Here is my Thursday June 17 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Tuesday June 15, 2010 fourth installment of the three-week Chicago Symphony Orchestra Beethoven Festival with principal conductor Bernard Haitink.
Beethoven's First and Seventh get due respect from Haitink, CSO
Conductor knows you can't mess with perfection
One of the many things that makes Beethoven unique among composers is that he and his music have maintained their intense popularity for two centuries.
That popularity has not varied much in kind, either. Audiences in the early 1800s and in our 21st century each find the same power, humane insight, and sense of inspiration and hope in his compositions.
[Bernard Haitink leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Beethoven's First Symphony on Tuesday at Symphony Center. Todd Rosenberg Photography]
These factors might seem to make putting on a survey of all of Beethoven's symphonies an easy task: Everyone's going to like them anyway, right?
In fact, it makes the challenge for conductor and orchestra even greater. Falling into habit or rote can dull or routinize any work, no matter how great.
Wednesday night at Orchestra Hall with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, principal conductor Bernard Haitink demonstrated that there has been no danger of this in the CSO's three-week Beethoven Festival. After a lifetime spent with these pieces, as both player and conductor, Haitink's current perspective is capping a set of three recent cycles intentionally given with three different orchestras. Having immersed himself in the new set of complete performing editions from the German music publisher Bärenreiter, Haitink has also looked deeply into his own musical experience to emerge with a general perspective that allows listeners -- and players -- to hear each symphony anew and in the context of all nine entries.
Every score marking -- Beethoven of course introduced these works as conductor as well as composer -- is observed, whether for dynamics, emphasis, color, or tempo. Every marked repeat is taken: "They are in the score. That settles it for me," Haitink said recently. And since he knows that every player and most listeners have a picture and set of memories and expectations coming into this immersion, he is able to play off of those and create additional excitement and healthy tension.
And so this week's concerts, the festival's penultimate program, came off less as a marathon of three distinct works that took us from 1799 to 1812 than a climb up a mountain of Beethoven's design and accomplishment. The First Symphony, the calling card of a 29-year-old genius, filled with subtle and not-so-subtle transformations of Mozart and Haydn's earlier creations, was followed by that opera in an overture, the 1804-05 Leonore No. 3. The program's second half held the nonpareil Seventh from 1811-12 with its outbursts of joy, its solemn meditations, and its lessons in harmony that can sweep up any listener.
Haitink's understanding of Beethoven's sense of structure was underlined by bringing three works with slow and deceptive introductions together on the program. His insight that the coda of the Leonore No. 3 relates to and ties together all parts of the piece showed that it is much more than a thrill ride. And his reassembling the basic elements of the famed second movement of the Seventh resulted in a performance of the Allegretto like none I've ever heard and, I'm prepared to say, surpassing any others played here.
And what playing! Every section, from first violins to basses, horns, trumpets (Christopher Martin again the offstage Leonore hero) and timpani and the now signature fabulous winds. Flute Mathieu Dufour and oboe Eugene Izotov play almost as a heavenly union, and clarinet John Bruce Yeh, bassoon William Buchman and all of their seconds made an unbelievable choir. And it is the human choir, the chorus that closes the titanic Ninth Symphony, that we await in the last orchestral concerts Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
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The orchestral portion of the Festival concludes with the Ninth Symphony on June 18, 19, and 20. Tickets are sold out but turnbacks may become available. Each remaining concert is preceded by a chamber performance by CSO performers curated by Haitink -- including, on Sunday afternoon June 20, the Grosse Fuge, op. 133 -- and a talk by Princeton musicologist Scott Burnham. Burnham, the author of the landmark Beethoven Hero (1995), will also give a talk entitled "Beethoven the Hero," Sundat at 12 noon at Orchestra Hall, followed by a performance of the early Wind Octet. Admission is free.
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