Here, with cuts restored, is my Saturday June 6 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday June 4, 2009, Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with guest conductor Sir Mark Elder and violinist Janine Jansen. The CSO's Dvorak Festival runs through June 20.
Elder right leader for Dvorak fest
BY ANDREW PATNER
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Repeats Saturday evening at 8 p.m.
One of the many fitting things about the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Dvořák Festival, launched Thursday night at Orchestra Hall, is that it is being led by a conductor who is neither Czech nor American.
For one of the central arguments of Antonín Dvořák's life and music is that Western art music is both universal and multicultural. A product of a provincial riverside village in Central Bohemia, the son of a butcher who also played the zither, no one dod more than Dvořák to integrate folk and dance music into classical music and to build bridges between the Old and New Worlds, including the musics and cultures of Black and Native Americans.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
When: 8 p.m. tonight
Where: Orchestra Hall, 220 South Michigan Avenue
Tickets: $19-$199
Phone: (312) 294-3000
That Sir Mark Elder, the son of a dentist in a provincial riverside town in northeast England, who cut his teeth as a conductor in Australia, should prove to be such a natural and idiomatic leader of the composer's shifting and broken rhythms and adaptations of complex, joyous yet at times dark Central European folk melodies would surely allow the great Bohemian artist the chance to say, "I told you so."
When Dvořák was at his height -- living, working, and teaching in New York City -- and visited the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 to conduct an all-Czech program, Chicago had the third-largest Czech population of any city in the world after only Prague and the imperial capital Vienna. His music had already been played at the very first CSO concert, in 1891.
And so to have this three-week exploration of once-popular but now-neglected pieces (this week’s opener, the 1883 Scherzo capriccioso, Op. 66), works recently restored to the repertoire (the 1879-80 A minor Violin Concerto, Op. 53), and accepted masterworks (the 1884-85 D minor Seventh Symphony, Op. 70), makes sense in so many ways. That his great-grandson and look-alike, Petr Dvořák, had journeyed here from the Czech Republic to open the festival brought much full circle.
Dvořák would certainly also have been thrilled by the belated CSO debut of Dutch violin phenom Janine Jansen, 31 (above). Tall but imposing musically rather than physically, she jumped into the concerto, one of the most physically awkward for its soloist, with confidence and gusto, and never wavered. Her performance of the Adagio movement backed her claim that this is a work she loves as much as Brahms.
In the familiar Symphony No. 7 and the relatively little-played Scherzo capriccioso, Elder launched himself to the higher ranks of guest conductors. He simultaneously made the case for this music's unique mixture of sensibilities and its general greatness at every moment . Strings, horns, woodwinds all played beautifully and thrillingly, none more so than English horn Scott Hostetler.
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