Here is my Saturday February 5 suntimes.com and Chicago Sun-Times review of the Thursday February 3, 2011 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with substitute guest leaders/conductors Mitsuko Uchida and Leonard Slatkin and programming changes following the collapse and fall of music director Riccardo Muti Thursday afternoon in rehearsal.
Uchida, Slatkin step up, step in for CSO’s injured Muti
BY ANDREW PATNER
Repeats with some changes (see below) Saturday at 8 p,m. and Tuesday February 8 at 7:30 p.m.
The exclamation point with which the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has hoped several times to launch the Riccardo Muti era was replaced again Thursday with a question mark. Or was it the interrobang, that combination of those two punctuation marks that expresses a collision of expectation and experience?
After a much-anticipated return following a sudden onset of illness in the fall, Muti literally fell on Thursday afternoon toward the end of an extended snow day-replacement rehearsal with the CSO. Witnesses say that he appeared to black out and fall straight toward the string players. CSO Association President Deborah F. Rutter later confirmed that Muti, 69, fell hard enough to suffer facial injuries and a serious laceration on his lower jaw.
While Muti rested at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, awaiting treatment for his wounds and tests to try to determine his underlying condition, CSO managers scrambled as only they canto rearrange the program for Thursday night’s concert, what was to have been Muti’s first here since falling ill October 2 with what was later diagnosed as severe stress and exhaustion.
Fortunately, guest piano soloist Mitsuko Uchida was willing to reprise her performances of Mozart’s C Major Piano Concerto No. 21, K. 467, which she had been playing last week (and will repeat again on Monday in another snow-day make-good). And the CSO’s trusty old friend Leonard Slatkin, music director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, on his way to Chicago as a juror for a new CSO conducting competition, was able to step in for the announced Shostakovich Fifth Symphony. It’s a work that he and the CSO know well and that the orchestra had just rehearsed with Muti.
A Muti rarity, Cherubini’s Overture in G was jettisoned, perhaps to rise another day.
(Among many rescues Slatkin has performed at Orchestra Hall, he had just taken over a series of CSO concerts, without any program changes, two weeks ago after British conductor John Eliot Gardiner canceled because of shoulder trouble.)
As my colleague Bryant Manning reported last week, Uchida and the CSO are a blessed pairing in Mozart. It’s not so much that they breathe together in this music -- and they do. It’s that they create an atmosphere together where what each party does seems as natural as breathing. The famous slow movement brought both soul-touching beauty and a measure of comfort to a hall filled with concern over Muti’s situation. Applause and curtain calls were offered and shared appropriately between the pinch-hitting conductor-pianist and the players.
In a telephone interview Wednesday, Muti told me that his would not be a “triumphal” Shostakovich, and Slatkin picked up where Muti left off. This was a straightforward but particularly clear performance of the much-loved 1937 orchestral showcase. Slatkin seemed to defer to orchestra and soloists in a way free of obsequiousness. Solos by Russian-born oboe Eugene Izotov, flute Mathieu Dufour, and harp Sarah Bullen, and the slow movement as a whole, were especially fine.
Retired principal bass Joseph Guastafeste, who is to be saluted at the CSO’s concert Saturday, returned in the hope of realizing his dream of playing principal under every music director from Fritz Reiner to Muti. Retired contrabassoon Burl Lane was also in his old chair. The difficulties of the principal horn, extremely unsettling in the work’s opening movement, are among the many matters that await attention when Muti returns again, this time, one hopes, for good.
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Note: Thursday night's program was repeated, reportedly with similar excellent results, on Friday afternoon. At Saturday and Tuesday nights' concerts, Uchida will play and lead Mozart’s F Major Piano Concerto No. 11, K. 413, Slatkin will again conduct Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, and CSO players will perform Mozart’s B-Flat Major Divertimento, K. 137, without a conductor. Both Mozart works were on Uchida’s CSO programs last month.
Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo, 45, will make his CSO début substituting for Muti in four concerts February 10 to 15. Siberian violinist Vadim Repin remains as soloist for the scheduled Tchaikovsky concerto but Oramo will substitute Sibelius’s Finlandia and the Prokofiev Sixth Symphony for scheduled works by Mead composer-in-residence Anna Clyne and by Hindemith.
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