Here is my Tuesday May 20 suntimes.com piece on Sunday afternoon May 18's chamber program in Chicago.
Concert by Barenboim's associates
brings sense of continuity to Orchestra Hall
JERUSALEM INTERNATIONAL CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL
BY ANDREW PATNER
After two weeks of reporting on and traveling to concerts of the current and future artistic leadership of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Salzburg and New York City, there was something fitting about rounding things out with a chamber performance at Orchestra Hall by family members and close associates of the CSO's last music director, Daniel Barenboim.
It was Barenboim, after all, who built the CSO into the position that it could retain and attract three of the world's leading conductors -- Pierre Boulez, Bernard Haitink, and Riccardo Muti -- to major positions at its podium. And it was the mercurial Israeli musician's departure almost two years ago that created the vacancy at the top that became the focus of international attention and speculation.
Before, during, and after his nearly 18 years in Chicago, Barenboim always said musicmaking was his only real priority. Among many other contributions here, he kept audiences supplied with a steady diet of chamber music, where he played with such high-powered friends and protégés as Maxim Vengerov, Yo-Yo Ma, Radu Lupu, and Thomas Quasthoff, as well as members of the CSO itself. He also demanded that members of the orchestra embody more of the aural and collaborative values of chamber musicians in their orchestral playing.
So the visit Sunday afternoon by members of the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival was not only a tribute to Barenboim's artistic and political connections to the Middle East but a direct link with someone who removed himself from the local scene so dramatically in June 2006.
Founded in 1998 and led since then by Barenboim's pianist wife, Elena Bashkirova (left), the JCMF brings together both established and rising performers from a variety of national backgrounds as a means of reviving secular cultural life in Jerusalem, a city dominated in recent years by strong religious currents. Sunday's program, modified by some personnel changes and visa difficulties, still gave a good snapshot of what goes on at the Concert Hall of the International YMCA in West Jerusalem in early September each year.
Bashkirova was joined in four rarely performed works of four key Austro-German composers by her son, violinist Michael Barenboim; Israeli cellist Kyril Zlotnikov; and East German-born clarinetist Matthias Glander, principal clarinet of the senior Barenboim's Staatskapelle Berlin. All three of these colleagues are also involved with the West-Eastern Divan Arab-Israeli youth orchestra.
While she has her own international career as a soloist and recitalist, Bashkirova's great love is chamber music, and her versatility and humility were keys to the afternoon's success. Arrangements for trios of works of Schumann and Beethoven, as well as a 1938 quartet by Hindemith and the accompaniment of Berg's 1913 Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 5, had Bashkirova as anchor and guiding spirit. Schumann's 1845 Six Pieces in the Form of a Canon, Op. 56, for the now-forgotten pedal piano, was heard in a 19th century transcription for piano, violin, and cello, and Beethoven's E-Flat Major Septet, Op. 20, in the composer's own Op. 38 Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano, both from 1800.
Glander is greatly respected technically and artistically by many musicians, and his good friend retiring CSO principal clarinet Larry Combs was in the audience. With Zlotnikov, who has a terrific CD (left) of the complete Mozart piano trios with Daniel Barenboim and violinist Nikolaj Znaider on EMI, Glander animated the Beethoven and the wholly captivating Hindemith, and on his own offered both textbook lessons and inspiration in the Berg work.
All in all, there was a happy sense of things coming full circle in Chicago and even of a figurative olive branch being shared among musicians, audience, and members of the CSO administration as new eras are launched on South Michigan Avenue.
Note: The 11th Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival runs from August 30 to September 12. Participants this year include star tenor Rolando Villazón in Schumann's Dichterliebe and Liederkreis, and bass-baritone Robert Holl in Schubert's Winterreise, all with Daniel Barenboim as pianist, and Emmanuel Pahud in the world première of Elliott Carter's new Flute Concerto.
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