But for audiences, the festival’s two opening-week programs warded off the cold like a piping hot meal: a scattershot but satisfying orchestral opener on Wednesday and Dvořák’s moving, underheard “Stabat Mater” on Friday.
From there, beloved Grant Park concertmaster Jeremy Black stepped into his first solo spotlight in many seasons for Camille Saint-Saëns’s Violin Concerto No. 3. Black proved himself just as poised and understated a soloist as he is a concertmaster, playing with grace and alacrity if not heaps of personality. He especially soared in the middle Andantino, achieving a stirring, somewhat pastoral quality that was profoundly moving but never maudlin.
The same goes for the Grant Park Festival Chorus. Given the great quartet of vocal soloists assembled for Dvořák’s “Stabat Mater,” it’s high praise to posit the chorus might have been Friday’s runaway stars, but that was patently true on Friday night. The tenors’ first entrance was deeply felt and iridescent, and chorus sopranos, with a limpid, straight-toned delivery in the upper reaches of their register, all but carried the later “Virgo virginum praeclara” movement.
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