Here is my Saturday December 5 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday December 3, 2009 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with guest conductor Markus Stenz and soloists Viviane Hagner, violin, and Nicole Cabell, soprano.
Markus Stenz with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at this week's "Beyond the Score" concerts (John J. Kim/Sun-Times)
Rare missteps at Orchestra Hall
Guest conductor, violin soloist falter
There are downsides to having things go as well as they have in recent seasons at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and when a concert doesn't fully come together, it shows. Thursday night it showed right away when Korean-German guest soloist Viviane Hagner, making her downtown debut, began the Mendelssohn E minor Violin Concerto both out of tune and with a small and hardly seductive tone.
She picked up technically as the half-hour piece went on, and offered a number of interesting, analytical takes on the 1844 work that usually belongs to the much more emotional Russian school of performance. But if she had much interest in what the orchestra was doing around her, she didn't show it. A disappointment from a still young player who has had good reports.
German conductor Markus Stenz made a favorable impression when he last led the CSO nine years ago, and he is doing fine work at Lyric Opera leading the outstanding Katya Kabanova through December 12. And he clearly has ideas about this week's main orchestral work, Mahler's Symphony No. 4 in G Major. But having ideas, communicating them, and achieving one's desired results are not the same things.
As this week's CSO "Beyond the Score" programs on the 1899-1901 composition argue, this is not only music about "beauty" and "heavenliness," as commonly understood. Mahler was an experimenter, a proto-Modernist, and he wanted to shake his audiences as much or more than soothe them. But however interesting what Mahler himself left behind on piano rolls might be, it is not necessarily the model for interpreting this nearly hourlong work, and certainly such a reading would require someone with a conducting and baton technique much more focused and clear than Stenz showed here. His fussiness with tempos in the normally transfixing final movement with the song "Heavenly Life" seemed to throw off soprano soloist Nicole Cabell, making it difficult to evaluate her performance or fully appreciate this landmark work. Among the soloists, principal oboe Eugene Izotov and guest principal flute Thomas Robertello were especially superb.
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