Here is my Monday June 7 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Saturday June 4, 2010 second installment of the three-week Chicago Symphony Orchestra Beethoven Festival with principal conductor Bernard Haitink. The Festival runs through Sunday June 20.
Pacing remains the key for Haitink
In Beethoven as well as life
Structure in music was something Beethoven both knew a great deal about and exploded for all time over the course of his prolific career.
So it's also interesting to note the structure of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's first-ever Beethoven Festival with its principal conductor Bernard Haitink. To present the nine symphonies requires choices in order and pairing, and they can be instructive.
[Chicago Symphony Orchestra principal conductor Bernard Haitink.]
On Wednesday and Thursday, Haitink kicked off the three-week survey with an underestimated entry, the Eighth, and then the work -- when not in the right hands -- most overexposed, No. 5. The match was a reminder that all of these works have something to say, and we need to give each of them careful hearing.
The program Saturday also brought a giant, No. 3, Eroica, and a lesser-heard opus, No. 2. But here we had back-to-back earlier creations, from 1802 and 1803, and playing them chronologically offered building blocks, points of expansion, and components given what might be called creative destruction in the larger, later composition.
Again, Haitink commands our listening. Pedants love to pick over Haitink's Beethoven; if you've heard and read a few things, you obviously must know more than this elegant musician, who has lived with these works for 60 years. But the meticulous Dutch conductor never makes claims to definitiveness, especially with Beethoven, whom he has revisited in full cycles three times with three different orchestras in just the last three years.
Nor does he want us to hear the symphonies piecemeal -- "I think we all need to really spend time together with Beethoven to begin to get close to what he is doing," he told me in a recent interview.
Pacing is key for Haitink -- to his career as well as to each piece. His intense study and re-study of Beethoven scores -- particularly their tempo markings -- has brought him to perhaps the most illuminating set of choices before audiences today. Fleet, without being rushed, Haitink's tempi are about the inner sense of urgency in these great works, not about whipping up sound for effect. If some mistake this for caution, that's their loss.
This festival also celebrates Haitink's four years atop the CSO's masthead. Every influence he has exerted here has been for the good, building on former music director Daniel Barenboim's reshaping of the orchestra to focus on sectional and chamber-like sound, but doing so with calm authority.
Possibly aided by the orchestra performing without stage risers, the CSO strings continue to shine and sing in ways new to the orchestra's history. Daniel Gingrich and David Griffin led the superb horns, and Haitink waded into the CSO at concert's end to shake hands with principal flute Mathieu Dufour and principal oboe Eugene Izotov.
It's fitting, too, that each program in the series is preceded by a chamber performance by CSO players, at Haitink's insistence and with his own underwriting. I've heard two thus far, the D Major String Trio, Op. 9, No. 2, with Qing Hou, violin, Lawrence Neuman, viola, and Brant Taylor, cello, and the B-Flat Major Archduke Trio, Op. 97, with concertmaster Robert Chen and principal cello John Sharp, joined by pianist Reiko Aizawa. Both were winners, as was the first of three Saturday symposia on the composer's historical context and reception. Of the reacquainting with Beethoven, there is -- and should be -- no end.
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