"Left Coast" and Pärt -- a muted Salonen in Chicago

Here's my Saturday January 24 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday January 22, 2009 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with Esa-Pekka Salonen, conducting. 

Arvo Pärt and Esa-Pekka Salonen at the world première of Pärt's Fourth Symphony in Los Angeles.  Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times

West meets Midwest as Salonen gives Pärt piece Chicago debut

Chicago Symphony Orchestra

with Esa-Pekka Salonen

Repeated  Saturday Jan. 24 at 8 p.m.

BY ANDREW PATNER

SOMEWHAT RECOMMENDED

The dramatic political and cultural shifts in our world have their geographic consequences as well.  Who would have thought that the South Side of Chicago would some day become the home base of a U.S. President and his closest advisors?  

Similarly, with a contemporary landmark concert hall, an emphasis on contemporary composers and the appointment of a young Latin American superstar as its orchestra’s music director, Los Angeles, long identified with tinsel and trivia, is now seen by many as the new hub of classical music.

Gustavo Dudamel just announced plans for his first season heading up the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  In addition to some South American works and personal favorites, it's a program much in the tradition of the orchestra's departing chief, Esa-Pekka Salonen: West Coast composers and Europeans who have positioned themselves against more intellectually-based Modernist music.

Salonen, leading this week’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts, is the youngest conductor to retire from a major orchestra since Leonard Bernstein, who was also at the cusp of 51 when he left the New York Philharmonic.  He intends to focus more on his own composing which just last year yielded one of his most successful works to date, his raucous Piano Concerto which he led here nine months ago with its dedicatee, Yefim Bronfman.

For this listener, composition seems the way to go for Salonen.  In recent years his general conducting has been in a static place and his programming tastes have been narrow. He opened Thursday night at Orchestra Hall with Bartók’s 1936 Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta.  Whether he was spooked by playing this work in the House that Hungarians (Reiner and Solti) Built or was seeing this normally edgy score through the scrim of the brand-new Fourth Symphony by the Estonian spiritual minimalist Arvo Pärt that followed, the performance was gauzy and sludgy.  The closer, Debussy’s 1903-05 La Mer, had micro-shaped moments but also lacked overall drive and shape.

Pärt, now 73, has been a cult figure since the late 1970s when he started writing in a slow-moving, lightly-scored style inspired by his Eastern Orthodox Christian faith.  For me, this works best in his vocal pieces.  I have little doubt that Salonen, who believes deeply in this music, gave this 35-minute symphony, Los Angeles (as in angels rather than the city named for them), an appropriate performance and I am sure that it fit better with the live and in-the-round acoustics of Walt Disney Concert Hall at its world première two weeks ago.  

But to my ears this work for strings, harp, and percussion sounds more like a meditation tape than it does a work one hopes to engage with seriously and see how it lends itself to future interpretations.  Over hazy, quiet strings a triangle sounds just when you know it will.  Silences ask us to invest them with importance.  A long-haul middle movement is followed by an angel's skipping ascent that sounds forced.

The piece may yet have an audience, and not only in Los Angeles.  As Abraham Lincoln is said to have responded after hearing a reading of an over-long spiritualist tract, “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.”