My Saturday Chicago-Sun Times review of Thursday night's Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with Miutsuko Uchida as soloist and conductor appears in full below.
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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Performances through Tuesday, February 19
Since its founding in 1891, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has played so much music hot off the presses and composers’ desks that it’s fascinating to see how late it was that Mozart’s piano concertos entered the standard repertoire of the CSO and other major ensembles. Of the two on this week’s concert program, the now-much loved A Major, No. 23, K. 488, was not presented until 1920 (with soloist Harold Bauer and Frederick Stock) and the C Major, No. 13, K. 415, now considered one of Mozart’s first adult works in the genre, did not get a CSO date until William Kapell performed it with Rafael Kubelik in 1951.
Most scholars and mainstream performers did not start taking these 27 works for piano and orchestra seriously until around the Second World War with additional big guns such as Daniel Barenboim and Charles Rosen weighing in on record and in print in the 1960s and 1970s. And throughout his lengthy tenure with the CSO, Barenboim made leading these pieces from the keyboard both cornerstones and highlights of his years here.
Mitsuko Uchida, Japanese born and European-trained, is playing the conductor-soloist role this week and she shares much in common with Barenboim philosophically. They see these as masterworks, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. They both build bridges from them to the future -- reveling in the sound of a Steinway concert grand and modern instruments in the orchestra -- and to the past -- finding a basis, especially in the heartbreaking Adagio of the A Major, in the music of Bach.
Uchida, an ever youthful 59, has no aspirations to make the podium a central part of her career, however. But she is an artist focused more than almost anyone on collaboration -- in chamber music, with vocalists and living composers, leading small and large orchestras, and teaching and sponsoring young artists. She recently completed a highly-regarded double-duty survey of all the Mozart concertos with the Cleveland Orchestra. The attention that she pays to colleagues was clear here in the responses of principals Mathieu Dufour, flute, Larry Combs, clarinet, and David McGill, bassoon. These are three of the finest wind players in the world and they played together for Uchida as for a visiting queen.
As such, her conducting style is really an extension of her deeply musical keyboard role, finding a way for players to breathe with her and offering them empathetic encouragement. Despite the modern instrument, she goes for delicacy and lyricism but she is always thinking harmonically as well. And when there is joy in the music we all know it, the same when there is sorrow -- a technique that appears effortless is her means not her end. While she has greater -- and appropriate -- refinement, Barenboim has her beat in the energy department: In K. 488, the wild Rondo that follows the time-stopping F-sharp minor Adagio needs full abandon.
The very early Divertimento for Strings in D Major, K. 136, is one of Mozart’s most popular pieces but it’s almost never programmed by symphony orchestras, perhaps because music directors see no need for pieces that don't require a conductor. Concertmaster Robert Chen and 22 of his colleagues played it with relish and great affection.
After these four performances, Uchida stays around as soloist in Bartók’s Third Concerto with Pierre Boulez next week, Thursday to Saturday, in a program that also includes Debussy’s Images for Orchestra and the world première of a commission, Osiris, from young German composer Matthias Pintscher.
