Here is my Monday April 11 suntimes.com and Chicago Sun-Times review of the Friday afternoon April 8, 2011 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with music director Riccardo Muti in music of Shostakovich, Cherubini, and Liszt.
Riccardo Muti leads the CSO on Friday in works by Cherubini, Liszt, and Shostakovich at Orchestra Hall. | Richard A. Chapman~Sun-Times
You’ve never heard Shostakovich like this
Muti offers more than just prep for CSO Carnegie Hall trip
BY ANDREW PATNER
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Repeats at Carnegie Hall only, Sunday April 17 at 2 p.m.
With three sold-out performances of Verdi’s Otello on his plate (the last in Chicago is Tuesday night) and a tour to New York coming up this weekend, Riccardo Muti wants to make clear to anyone and everyone who’s watching that he is fully back in the saddle as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
On Friday afternoon he went ahead with his scheduled all-orchestral program just 13 hours or so after Desdemona and Otello had taken their last breaths on the Orchestra Hall stage.
Two pieces that would have made Muti’s first Friday matinée subscription concert as music director additionally intriguing -- Mead composer-in residence Anna Clyne’s <<rewind<< and Edgard Varèse’s way-out 1920s Arcana -- had fallen victim to the weeks Muti missed for health reasons this winter. This was still a chance for the audience to hear the music director’s first Shostakovich with the CSO and for the players themselves to continue building bonds with their maestro ahead of their three-date stand at Carnegie Hall.
For Muti, a one-off matinée has no less importance than a full run of a staged opera in Salzburg. The CSO has played Shostakovich’s 1937 Fifth Symphony dozens of times over seven decades -- recording it twice, with André Previn in 1977 and with Myung-Whun Chung as a CSO Resound download in 2006 -- and I was certainly not the only listener in the house who has heard the piece 100 times or more in various performances, broadcasts, and recordings.
But I never heard it sound like this. Muti plays very little of the Soviet composer’s music (“and none of the operas,” he told me recently), and this distance here is a very good thing. Among other things, it means that Muti has avoided the so-called “Shostakovich wars” over what the composer’s politics “really were” or what his pieces “actually mean.” Muti’s not looking to connect a composition with Shostakovich’s complex and unhappy biography. Instead he pays the Russian the high compliment of taking his work seriously as music, some might say even more seriously than it wholly deserves, and by doing so with such care, elegance, and lyricism that he makes a new case for the perennial 50-minute work.
Muti does not, as he is sometimes accused of doing in other repertoire, give us an “Italian” version of the piece. But he does what he does with his beloved Verdi: knocks away the usual bluster and lets the music develop organically, making pianissimos almost whispered and building up and cueing fortes when called for, not for sonic effect or vulgar expression. Moscow-born and -schooled principal oboe Eugene Izotov matched his haunting solo in the slow movement to this seemingly more delicate approach, as did flute Mathieu Dufour and horn Daniel Gingrich in their interplays. The pacing of all four movements found a nobility throughout. The famous finale was not somber, nor was it ever triumphant. This is not the only way to skin this cat, of course, but no other has made me think as much as this one.
(The Clyne and Varèse scheduled openers were replaced with two brief Muti career staples, the 1815 Cherubini Concert Overture in G and Liszt’s mid-19th century “symphonic poem” Les Préludes. The Cherubini was having its first ever CSO performance and the Liszt was heard with more circumstance at September’s outdoor "Free Concert for Chicago" in Millennium Park. Muti will have time in the future to display more extensively his arguments for Cherubini.)
It was during the rehearsal of the slow movement of the Shostakovich that Muti fell on February 3 suffering now-repaired facial and jaw injuries and leading to the installation of a pacemaker and a number of canceled performances, some generously picked up by Leonard Slatkin. Fitting then that the full work was played as a sign of renewed commitment.
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