CSO: in debuts, Pinnock surprises, 'cellist Pavel Gomziakov hits one out of the park

Here is my full Saturday May 1 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday April 29, 2010, Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with Trevor Pinnock conducting and 'cellist Pavel Gomziakov.

Pinnock impresses in 'post-early' repertoire 

Cellist Gomziakov makes major debut

BY ANDREW PATNER

Repeats Saturday at 8 p.m. and Tuesday May 4 at 7:30 p.m.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Formulating expectations of a concert by reading over the announced program can be like judging that proverbial book by its not fully-disclosing cover.  Something that looks good on paper might not take off.  A combination of works and musicians that initially sounds dull or just odd can very pleasantly surprise you.

This week’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts could be the sleeper tickets of the season.  Trevor Pinnock, long known for his 30 years of pioneering work in early music with The English Concert, which he founded in 1972, making his CSO debut at 64?  Some seemingly random and rarely-played-in-concert shorter works by Haydn and Fauré preceding a Mozart symphony?  A young Russian cellist from a small town near the Ural mountains called, of all things, Tchaikovsky, making his North American debut in a Haydn concerto?  The box office phones were probably not ringing off the hook.

[Conductor Trevor Pinnock made his debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Thursday night. (Al Podgorksi/Sun-Times)]

They should be now.  Pinnock opened Thursday's concert by speaking briefly, wittily, and on point about how he hoped that people would not have narrow minds about his leading a modern-instrument international orchestra just as he tried not to when he played any sort of music.  “There are a lot of such people in the world, though, aren’t there?” he chuckled.  And then we were off, with an overture to a 1779 Haydn opera, L'isola disabitata (The Desert Isle), heard here before only once, when the unjustly forgotten Izler Solomon led it in 1956.  

Pinnock starts on the podium like the bantamweight boxer he resembles, shaking out his arms and even his legs before he gives one of the least subtle downbeats I’ve ever seen.  The players, who often complain, reasonably, that some conductors have beats too small or indistinct to follow, at first seemed taken aback by this underlined clarity.  But all came together to give the various contrasts of the Haydn idiom in the 8-minute curtain-raiser.  Faure’s late Masques et bergamasques suite, Op. 112 from 1919 (also played here only once before, by James Paul in 1993) had a very English feel, but then the English have always embraced “light music” and Pinnock also made us feel fully the dance rhythms animating each section. 

Rhythmic animation is especially essential in Haydn. There’s a motor running in all of his great pieces and if you don’t sense that tick-tocking and the gentle sighing as these works run by, you don’t get them.  Pinnock was an excellent driver for the early 1761-65 C Major Cello Concerto (he even referred to the reduced orchestra as “like a compact sports car”) and thank goodness, for the soloist, Pavel Gomziakov, 34, made one of the most memorable debuts of recent years and doing so with complete support and sympathy from the podium allowed him to shine even more.  He has an absolutely individual and unsentimental tone, and no stage mannerisms of any kind.  Without resorting to odd interpretation he could still make familiar music sound unexpected.  

The sound is clear and rich and yet his bowing and fingering both appear light and fleet.  “He seems to make the sound just fly off of the instrument,” my nephew the college music student rightly said. (And what an instrument, the David Tecchler “ex Romberg,” made in Rome in 1703, 30 years before Haydn was born, on loan for these concerts from the Stradvari Society of Chicago.  Gomziakov, who normally plays a modern instrument made for him by French luthier Christian Bayon of Lisbon, was seeing the "ex-Romberg" for the first time this week..  One can see and hear why elite pianist Maria João Pires picked Gomziakov as her partner for her recent DG recording of the Chopin cello sonata. This could be the beginning of a very serious career. 

It’s a mystery that Mozart’s G minor Symphony No. 40, K. 550, one of his most popular and important works, has not been on a downtown CSO program since 1995.  Pinnock led the band of just 36 players -- including beautiful work by the quartet of principal winds -- in an exhilarating performance that was as much about the human comedy as it was about Mozart’s combination of brilliance and experimentation.  Just as it should have been.