Chicago Symphony Orchestra launches its 2009 Ravinia season with Conlon -- but where is the musical leadership?

Here is my Thursday, July 9 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Tuesday, July 7, 2009 first Ravinia concert of the season by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with James Conlon, conductor, and Yefim Bronfman, piano, as well as of the Sunday, July 5, chamber program with Bronfman, Pinchas Zukerman, and the Zukerman ChamberPlayers.  My colleagues at the Chicago Tribune and the welcome new addition to the music journalism scene, Chicago Classical Review, focused their CSO reviews on the introduction of large video screens to all Pavilion concerts, both in the Pavilion and on the lawn.  I'll take up this issue at a later date; my concern in this review is with musical issues at the Festival that are present with or without "value-added" (Ravinia's term) features.  The CSO Ravinia residency continues through Saturday August 15 with a concert performance of Verdi's Rigoletto conducted by Conlon and featuring Dmitri Hvorostovsky in the title role.

 

CSO's decline at Ravinia rests at the podium

Conlon shows he lacks stature of non-summer conductors

BY ANDREW PATNER

Ravinia is many things these days: top-level chamber music and vocal recitals in the gem-like Martin Theatre, an ever-expanding array of pops concerts, highly regarded training programs for young musicians, dance and music theater events, a site for picnicking, and home to a beautiful new restaurant building.  All as it runs a full 15 weeks from early June to mid-September.

But in the minds of many, and in its modern history, it is still the summer home of the great Chicago Symphony Orchestra, though the CSO plays for only six weeks each year and has done so under mostly unexceptional conductors since James Levine left the fest for good in 1993.

Tuesday night brought the CSO's first performance of this season and brought the continuing uneasy state of its residency into focus.  An interesting program became almost indifferent as played before a Pavilion audience of advanced age.

James Conlon (above left), Ravinia's music director since 2005, has things to say in opera, as he has shown at the Los Angeles Opera, the Cincinnati May Festival, and his alma mater, the Juilliard School, where he recently completed a two-year residency.  But in the symphonic repertoire, he is simply not at the level of Levine or the international conductors who have led the CSO downtown in recent years: Georg Solti, Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Bernard Haitink, and music director-designate Riccardo Muti.

Mendelssohn's First Symphony, in C minor, Op. 11, was written in 1824, when the young genius was 15.  To his credit, Conlon is one of the few advocates of this neglected work, which undoubtedly gives us a clear idea both of the composer's influences (Bach, Mozart, Weber, and Beethoven, among others) and his own sparkling and swirling sound.  But for all of Conlon's devotion to this 30-minute piece, he played it like a rapid run-through with no attention to the quality of sound or any apparent individual insight.

Even the normally thrilling soloist Yefim Bronfman (above, right) seemed reserved and withdrawn in the Brahms Second Piano Concerto, the B-Flat Major, Op. 83,  in the concert's second half.   Two nights before, in a Martin Theatre chamber program with violinist Pinchas Zukerman and three of Zukerman's Canadian protégés, Bronfman showed the full range of power and delicacy, daring and narrative mastery that are his trademarks in Mozart's First Piano Quartet and a performance of the  Schumann Piano Quintet that might have been the finest I have ever heard live.

Yet on Tuesday, although never less than beautiful, Bronfman's playing was introverted and almost careful, as if he were afraid to try to carry the orchestra along in his interpretation.  A shining light here was the uncredited assistant principal cellist Kenneth Olsen, whose solos in the concerto's slow movement were so accomplished and moving that Bronfman made a point of walking around his Steinway concert grand to salute Olsen and pull him forward to take a solo bow when the work was done.  That's the sort of excitement that should be the rule and not the exception when the CSO plays Ravinia.