Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Saturday December 3, 2011
Photo: Marco Borggreve
Van Zweden Leads CSO in magnificent Mahler
McGill makes Mozart's bassoon concerto sing
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
with Jaap van Zweden
and David McGill, bassoon
Repeats Saturday at 8 p.m.
Tickets: 312.294.3000 or cso.org
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
By ANDREW PATNER
While image builders and the remaining record companies drum a steady beat of candidates for “the next big conductor,” Jaap van Zweden is the ultimate under the radar man. A former concertmaster of Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw (appointed to the job at just 19 by Bernard Haitink, then the Dutch ensemble’s chief conductor), he later paid his podium dues at a number of smaller orchestras in The Netherlands (and two in Belgium) before taking the music directorship of the still off-the-beaten-track Dallas Symphony Orchestra four years ago.
But boy is he good. Introduced to local audiences and earning nationally noted reviews when he stepped in at the last minute with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2008 for ailing, popular Italian conductor Riccardo Chailly and led a Bruckner Fifth that still raises goosebumps when recalled. He’s been back several times since as both a reliable sub and with his own program. This week, his scheduled appearances make news again as Thursday night van Zweden offered a Mahler 1 that was as fine a pairing of conductor and orchestra as you will hear anywhere.
What makes a great Mahler performance can be hard to explain. CSO music director Riccardo Muti is himself wary of Mahler but thinks “it’s easy to get audiences to like performances of his works because, except for the Third Symphony, they all end with big noise!” That’s actually the way to give a common or mistaken interpretation. Van Zweden, like Haitink or the CSO’s conductor emeritus Pierre Boulez, avoids this easy way out completely. He certainly does not avoid the Austrian composer-conductor’s famous climaxes and other explosions of sound, but he makes them part of an overall 54-minute tapestry, not moments to wait for or “exciting” interruptions or toppings-off of the rest of the score.
Proper control and aural elegance are van Zweden’s hallmarks and he somehow gets them with an unusual and animated conducting presence that resembles a menacing movie bad guy who's studied dance with Bob Fosse. This man in all-black though wants nothing from the score that’s not really there. No heart on the sleeve but genuine emotion. In recent years, the appreciation of “bringing out inner voices” in a piano or ensemble performance has become almost hackneyed. Van Zweden does several more complex things, he brings out inner silences by emphasizing the continuity of the 1888-1899 four-movement work and he is able to mange the contrasting volume levels as well as tempo and color changes among the various sections of the orchestra.
And how magnificent the orchestra sounded! This is a credit to the players, of course, as well as to a succession of CSO leaders starting with Daniel Barenboim who built a remarkable string sound in a once brass-focused entity. But it’s also a sign of the respect that the players have for such a serious and communicative conductor. The audience was -- legitimately -- on its feet and cheering as the last note sounded. Extra kudos to associate principal horn Daniel Gingrich for continuing his section leadership in the great Chicago tradition.Bassoonist David McGill is a great principal player of an instrument that has very few solo or display works written for it. A lyrical, almost vocal sounding and technically virtuosic performance such as he presented of Mozart’s only surviving bassoon concerto, in B-Flat Major, K. 191 (1774), underscores the shame of this lack of repertoire.
Van Zweden brought a ten-minute curtain raiser by American Steven Stucky whose oratorio August 4, 1964on Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and civil rights was a major premiere in Dallas in 2008. “Rhapsodies for Orchestra” from the same year is an expectedly well-executed piece in the style of Stucky’s idol, Witold Lutosławski, intricate but not in any way abrasive. Both of these shorter works were beautifully prepared by van Zweden. But it’s the Mahler that was worth writing home about.
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