Catching up with the CSO's Dvořák Festival II -- Emersons in the house and a 136-year-old symphony premieres

Allergies have knocked me about this last week, so catching up with posts of reviews, etc., Here is my Tuesday June 16 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Saturday June 13, 2009, Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with guest conductor Sir Mark Elder and the Emerson String Quartet with violist Paul Neubauer.

This Dvořák Festival program is repeated tonight, Tuesday June 16, with the Emerson substituting the E-Flat Major Slavonic Quartet, Op. 51, for the Op. 97 American Quintet in the chamber portion of the concert.  The Emerson gives a free performance today, Tuesday, at 12 noon at The Art Institute of Chicago's Fullerton Hall of Cypresses and the American String Quartet, Op. 96.

Thursday June 18 and Saturday June 20 bring both a wide array of vocal selections and the Romance for Violin and Orchestra with Rachel Barton Pine among other works. Friday June 19 holds a repeat of the Cello Concerto, the Ninth Symphony, From the New World, and the popular Carnival Overture.  See my reviews of the Cello Concerto and Symphony No. 9 below.

Dvořák expert Michael Beckerman of New York University speaks an hour before each remaining CSO concert as well as in a special additional free lecture at 3 p.m. on Saturday afternoon.

 

CSO's Dvořák celebration builds case for composer from ground up

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED

The Saturday CSO program is repeated tonight, Tuesday June 16, at 7:30 p.m. with the Emerson substituting the E-Flat Major Slavonic Quartet, Op. 51, for the Op. 97 American Quintet in the chamber portion of the concert and, alas, without the Wind Serenade postlude. 

Dvořák again?  

Perhaps the greatest success thus far in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Dvořák Festival is the way those words have been transformed from an uncomfortable question into an enthusiastic statement. Yes, Dvořák again!

This weekend saw a packed hall Saturday night for a highly unusual CSO program and a deeply focused Sunday afternoon crowd for the Symphony Center Presents chamber music installment of the combined celebration/investigation of the great Czech composer.

Who would have thought before this festival that a program of a little-heard string quintet (without orchestra), a 136-year-old symphony having its Chicago première, a late bit of spooky atmospherics, and a post-10 p.m. performance of a wind serenade would be a near-sellout?  If you've been to any of the CSO's Dvořák Festival programs, you could see why people have become believers.  Guest conductor Sir Mark Elder (above) has found a bond with the CSO and audiences that makes a case for Dvořák as musical prophet and humanist as much as folk-infused craftsman.  To hear the edges of his repertoire as well as his central works has come to feel like a privilege.

The Emerson String Quartet (above) is known for giving 110 percent, and sometimes that extra 10 percent puts a chrome plate on its performances.  Not here.  Joined on Saturday by violist Paul Neubauer, its performance of the 1893 E-Flat Major American Quintet , Op. 97, was sensitive and idiomatic in ways that would have pleased Dvořák and the residents of Spillville, Iowa, who were hosting him that long-ago summer.

The F major Op. 96 Quartet itself came on Sunday, and with the context of music just before and after it still in our heads, the work was even richer than usual.  The discovery Sunday was the too-rarely given G Major Quartet, Op. 106, the first music that Dvořák wrote after returning to his native Bohemia in 1895, though not until after a nine-month break from composing to let his American experiences settle in.  Though the piece is structured normally, each of its four movements contains marvelous subtleties and intricacies.  Pianist Jeffrey Kahane was the additional guest for a rousing run through the 1887 A Major "pre-American" Piano Quintet.

The centerpiece Saturday night was the first CSO performance of the Third Symphony, written in 1873 when Dvořák was just 31 but not known until well after his death in 1904.  In the thrall of both Wagner and Czech folk music, the work's three movements seem to be different pieces, but it gives a sense of what would become the composer's building blocks and lifelong passions.  The CSO played it as if it was an old and much-admired friend.

One of Dvořák's late folk-tale tone poems, the 1896 The Midday Witch, Op. 108, is perhaps a too literal setting of yet another Central European child killed by a too restrictive society story.  It was the after-hours offering of the Op. 44 Wind Serenade that had the audience grinning until 10:45 p.m.  What a pleasure it was to hear this wind band staple with a dozen CSO players, led by principal oboe Eugene Izotov.