A Knight to Remember

It was a happy circumstance that the 400th anniversary of the Shakespeare’s death provided the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with the necessary pretext for a concert performance of Verdi’s Falstaff, which occurred as part of a Shakespeare-themed series that also included (on different evenings) Tchaikovsky’s two famous overtures and the less-frequently performed Roméo et Juliette of Berlioz. Admittedly the concert setting may not have seemed ideally suited to an opera in which so much depends on physical comedy and the fast-paced dynamics of theatre. Yet if one required a certain reserve of imagination to transform the music into a coherent narrative, the exceptionally high quality of the vocal ensemble and an animated, detailed reading from Riccardo Muti made for an evening which lacked nothing in joyous energy and musical splendour.

Indeed,…