Here is my Saturday December 6 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday December 4 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with CSO principal conductor Bernard Haitink and CSO concertmaster Robert Chen as soloist.
Haitink brings out brilliance and beauty of Chicago Symphony
BY ANDREW PATNER
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Repeated Saturday at 8 p.m.
Great orchestras have music in their bones. We speak of the affinity of the Vienna Philharmonic for the great Viennese-based composers, of Russian orchestras for Russian music and even of the connections of particular ensembles for the works of individual composers.
But truly great orchestras should and must be able to play great music in more than one way. One of the most enlightening and pleasurable aspects of the recent seasons of collaboration with principal conductor Bernard Haitink and music director to be Riccardo Muti has been the way that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has responded to their direction for sounds, style and intention wholly different from those of Sir Georg Solti, Daniel Barenboim, or Fritz Reiner.
Was there ever anything much more thrilling than a Mozart symphony or piano concerto with Barenboim in his last seasons here? And yet, a part of what makes Mozart such a marvel is that he need not be played for excitement, or in any one way for that matter. Haitink's Jupiter Symphony this week, Mozart's 41st and last such work, K. 551 in C Major from 1788, was so elegant and assured Thursday night that at first it almost seemed too balanced.
But then, as ever with Haitink, we see where he is going, not just with this piece, but with all of this week's program, whose second half holds Richard Strauss's self-celebration Ein Heldenleben ("A Hero's Life"), Op. 40. For Mozart himself set up his symphony with the seeming nobility of his first movement and then move toward the complexity of a five-part fugue for a finale. To hear these last pages not as a race or an expression of human emotion but with the transparency of a physical animation of these interweaving lines is to hear Mozart's ideas alive and at play.
And also to be prepared for a performance almost shockingly different from so many historic ones by the CSO of the Strauss tone-poem. Talk about owning a piece: The CSO gave the U.S. première in 1899, one year after a 35-year-old Strauss introduced the work himself in Frankfurt, and has played it ever since. For Haitink, though, the starting point is not the masses of sound of those past glories. It's the intricacy and inevitability of Mozart's fugue. With or without Strauss' story -- a composer battling his critics and tug-of-warring with his wife -- the 50-minute piece here is one of endless musical fascination as melodies and figures move across the orchestra. Haitink knows just how beautiful this orchestra plays when it plays quietly and he gets them to play quietly like no one else. You haven't heard two tubas really sing until you hear them sing here. And brass and winds marry in a way that surely would have made the composer smile.
Haitink told me this week he thinks Robert Chen is the finest concertmaster in the front seat of any major orchestra today. I agree. And with the extensive violin solos in Heldenleben, Chen and Haitink are in a stylish and touching accord that seems almost telepathic.
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