Here is my Saturday June 12 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday June 10, 2010 third installment of the three-week Chicago Symphony Orchestra Beethoven Festival with principal conductor Bernard Haitink. The orchestral portion of the Festival resumes on June 15 and runs through Sunday June 20.
CSO conductor Haitink shows operatic touch with Beethoven symphonic works
Sense of vocal presence in instrumental evening
We have been fortunate in the four seasons that Bernard Haitink has graced the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as principal conductor to see and hear him in a wide range of music -- large-scale symphonies from Bruckner, Mahler, and Shostakovich, 20th century works from Britain, France and Poland, new work, Classical period work, choral and instrumental pieces, and those featuring both piano and vocal soloists.
But we've missed out on a big part of his long career by never hearing him in opera, even in concert form. Time, money, and other legitimate priorities all played their parts. But this week's installment in the CSO's ongoing Beethoven Festival, heard Thursday, gives more than a small taste of what Haitink brings to the world of opera and song, and not only because it opened with a commanding performance of the often raucous and lesser-played Leonore Overture No. 2, written in 1805 for Beethoven's sole opera, Fidelio. In fact, the thought really wouldn't leave my head during the quicksilver playing of the Fourth Symphony, a work that is too often seen as merely occupying the space between the composer's signature Eroica and Fifth Symphonies.
[Chicago Symphony Orchestra principal conductor Bernard Haitink.]
In Haitink's experienced hands, we hear Mozart echoing through the half-hour-plus 1806 work -- but fortified and expanded upon. Beethoven scaled back his instrumentation to a Mozart/Haydn ensemble and length for this entry after the mighty Third Symphony. But he didn't limit his curiosity. In many ways, he successfully spins out and develops more moods and story lines in this work than he does in the one he actually wrote for the theatre. With great economy (and Haitink is made for economy), Beethoven gives us the equivalents of arias, ensembles, and accompanied recitatives (by instruments taking solos). And as he did in the overture, where a listener always wonders if the players will accidentally make a move from the more frequently played Leonore No. 3, Haitink made sure that Beethoven's thrill in the unexpected underscored the pulse of the final movement. Christopher Martin's offstage trumpet sent shivers down the spine.
It's the Sixth Symphony, the 1807-08 Pastoral, that we're accustomed to thinking of as storytelling, what with Beethoven's own descriptive movement names -- "Merry Gathering of Country Folk," "Thunderstorm," and so forth. But Haitink knows that how the tale is told musically is what matters here, not a lot of acting out or trying to create a film score before its time. It was as if we were hearing a fine opera company in the gardens of a country house, except our singers were flute Mathieu Dufour, oboe Eugene Izotov, bassoon David McGill, and guest clarinet Patrick Messina of the Orchestra National de France -- blending with his colleagues as if he lived here -- with horns Daniel Gingrich and James Smelser supplying brilliant atmospherics. Haitink gave us a "slow" movement taken at an almost brisk pace that worked sublimely. A good word for the whole evening: sublime.
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