Here is the full version of my Friday June 4 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Wednesday June 2, 2010 kick-off concert of the three-week Chicago Symphony Orchestra Beethoven Festival with principal conductor Bernard Haitink. The Festival runs through Sunday June 20.
CSO: Beethoven's 5th + 8th = Haitink highlight
CSO: Beethoven's 5th + 8th = Haitink highlight
Conductor makes magic
From the moments Wednesday at Orchestra Hall that Bernard Haitink signaled the first notes of Beethoven's Fidelio Overture and then those of his Eighth and Fifth Symphonies with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, you knew you were in a very special place.
Perhaps you knew it even before those rippling and rhythmic measures sounded out. For the full house was unusually attentive and palpably expectant. In cities where Beethoven festivals are done frequently, either as money makers or due to lack of programming vision, there's not much to such an occasion. But for one of the world's finest conductors, at 81, to lead the CSO in a survey of the nine symphonies by this most charismatic and revolutionary of all composers is something different.
This series of nine CSO concerts, many chamber music performances, three free Saturday symposia, and a free film screening Friday night also marks the end of Haitink's four years as the CSO's principal conductor.
As one longtime subscriber and I noted on exiting the hall, that means there is a lot of love in this space. Love for Beethoven and love from the audience, love from the players for a consummately professional and richly experienced conductor who gave them leadership at a time it was almost desperately needed, and love from a conductor for an orchestra "that does something very difficult," as Haitink told me. "It allows me simply to be myself and to say musically what I might have to say."
In some ways all of the “What is there new to observe about Beethoven now?” questions are satisfied by this conjunction of deep affection and superb performances. Beethoven is about the totality of human possibility, and this is not a subject that changes -- except perhaps for the worse -- or loses its power as time goes by. And Haitink knows -- as well as anyone active in music today -- that it is we who have to open ourselves to this great musical maker and thinker.
Haitink is as surprised and as amazed today by Beethoven’s unpredictability as he was as a young violinist and conductor in his native Amsterdam in the 1950s. And it is this above all this is his unique way these days with Beethoven. Of course he understands the pacing and the relationship between different and changing tempi in each piece and each movement in a way that few others do. Of course he has a psychic-seeming way of carrying senses of dotted rhythms between himself and the orchestra without beating out every count. Just those opening measures of each work contained as much unseen rippling as the flutter of a butterfly's wings.
But he also is so in the moment at each moment that we forget what is happening next in works that we might have heard dozens, even hundreds, of times. Haitink draws this same watching out for the next turn from the CSO players -- from Daniel Gingrich and James Smelser's ruddy horn calls and leadership, to Eugene Izotov's heart-stabbing oboe solo in the Fifth, to trombones that are just right -- tuneful, buoyant and never too much.
It's magic. But it's magic that comes from decades of work, of trial and error, of training and practice by everyone on that stage. And when these master musicians turn their full attention to one another and to Beethoven in such a concentrated way, you are reminded of why you are here -- here in this hall and even here on this earth.
The festival continues through June 20. For full details, go to www.cso.org or call (312) 294-3000.
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