Requiem for a heavyweight: Riccardo Muti in Philadelphia

Don’t meet your heroes, Flaubert once cautioned – they often have feet made of clay. For a good segment of The Philadelphia Orchestra’s current audience, Riccardo Muti stands as a mythic figure: after serving as Music Director for a decade in the period immediately following the Ormandy era, he has made only infrequent returns as a guest conductor. He counts passionate partisans and dogged skeptics among the old guard, but newer listeners have had scant opportunity to make up their own minds. When he arrived this weekend to lead one of his calling cards, Verdi’s Messa di Requiem, it was his first visit in 19 years.

A large portion of the audience greeted him with an immediate standing ovation when he first appeared on stage, several moments after the vocal soloists assembled. Yet although Muti has lived with this work for decades and has a thorough pedigree as an opera conductor, the performance lacked a sense of musical variation and narrative drive. The orchestral musicians played consistently well for Muti, though he seemed intent on goading them to keep things loud and fast. This compunction worked in some instances – the Dies irae left you holding onto the arms of your seat and the volleying fanfares between onstage and offstage trumpets in Tuba mirum sounded regal and terrifying at the same time. But Muti’s preferred dynamics sacrificed the emotional core of the work for a few thrilling moments, as if intending to prove right the early critics who wrote this piece off as cheap.

Likewise, the Philadelphia Symphonic Choir made its best impression in full-throated passages, navigating well the difficult double chorus in Sanctus. They tended too often to blare out their sound, especially in sections that should seem foreboding: Liber scriptus and the response to the soprano’s opening incantation of Libera me. With the orchestra and chorus essentially operating at one speed throughout the performance, the progression of the work lacked a total impact – the listener knew well what to expect from the beginning onward, without much development or surprise.

Perhaps the greatest sense of excitement happened offstage. A press release circulated earlier in the week announced that Iwona Sobotka would replace Juliana Grigoriyan as the soprano soloist. (Sobotka sang the role for Muti in Paris a few weeks ago.) Yet on opening night, and for all remaining performances, the soprano duties fell instead to Angela Meade – a favorite of the Philadelphia crowd since her student days at the Academy of Vocal Arts. Meade has a history with this piece in these parts – when the Orchestra last performed the work, in 2012, she similarly jumped in to replace an ailing colleague – and she proved herself a game participant once again.

Meade’s lush, room-filling sound made friends easily, although her fast vibrato surely wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste. She turned Libera me into a compelling monodrama, injecting some dramatic flair into the performance that had been missing elsewhere. Like so much else in the evening, though, she seemed to have only one volume setting, punching rather than floating B flats as if she might lose the thread singing pianissimo.

Next to Meade’s ringing instrument, the other soloists sounded bantamweight. Isabel De Paoli’s dark mezzo projected an occluded quality throughout the performance, and she was dwarfed vocally by Meade in Agnus dei. Giovanni Sala mustered up his modest resources for Ingemisco, but the task seemed to push him to the limit. Maharram Huseynov resorted to screeching and sneering for dramatic effect, perhaps to compensate for a light-toned voice that simply isn’t suited for this music.

As an event, Muti’s long-awaited return clearly made an impact: tickets were scarce, ovations were thundering. As a performance, though, it felt as if we were laying flowers at feet of clay.