June 19-24 to cap Muti’s two-week return to the podium, at a moment of global instability so fraught that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists re-set the world’s iconic Doomsday Clock at 89 seconds to Midnight. [[https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/]]

It was on Saturday, June 21, midway through the CSO’s breathtaking Requiem run, that American planes entered Iranian air space intending to destroy the uranium enrichment facilities essential to the creation of nuclear warheads. By Tuesday, June 24, when a fourth Requiem performance crowned the all-but-sold-out concert series, the world was still more on edge: it was uncertain that Iran’s nuclear sites had been obliterated as first reported. Had the country’s timetable to full nuclear capability only been pushed back a few months?

Verdi’s Requiem is a spellbinding plea for deliverance from an angry God who punishes with fire. Its message is brutally modern. Its music flowed from the pen of a composer who lived in a time of multiple European wars affecting Italian-speaking lands not yet entirely unified. One movement was completed in 1869 to commemorate the death of fellow composer Gioachino Rossini. It later became part of Verdi’s 1874 project to honor the great humanist poet and philosopher Alessandro Manzoni on the anniversary of his death.

As fiercely wrought by Muti, who in 2023 was named Chicago Symphony’s Music Director Emeritus for Life, this Requiem spoke directly to the current fraught international moment: Whipped up by the maestro with a thwack of his baton as both feet lifted off the podium, and accented by nearly deafening cracks of percussion, the chorus in the  Dies Irae roared lion-like in the extreme. But the raw shock just as quickly gave way to the frantic uncertainty of chastened whispers at the threshold of sound, and gentle pleas. Did I mention that Muti had a long career in opera? He knew exactly what he was doing, to splendid effect.

Donald Palumbo – the former Metropolitan Opera veteran who becomes the CSO’s official choral director on July 1 – prepared the excellent CSO Chorus, which evoked the terror of Judgment Day at a thundering level, and exquisite prayer as well. The famous dread text derives from a 13th-century cautionary chant prophesying the summoning of souls “when the whole world will dissolve in ashes.”

The hushed singing of the chorus in the “Agnus Dei,” their disquieting pianissimo moments in the “Dies Irae,” and the desperate anxiety they conveyed in the final “Libera Me” for soprano and chorus – with the soprano Elena Guseva – all conveyed tremendous intensity.

In chats about the Requiem, Muti has emphasized that Verdi’s singers are not merely begging God for mercy in the face of their dread prospect. Rather, “they are asking.” His comment put me in mind of the World War II Jewish prisoners at the Terezin concentration camp, who learned the music of Verdi’s Requiem with its Dies Irae and even performed it for the camp’s murderous Schutzstaffel and a Red Cross delegation. Direct confrontation on the issue of these prisoners’ fate could not possibly have been permitted, but as remembered, their performance of Verdi’s humanistic masterwork was the implicit, “Why…?”

Muti is a past master at Verdi’s Requiem. He has performed it with dozens of stellar artists across the span of five decades and recorded it four times, including once with the CSO in 2009. With this orchestra alone, it was the sixth Verdi Requiem to be conducted by Muti since 2009, when he became the orchestra’s music director designate. Together, Muti and the CSO have also taken the Requiem to Vienna and Tokyo.

In Chicago, at 89 seconds to Midnight, Verdi’s Requiem seemed new again, searingly contemporary, its quartet of solo singers in top form, including Russian soprano Elena Guseva, American tenor John Osborn, Azerbaijani bass-baritone Maharram Huseynov and the French mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa, who was downright terrifying in the “Liber scriptus,” warning of the horrors of God’s wrath on Judgment Day.

Crebassa’s towering performance was a reminder that while she has in prior years been a natural for various trouser parts across town at the Lyric Opera ‒ not to forget her meowing like a cat and taking the role of a Louis XV armchair in Ravel’s fairy tale “L’enfant et les sortileges” 15 years back with the CSO ‒ the mezzo-soprano is a deeply expressive artist fully capable of soul-rending stuff. Midway through the “Dies Irae,” in the lovely “Recordare” section, Crebassa pleaded for absolution in a surpassing beautiful duet with Guseva, who had a brilliant moment of her own with the chorus in the Requiem’s great finale, “Libera Me.”

The tenor Osborn’s elegant, introspective “Ingemisco” invited reflection and projected comfort even as it pleaded for a place of rest at God’s right hand, a cameo of quiet respite that also lingers in memory. And the impressively dark-voiced Huseynov projected the grave sentiment of the “Mors stupebit,” singing of a time when even death will stand amazed in final judgment.

A Trumpeter Returns: 

Although the CSO was outfitted with an outstanding new quartet of principal woodwind players under Muti’s watch –  flute, clarinet, oboe and bassoon – the question of an ideal principal trumpet had seemed uncertain until Esteban Batallán, a charismatic Galician, won the CSO’s top trumpet job in 2019 at age 37. However, this season Batallán took a leave of absence to take the position of principal trumpet with the Philadelphia Orchestra after auditioning for, and winning, that job offer as well.

The definition of an ideal career for any virtuoso player is a tricky one, doubtless so for Batallán, given the CSO’s recent music director transition from Muti, who is 83, to the Finnish Klaus Mäkelä, at 29. The younger maestro’s path has been blazing straight out of the gate, much like Muti’s own sprint to fame in his young day. But for Batallán, who is now 40 ‒ and who grew up listening to recordings of the CSO’s legendary brass section headed by Adolph Herseth under Kubelik, Reiner, Martinon, Solti and Barenboim ‒ the trumpet job he had long envisioned must have seemed radically altered by the prospect of a CSO under the very youthful Mäkelä.

In the end, Batallán decided to make his return to the CSO permanent after finishing out the 2024-25 Philadelphia run. What comes next will be another time of transition; longtime assistant principal trumpet Mark Ridenour, who was appointed by Daniel Barenboim in 1994, is retiring at the end of the season. Guardian of a long tradition that goes back to Herseth, Ridenour was embraced warmly by Muti during bows at the end of the June 24 concert.

So there will be changes, but a delightful trumpet future beckons: In concerts the week before the Verdi Requiem, Batallán turned out two mid-18th- century showpieces by Michael Haydn (Joseph’s younger brother) and Georg Philipp Telemann on piccolo trumpet, both with gorgeous slow movements and dazzling finales set at coloratura speed, and both in D major. Thus the season ended on a high note, and that’s not a metaphor. It sounded like a promise.