Bravo, Haitink! But whither Ravinia?

Here is my Friday July 18 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Wednesday night July 16 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert at Ravinia.

Haitink, CSO match high standards

Conductor’s reading of Mahler’s Sixth is deep, intimate

By Andrew Patner

When Bernard Haitink led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in astonishing 

performances of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony at Orchestra Hall last fall, he did so even though he and the orchestra he now leads as principal conductor were still getting to know each other.

Wednesday night, Haitink, 79, made his much belated Ravinia debut with a one-time-only reprise that confirmed the unique nature of this partnership and Haitink’s role as one of the finest Mahler conductors in the world.

Indoors in October, Haitink achieved levels of transparency and delicacy that seemed almost impossible in a work too often played for bombast or, worse yet, has bombast added to it.  Somehow in the outdoor Pavilion with cicadas humming he found even greater intimacy with this enormous work making it sound even like chamber music and deeply affecting chamber music at that.

In a small conducting master class at Tanglewood in Massachusetts last week a friend reports that Haitink, who prefers not to talk much about music, demonstrated how minimalism in technique can achieve the greatest communication when coupled with authority.  Knitting the 85-minute four movement A minor symphony into a whole that eludes many, Haitink gave his large Highland Park audience an additional object lesson.  The conductor and orchestra will take this work to Europe in September and last fall’s dates are captured on a CSO Resound CD.

In the decades of James Levine’s music directorship at the CSO’s summer home, this was the sort of standard to be expected at Ravinia.  Since that time, indifferent administrators have put this jewel of an orchestra into the hands of second-rate orchestral conductors and shifted the CSO into the shadow of a burgeoning schedule of weekend pops acts at the not-for-profit venue.  

With Haitink, Pierre Boulez and Riccardo Muti downtown, the failure to provide a similar level of leadership for the CSO in the off-season is scandalous.  The rush of principal players to thank Haitink in his backstage dressing room after the powerful performance spoke with as much volume as the most heart-stopping of Mahler’s  fortissimos.