Chicago Symphony Orchestra's season double-launch: Järvi and Gluzman's fluid dexterity and Fleming's "hunh?"

Here is my Monday October 5, 2009, Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the two (separate) "opening night" concerts of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra season, Friday evening October 3 with Vadim Gluzman as soloist and Saturday October 5 with Renée Fleming, both concerts led by guest conductor Paavo Järvi.

  

White House Senior adviser David Axelrod contemplates Vladimir Putin, er, guest conductor Paavo Järvi at Friday's CSO season opener.

Järvi's fluid dexterity and Fleming's "hunh?" in CSO's season double-launch

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s recently completed European tour with principal conductor Bernard Haitink resembled a series of breathtaking Old Master paintings -- large-scale masterworks without frills or games exquisitely presented in five of the world’s musical capitals -- Berlin, Lucerne, Vienna. Paris, and London -- to rapt and then ecstatic audiences and critical rapture.

Back at Orchestra Hall, the CSO’s opening weekend of concerts with the excellent and remarkably flexible guest conductor Paavo Järvi left an impression more of a mixed collage of elements varied in both format and quality.

Friday night’s one-off deserved a full week’s subscription run.   A heart-stopping account of “Nimrod” from Elgar’s Enigma Variations opened the evening as a memorial tribute to the longest-serving (54 years) and one of the most loved members of the orchestra, cellist Philip Blum who died last month at 77 after a 12-year battle with cancer.   Leonard Bernstein’s 1954 Serenade, after Plato’s Symposium is played so rarely that President Obama’s senior adviser  David Axelrod took a “music leave” from the White House to come home to hear it.  Israeli violin soloist -- and belated CSO debutant -- Vadim Gluzman’s insightful performance, both lyrical and virtuosic, made the trip worthwhile.  

That Jarvi took up Bartók’s 1943 Concerto for Orchestra, a CSO staple for more than 60 years, was a sign of both his confidence and abilities.  With the orchestra in its finest shape in decades thanks to former music director Daniel Barenboim and to Haitink, Järvi found just the right way both to shape this modern masterpiece and to give the many soloists and sections the freedom to play as Bartók wanted them to.  Guest principal flute Thomas Robertello deserves special notice for his hypnotic playing.  Järvi gave Bernstein’s Candide Overture, moved to encore position, one of the most thrilling and tight performances I’ve ever heard.

Saturday’s Gala “Opening Night” was again a showcase for Järvi’s hand with both Bernstein, here another rarity in the 1980 “Divertimento,” and tone-poems, this time another CSO signature work, Richard Strauss’s 1894-95 Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. Total control with lack of dogmatism and respect for soloists again marked the globe-trotting Estonian-born conductor’s method.  

Guest diva Renée Fleming’s work in Samuel Barber’s 1947 setting of James Agee’s memory text Knoxville: Summer of 1915 was absolutely baffling.  In a work that is all about its haunting text, almost every word was unintelligible and poorly projected.  It took two Strauss songs, more the soprano’s territory in any event, for her to come near what she can do best and it was really only in an encore of “Morgen!” from the 1894 Four Songs of Op. 27  that there was any sense of what all the hubbub was about.