Sir Donald Runnicles
REVIEW: Runnicles returns and scores (again) with Strauss
By Lawrence A. Johnson
It was five years ago that Donald Runnicles made his belated Lyric Opera debut, conducting a riveting performance of Richard Strauss’s Elektra in which the unearthly sounds coming out of the orchestra pit proved even scarier and more mesmerizing than what was taking place on stage. (Of course, finger ever on the pulse, Lyric’s former management never invited him back.)
Happily, Runnicles returned to town Thursday night to lead more Strauss—this time at the other end of the Loop with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, his first downtown podium stand since 2016. The evening’s program may have looked pedestrian on paper, yet the outstanding performances provided an example of a first-class conductor inspiring the orchestra to their very best.
There was a fantastical thematic thread running through the selections, which led off with Beethoven’s Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus.
Beethoven’s curtain-raiser to his eponymous ballet score is among his most concise overtures but also one of his finest. From the taut dramatic punch of the opening chords, this was an exhilarating and ideally realized performance, with warmly blended tuttis, rollicking woodwinds and dazzlingly virtuosic strings in the main Allegro.
A versatile veteran of both the opera house and concert hall, Runnicles was music director and principal conductor of San Francisco Opera from 1992-2009 where he led a magnificent Ring cycle (at least musically) in 2011.
Devoting nearly half the evening to a 32-minute suite from Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel may seem like a profligate waste of resources. But Runnicles’ affection for this score—one he has likely led countless times in the opera house— was manifest in Thursday night’s performance. Omar Abad’s suite doesn’t attempt a unified synthesis, instead rather clunkily compiling seven non-sequential excerpts from the opera.
Runnicles—a rare left-handed gun on the podium— underlined the Weber influences in Humperdinck’s opera, as with the Prelude in which the four horns floated a magical rendering of the “Evening Prayer.” Runnicles and the players served up a characterful account of this score bringing out its inherent gracious charm. There was a rambunctious account of the children’s playful dance (“Rallalala”), spooky evocation of the forest with delicate pizzicatos, and galumphing humor in the “Witch’s Waltz,” closing with a shimmering and majestic reprise of the prayer. The musicians delivered playing that was refined, lively and sumptuous under Runnicles’ direction with even the grandest climaxes never turning strident.