Here is my Friday Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of Wednesday's first performance of this week's Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concerts -- Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting and Yefim Bronfman as soloist in Salonen's 2007 piano concerto. Due to the Passover holiday, there are, alas, no further CSO performances of this program. Salonen and Bronfman will give the piece its Los Angeles première with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in four performances at Walt Disney Concert Hall May 29 to June 1.
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Esa-Pekka Salonen (left) has protested for many years that he is a "composer who conducts." As he steps down from a 16-year tenure as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he will perhaps have more opportunity to focus on the first part of this description, and the one which he does best.
Beloved by coastal critics who see in his spirit and youthful energy (maintained into middle age -- he turns 50 in June) an antidote to the old-fashioned reputation of symphony orchestras, Salonen is articulate, curious, charming, and self-deprecating in ways that add to his allure. But when it comes to making music, he has been more of a "shake-up-the-repertoire" man than one taken up much with interpretive ideas or details in the score on the stand before him.
As a composer, though, he carries through with his excitement. His first and untitled piano concerto was widely anticipated when it had its première with Salonen conducting soloist Yefim Bronfman and the New York Philharmonic last year. (Bronfman was one of the keener anticipators as Salonen did not finish the busy, involving, and nearly continuous score and solo part until a few weeks before the first performance.) It was the major draw of the Afterworks Masterworks concert Wednesday night at Orchestra Hall, with Salonen on the podium leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Bronfman (terrific portrait by Israeli photographer Dan Porges at left) is as disparate physically and in demeanor from the pixie-like Salonen as two almost exact contemporaries can be -- the Russian-Israeli-American pianist hit the half-century mark last week. But the two men are soulmates in both the Russian repertoire most associated with Bronfman and in the idea for what a 21st-century piano concerto might sound like. Salonen is the best kind of sponge when it comes to acknowledging and using influences, for here he has pulled sounds and rhythms and styles from sources ranging from Rachmaninoff to Messiaen to John Adams to Ravel to Gershwin to Bernstein to Bernard Herrmann to make a 33-minute work that still sounds and feels both new and like Salonen.
Quirky, emotional, edgy, cumulative, and skillfully scored, it might not be a work for the ages -- how many are these days? But at least as performed by the phenomenal and music-always-first Bronfman and conducted by its composer, it grabs the listener's attention and holds it through its rollicking and repetitive (in a good way) forward motion. In this crackling CSO performance, Burl Lane, in an extended alto saxophone solo, and principal viola Charles Pikler deserved the bravos they shared with Bronfman and Salonen.
Following his own work with Beethoven’s almost 200-year-old Seventh Symphony, the A Major, Op. 92, was not a mistake in comparing compositional techniques or interests, as the piano concerto stays with you for a good while. Rather it was an error because it was unclear what Salonen was hearing in the piece and wanted us to hear. Perhaps he was listening for more musical ideas. If so, he slowed things down to an almost deadly pace, exposing the talented CSO players to unsupported transitions. It is not easy to make Beethoven dull and purposeless but Salonen did.
Thursday's and Friday's programs also will feature the first CSO performances of a set of contemporary (1975) adaptations of a 1795 Boccherini piece, Ritirata notturna di Madrid, by the late Luciano Berio. These should be something to hear.
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