Leave it to Grant Park Music Festival artistic director Carlos Kalmar to make sense of a head-scratcher of a season closer: A sprawling, somewhat obscure military panegyric by Handel.
In his address to the audience, the conductor echoed his sentiments from the festival’s opening concert — acknowledging the pandemic’s ongoing devastation while urging audiences to take care of themselves and their neighbors — and sketched parallels between that patriotic occasion and Friday’s concert. Kalmar dubbed the always enthralling Gabriela Lena Frank’s “Elegía Andina,” the composer’s first formal musical inquiry into her vantage point at the intersection of multiple immigrant identities (Chinese-Peruvian and Lithuanian-Jewish), a “truly American piece.” Then, he pointed out how the martial brassiness of Handel’s “Dettingen Te Deum,” commissioned by the British Royal Family to mark a military victory, echoed the Independence Day Salute’s many tributes to U.S. armed forces.
As for Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 3 Think of it as an added treat from the familiar fingers of Vadim Gluzman, a local institution who runs the North Shore Chamber Music Festival with his wife, pianist Angela Yoffe.
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