Here is my Friday January 7 suntimes.com and Saturday, January 8 Chicago Sun-Times review of the Thursday, January 6, 2011 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with Sir Mark Elder conducting and piano soloist Stephen Hough.
Pianist Stephen Hough
Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky works a letdown
Liadov miniature enchants
BY ANDREW PATNER
SOMEWHAT RECOMMENDED
Repeats Saturday at 8 p.m.
Whether it was difficulty in shifting back to a busy performance schedule after a winter break, schedule splits for first-desk players, or the odd inconsistencies of guest conductor Mark Elder, the first 2011 Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concert Thursday was, with one small but important exception, something of a letdown.
The all-Russian program’s two major works look backward and forward to other concerts. Soloist Stephen Hough’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s towering B-flat minor First Piano Concerto is a bookend to the performances he gave last month of three lesser-known Tchaikovsky piano and orchestra works. And Prokofiev’s once widely popular Fifth Symphony of 1944 is the subject of this week’s Beyond the Score multimedia investigation entitled “Pure Propaganda?”
The works’ renditions Thursday, however, were choppy and seemed poorly thought out. Hough, the unflappable Brit who can make rarities seem like old friends, broke the grand lines of the Tchaikovsky into almost arbitrary sections, some of them beautiful, some intriguing to be sure. But his focus on the specificity of the moment led to technical and memory slips highly uncharacteristic of this player.
Elder, for his part, had a very subdued sense of the piece, which worked against and did not support Hough’s conception. Hough’s solo encore of Anton Rubenstein’s brief Melody in F, Op. 3, No. 1, had all the warmth and sensibility the half hour concerto lacked.
Audiences tend to be bigger fans of Prokofiev’s symphonies than I am, but there’s still a difference to be heard between a focused and passionate playing of the 45-minute wartime paean to optimism and the human spirit, and Elder’s loose-limbed, meandering offering. It was hard to believe that this was the same conductor who was so superbly convincing in the CSO’s major Dvořák Festival 18 months ago.
That wasn’t the case for a small seven-minute piece by Anatoly Liadov, a bridge between Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev and their respective generations. Liadov is known for a handful of orchestral miniatures, including The Enchanted Lake (1909), a work of pure mood magic with uncanny musical equivalents for mist and the colors of night. Elder and the CSO played it hauntingly, as if this were the one part of the program that truly mattered. Liadov’s lively three-minute Baba-Yaga followed as a fillip.
The CSO also will perform the Prokofiev Fifth Symphony as part of its Beyond the Score series at 3 p.m. Sunday. (The first-half presentation is recommended.)
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