Correction being weighed: John von Rhein reports in the Chicago Tribune on Saturday: "For this performance she traded her Gagliano fiddle for the famed, $18 million, 1741 Vieuxtemps Guarneri del Jesù violin, on loan from Chicago's Stradivari Society. The sweet yet refined sound she drew from it was every violinist's dream come true." I'm checking into this.
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Here is my Saturday April 3 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday April 1, 2010, Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with Sir Mark Elder conducting and violinist Elena Urioste.
Mark Elder, CSO make case for rarely-heard British works
Violinist Elena Urioste, 23, makes dream debut
BY ANDREW PATNER
Repeats Saturday at 8 p.m. and Tuesday April 6 at 7:30 p.m.
RECOMMENDED
The English have a most unusual love of classical music. They have been mad about concert music and opera since the 17th century. They adopted both Handel and Haydn, though they went without a major opera composer of their own for 250 years between Henry Purcell and Benjamin Britten. With a population of just 50 million, they have one of the world’s liveliest and best concert, conservatory, and orchestral scenes. And with all the devotion that they have for continental music, they keep the flag waving for their native composers, even when the rest of the world has passed them by.
Britten’s place is secure in the United States, at least in opera houses and choral groups. And his predecessor, Sir Edward Elgar, had several masterworks that show no signs of disappearing -- his Enigma Variations, Cello Concerto, and Pomp and Circumstance marches, among them. But after that, there’s a drop-off in trans-Atlantic transfer for most other English composers, and even for most of the rest of Elgar’s catalog.
Chicago used to be an exception to this rule. Longtime Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Frederick Stock played English music pretty much as it came off the printing press. Sir Georg Solti (a refugee who eventually took British citizenship) and Daniel Barenboim had strong early connections to Elgar’s music in particular, which they maintained throughout their careers. Yet here we are now, in 2010, with only rare performances of English works, some of them very belated premières of historic scores, by guest conductors. (Although Riccardo Muti has none on his 2010-11 calendar, look for the incoming CSO music director, who, like Solti and Barenboim, cut many of his orchestral conducting teeth in London, to serve up pieces from the English kitchen in future seasons.)
This week’s podium guest, Sir Mark Elder, is music director of Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra, long a base for English music, and he’s a fervent case maker for his compatriots. (Though none of these works required a spoken introduction and Elder gave two of them. Let the music make its own case.)
His all-English program, heard Thursday night at Orchestra Hall, takes us along, but only so far. Some of this is due to the world’s lack of familiarity with much of this music and some of it to changing tastes, and, frankly, to quality. Most English composers rejected ideas of form, and often, brevity, going more for episodic and long unwinding storytelling along the lines of a Brontë novel.
Sir Michael Tippett (1905-1998) was perhaps the greatest meanderer of the line; his music, oddly smacked together, never jarring but often hard to follow, is adored in Britain but has rarely taken root elsewhere. Lyric Opera of Chicago presented his early major opera score The Midsummer Marriage. Both the CSO and Grant Park have recently performed his spirituals-infused oratorio A Child of Our Time. Solti also premièred some over-the-top, large-scale Tippett works here and extended at least one major commission to him.
Tippett fans praise the early Concerto for Double String Orchestra; it was a favorite of such skeptics as Leopold Stokowski as well. America’s own compositional native son, Aaron Copland, led the only previous CSO performances of this 1938-39 work back in 1970. You can see why Copland liked it -- open and naive-seeming at first, with tricky rhythms that mirror but do not copy jazz and folk techniques, crossing back and forth between the two string groups.
Elder led an initially appealing performance, but one that ran out of the concentration and tension needed to carry the piece. Assistant principal Kenneth Olsen played the slow movement’s 'cello solo with a beauty that would have thrilled the eccentric composer.
Ralph Vaughan Williams’s 1919-20 orchestral version of his The Lark Ascending must be one of the most recorded and broadcast works of the 20th century. Remarkably, it is receiving its first-ever CSO performances this week. One can speculate -- it’s not flashy enough for most violin soloists (or their managers, more likely), it’s a concertmaster’s piece, etc. But I’ve found no firm answer about how this came to be.
If we had to wait this long, however, then it might as well have been to hear Elena Urioste, just 23, a Basque-Mexican-American and a Sphinx Competition double winner, in her CSO debut. No other piece captures the poignant side of British landscape painting, visual or musical -- and the wistful aspect to the “goodbye to all that” English sensibility that followed World War I -- as well as this delicate 13-minute meditation. A totally poised performer, Urioste also understands what it takes to play a piece marked by such humility. If anyone has played solo pianissimos at Orchestra Hall with the hypnotic delicacy that Urioste and her 1706 Gagliano offered, I must have been away. She already has a challenging and highly varied repertoire. Let’s hear her again soon.
Elder, as many an Englishman, would stake all on Elgar and his 1910-11 Second Symphony, however. A massive, hour-long work, not heard here in 26 years, it was a favorite of Solti’s, recorded by him, Barenboim, Elder, and just about every British conductor, but by no orchestras outside the U.K. (Elgar himself recorded it with the London Symphony and conducted it with the Hallé.) To me, elevating this piece has always seemed a backward view of Elgar, a composer whose greatest works benefited from distillation and intense focus. Here we are out in the English countryside for a very lengthy walk that by turns becomes a hike, some spooky steps through a garden at night, a fearful run from a storm cloud that never quite breaks, and a gaze into the sunset with one eye on the score to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and the other letting loose a single “there’ll always be an England” tear.
Like most of Elgar, the piece doesn’t have a bad measure, but it has far too many of them. Still, you’ll probably not hear it again in these parts -- or this country -- any time soon. Fortunately, next season holds one of the composer's greatest and most perfect works, the Enigma Variations, with Charles Dutoit conducting and a full Beyond the Score treatment as well.
