In Monday’s (7/8) Chicago Tribune, John von Rhein reviews a weekend concert by the Grant Park Music Festival Orchestra led by Eugene Tzigane. “Grant Park Music Festival and its principal conductor, Carlos Kalmar, have long considered” giving young conductors early exposure to be a priority. Tzigane, “a 30-year-old conductor of American and Japanese descent” making his Chicago and Grant Park debuts, “had his work cracked out for him here last week, having to prepare a challenging calling-card program in typically tight rehearsal time. But he did so most impressively, bringing freshness and energy to an attractively varied program that found him fully engaged with the musicians, and they with him.” Tzigane conducted William Bolcom’s “Ragomania” with “plenty of zip, making it an ideal curtain raiser for a concert in the great summer outdoors.” In the Barber Piano Concerto with soloist Alessio Bax, “under Tzigane’s firm, decisive leadership the orchestra came very close to matching Bax’s rhythmic acuity and propulsive drive.” And Tzigane “came into his own after intermission with a Dvorák ‘New World’ symphony that proved as dramatic as it was idiomatic.”
Posted July 8, 2013
