Here is my Friday October 16 suntimes.com and Saturday October 17 Chicago Sun-Times review of the Thursday October 15, 2009, Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with Riccardo Muti conducting music of Mozart and Bruckner. Repeated Friday at 1:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., with free concert (some last-minute first-come, first-served seats available) Saturday at 3 p.m. followed by a "town hall" Q-and-A.
Riccardo Muti triumphs in his first CSO concert of the season
BY ANDREW PATNER
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Transitions are often difficult times for institutions. Who’s really in charge? How is the mission maintained? Where does cohesion come from?
Such is not the case with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as it continues to soar in the period between Daniel Barenboim’s departure as music director three years ago and Riccardo Muti’s taking up that position a year from now. With Bernard Haitink and Pierre Boulez providing inspirational and sympathetic podium leadership in Chicago and on tour, and with overwhelming confidence in Muti’s leadership capacities, the CSO is experiencing its own Era of Good Feelings and Great Music-Making.
Mozart’s D Major Haffner Symphony No. 35, K. 385, is a brief, high-spirited, and festive work and a Muti favorite. It’s also a piece about new beginnings as Mozart wrote its first version as a serenade in 1782 while still in Salzburg and reworked it the next year when he had escaped to his own life in Vienna. Muti used it as his own seasonal calling card, demonstrating his strong belief that delineating formal structure is a key to understanding a work of music and bringing it to life.
Muti is leading only two weeks of concerts this season before his contract begins in September 2010. Much of his time in Chicago this month is being given over to meetings, auditions (including another attempt to fill the vacant principal clarinet position), press interviews, and photo shoots. But Thursday night at Orchestra Hall, in his first CSO concert of the season, he reminded us of what all the fuss has been about.
In a program that balances his interest in popular works and the margins of the repertoire, as well as precision and lyricism, refinement and passion, he lit an electrical charge with his first step onto the Armour Stage that did not end until his now-customary “bye-bye” wave almost two hours and two symphonies later.
That insight serves him especially well in the program’s large work, Bruckner’s C minor Second Symphony in the Nowak edition of its 1877 version. This is early Bruckner, though first written when the hesitant composer was almost 50. It is in some ways a primer, a brief, for ideas and concepts that Bruckner would develop and perfect further in his later great works in the genre. Muti sees the piece as not so much a break with the past as a continuation of Schubert’s symphonic efforts, and, no great surprise here, as the most Italianate of Bruckner’s works.
He finds courtly dances in the opening moderato movement and has at the service of his interest in detail the Barenboim-recharged string sections, which he treats as separate choirs, as the score requires but rarely receives.
In a piece with even more stops and starts than the better-known Bruckner behemoths, Muti paces to perfection with the composer’s silences as clear and as moving as his many notes. His tempos are brisk, shaving about five minutes off of more standard timings, but are never hurried, and, as always with Muti, he never overexplains in his interpretations. Bruckner, even early on, has plenty to say, and Muti lets him say it, in his own quizzical yet strangely hypnotic voice.
This work is a concert rarity, not even played by the Bruckner-besotted CSO since it recorded it with Sir Georg Solti in 1991 during his farewell season. This also means that at least a third of the orchestra has never played the piece before. They dug in with glee, demonstrating their strengths at every turn and with especially beautiful playing by the wind and horn principals. And yes, Los Angeles, that was Mathieu Dufour playing the flute. He certainly sounds at home with Muti.
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