In a season that already has heavily focused on the music of Igor Stravinsky, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra proved once again to be a masterful interpreter of the Russian composer’s art, presenting an enlightening take on his Ode, Apollon musagète, and Oedipus Rex with the Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas.

Serge Koussevitsky, famed conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and avid supporter of new music throughout the first half of the 20th century, established a foundation in 1942 to honor the memory of his wife, Natalie, by commissioning new works of music.  Martinů, Bartók, and Schuman were all recipients of grants, and Stravinsky wrote the three-movement Ode that appropriately leans towards darker sonorities and subdued orchestration.  The second movement Eclogue proved to be the joyous highlight amidst more somber music, with its energetic horn fanfare, ricochet bowing, and impressive double-tonguing from the winds.

Writing in his autobiography, Stravinsky mentions envisioning his Apollon musagète as a strings-only “pure-ballet,” absent the “many-colored effects” and “superfluities” that characterize some of his earlier ballets.  Indeed, this music is Stravinsky at his most diatonic and hummable, but hardly pedestrian.  From the dotted-rhythm French overture opening, through Concertmaster Robert Chen’s extended solo depicting Apollo, through the dances of three Muses- Calliope (representing poetry), Polyhymnia (representing mime) and Terpsichore (representing dancing)- and finally concluding with a wildly energetic ending that would befit a rock concert, the CSO and Thomas performed this music with characteristic virtuosity.  Stravinsky’s music is so often a subversive blend of mysticism and mathematics, and Thomas undoubtedly had a full grasp of the intricacies and subtleties of the score.

For the final trek through Stravinsky’s music, Sir Patrick Stewart joined the men of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Chorus, singers William Burden, Michelle DeYoung, Ryan McKinny and Stanford Olsen, and the full orchestra for the “opera-oratorio” Oedipus Rex.  Stewart’s authoritative narration opened each section in English, setting the stage for Oedipus’ battle against Fate, sung in Latin.  As the protagonist, Burden’s lyrical, hall-filling singing was filled with beauty, sweetness, and vulnerability, sounding alien next to the ominous Orff-like chanting of the chorus.  After becoming increasingly unstable and tense, the music launched at warp speed into a full-voiced Gloria that was undoubtedly inspired by some of the masses of Stravinsky’s predecessors, superbly performed by the forces on stage.

Act II was wrought with more drama, as Oedipus’ mom-wife Jocasta realizes the truth in the prophesy that Oedipus would kill his father and marry his mother.  Unable to bear the situation, she commits suicide, and as the opera-oratorio comes to a close, Oedipus is left alone to deal with the cruel machinations of Fate.  Both McKinney as the Messenger and Olsen as the Shephard had some particularly fine moments with the CSO’s bassoon section and Stewart gave a particularly powerful and emotional reading of the last segment, bidding farewell to Oedipus.