Here is my Saturday March 5 suntimes.com and Chicago Sun-Times review of the Thursday March 3, 2011 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with guest conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen in music of Wagner, Donatoni, and Bruckner.
Franco Donatoni (1927-2000) in 1996; Esa-Pekka Salonen
Making perfect sense of Bruckner’s 7th
Salonen goes back to the Austrian master, by way of an Italian teacher
BY ANDREW PATNER
RECOMMENDED
Repeats Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday afternoon at 3 p.m.
For decades, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s vice president of artistic administration Martha Gilmer would work on planning seasons by spreading out dozens of 3-by-5 cards and moving them about to take into account dates, composers, conductors, soloists, and other personnel all in a sort of living jigsaw puzzle.
I don't know if they've computerized the process by now, but Gilmer and her colleagues have had their hands full this season with unexpected cancellations by music director Riccardo Muti and the program changes that resulted as substitute conductors were arranged. In October, on very short notice, CSO conductor emeritus Pierre Boulez graciously agreed to take over a Muti week of concerts, but wanted to program Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, which guest conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen was planning to lead this spring. Then in November, Boulez and the CSO did not receive scores in time for an announced work by the late Italian modernist composer Franco Donatoni and had to reschedule it.
Salonen, conductor laureate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic at just 52, took all of this in stride. (He’s had to cancel appearances -- and, under his composer’s hat, premières -- here himself in the past.) For this week’s CSO concerts, he substituted another Seventh -- Bruckner’s -- for Mahler’s. He also added not only a Wagner party piece but a different work by Donatoni: the composer’s last, dictated from his hospital bed in Milan to his students just before his death at 73 in 2000, and dedicated to, and even named for, Salonen.
The 10-minute work, called Esa by this playful Veronese humanist, is the fifth and final of his In cauda series (a cauda was a medieval musical tail, similar to what we now call a coda); premièred by Salonen in Los Angeles in 2001 and having its first Chicago performances now, it proved not only a beautiful and captivating piece, but also a key to Salonen’s Bruckner as well.
As a composer, Salonen, a former student of Donatoni’s, is fascinated by taking things apart and putting them together again. As his dynamic new Violin Concerto showed CSO audiences last week, he’s also interested in finding and making motors and continuities in music.
This was not a Bruckner 7 on the mystical level of Bernard Haitink’s recent CSO performances (and CSO Resound recording). But it was one that found ways of making all of that Brucknerian starting and stopping and starting again make sense, and not just as a bunch of building blocks being moved around, but harmonically and in a linear way.
The CSO goes back more than a century with this 65-minute work from the early 1880s -- to Frederick Stock in 1906. It has played and recorded it under everyone from Paul Hindemith to Klaus Tennstedt, Daniel Barenboim and Georg Solti, and they gave their all -- sometimes a bit too much all in the brass, but balances could come in the remaining performances this weekend.
The same might be the case for a rather flexible take on Wagner’s Prelude to Act 1 of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. But the alternately sweeping and delicate Donatoni (with pianist Mary Sauer’s smiling benedictions from a harpsichord!) and the way it inspires this take on Bruckner made this an unexpectedly joyful evening.
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