Andrew Patner: The View from Here

Haitink and CSO: Haydn's "Creation" can be new, too

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, October 28, 2011 6:17 PM CDT

Conductor Bernard Haitink

Bernard Haitink, CSO and Chorus conjure up a heavenly Haydn's ‘Creation’

Veteran conductor's first performances of historic score

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

Repeats 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday

Orchestra Hall, 220 South Michigan Avenue

Tickets, $32-$240

(312) 294-3000; cso.org.

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED

It comes as little surprise that, even at 82, Bernard Haitink brings the same remarkable gifts of clarity, buoyancy, lyricism, and humanity to a work new to his repertoire as he does to the longtime pillars of his career.

For Haitink, former principal conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, is guided almost exclusively by the twin stars of musical integrity and personal humility. When you add his decades of experience to the time that he puts into study and contemplation of scores, you wish that he could take up any and all masterworks he has yet to perform.

Though he has had the lifelong acquaintance with Haydn that is a part of a classical musician’s life and has shown a special affinity for his symphonies, Haitink had never led the late, summing-up oratorio The Creation (1796-98) before this week’s concerts.  Thursday night at Orchestra Hall, you could hear not only the results of the conductor’s study and insights, but also a lifetime of reflection on the meaning (and limitations?) of religion, of poetry, of tradition, and of that great framing era that Haydn helped to close out and that Haitink’s native Netherlands played such a key role in establishing: the Enlightenment.

Inspired by the massive oratorios of English tradition, especially those of another native German speaker, Handel, The Creation is very much a work of texts, for both soloists and chorus. The words, whether performed in German or, as here, in English (Haydn made dual versions), inspire the music, even when the instrumental parts of the score preview the vocal lines. What is this Biblical creation story really about, both Haydn and Haitink seem to be asking.  Would the Creator still pronounce His work as “good” today?  Can we know any more in the end than that innocent-then-fallen couple Adam and Eve?

It is hard to imagine this 110-minute (with Haitink’s sometimes stately tempos) musical narration having a better instrumental or choral presentation than it had here.  Suspicious of piety and allergic to pomposity, Haitink both found the work’s simplicity and unfolded the intricacies that two centuries of listeners and players have called Bach-like.  Without breaking flow, he inspired passages on the bringing forth of animals and the other creeping, crawling, and swimming things that were, as they should be, laugh out loud funny.

Reduced strings, wind sections, and soloists were all a part of a single team, curious and eager.  Duain Wolfe’s Chicago Symphony Chorus, almost always a marvel, showed a coiled strength and a contrast between near silence and C Major celebrations rare even in its own illustrious history.

As the chief tale-telling archangel Uriel, English tenor Ian Bostridge was all that this part can and should be: knowing, confident, confiding, hypnotic.  He also had the distinct advantage of total command of the English tongue, something that often defied Swedish soprano Klara Ek and German bass-baritone Hanno Mueller-Brachmann, also attractive, younger singers more believable as the Edenic couple of the work’s third and final part than they were as Uriel’s companions Gabriel and Raphael.  British fortepianist James Johnstone and CSO principal cellist John Sharp were the ever-attentive and supportive continuo players.

Filled with infectious energy in this residency, Haitink looked very, very happy as the seventh day received its last “Amen.”

 

My (radio) guest tonight: Bernard Haitink on taking on new challenges in late career

Bernard Haitink with CSO principal oboe Eugene Izotov, Berlin, September 2009

Tonight from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. CDT on 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago, and via free streaming anywhere in the world at wfmt.com, the latest in our ongoing series of conversations with former Chicago Symphony Orchestra principal conductor Bernard Haitink.  Recorded just yesterday afternoon, Sunday October 23, 2011, Mr. Haitink talks about his recent Chicago concerts of Mahler 4 and Schubert 5, other recent and upcoming activities (including a return to Boston this spring and a "re-début" in New York next month), and especially about his taking up for the first time, at 82, Haydn's great oratorio The Creation at concerts this week with the CSO and the Chicago Symphony Chorus.

We'll also hear music from two of the Creation soloists, bass-baritone Hanno Müller-Brachmann and tenor Ian Bostridge, as well as from two of Mr. Haitink's recent CSO Resound Mahler recordings.

The program will then be posted at wfmt.com/criticalthinking for free podcast, download, streaming indefinitely. 

See you on the radio! 

 

Haitink and CSO: a sublime, subtle Mahler 4

Here is my Friday suntimes.com and Saturday October 22 Chicago Sun-Times review of the Thursday October 20, 2011 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with Bernard Haitink leading works of Mahler and Schubert and guest soprano Klara Ek.  Repeats Saturday at Orchestra Hall at 8 p.m.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Bernard Haitink sublime in Mahler

Photo: © Todd Rosenberg Photography

BY ANDREW PATNER 

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

It’s “pinch me, I must be dreaming time” at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Music director Riccardo Muti’s European tour with the orchestra and fall residency here were artistic successes and went off without a hitch. New appointments, associate concertmaster (a new position) Stephanie Jeong and principal clarinet Stephen Williamson, are top drawer as soloists and team players and leaders.  Two young 'cellists have just been hired, giving that splendid section a full roster for the first time in years.

An internationally regarded young, female guest conductor, Susanna Mälkki of Finland and Paris, this month offered not only some of the best Charles Ives heard in the area since James Levine’s in the 1980s but also led an Also sprach Zarathustra of Richard Strauss that could match many of the CSO’s past performances of one of their signature works.

And now former principal conductor Bernard Haitink is back in the house with Mahler and Schubert this week and his first-ever performances, at age 82, of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation next week.

Muti himself is not a big Mahler fan, but he has invited Haitink, conductor emeritus Pierre Boulez, and younger guns Jaap van Zweden and Esa-Pekka Salonen each to present a major work as a part of a yearlong commemoration of one of the most searching and beloved 20th century symphonists.

Over his recent years with the CSO, Haitink has shared a lifetime of experience with Mahler that began with his days as a student listener at the Concertgebouw in his native Amsterdam and included his 27 years leading that orchestra, one that Mahler himself had conducted in his own works.

Haitink’s presentations are not of the urgent, emotions-on-the-sleeve school that became too accepted in the States after the Mahler revival of the 1960s.  Rather, they have an almost Shakespearean knowingness, one that allows for both depth and lightness to unfold naturally in performance.

There is neither manipulation nor overanalysis here.  Instead, we are treated to a kind of flowing inevitability, one that the musicians, judging from their performances, find highly attractive and even liberating.

In his informal Mahler survey here, Haitink has waited until now to bring us one of his favorites, the initially simple-seeming but highly personal and structured 1899-1901 Fourth Symphony.  Culminating in the naive child’s song of paradise, “Heavenly Life,” which early audiences found entirely too “charming,” Haitink reveals the piece, heard Thursday night at Orchestra Hall, as yet another that benefits from hindsight, and a hindsight free of the nostalgia often ascribed to the score.

Petals unfold but remain nested in one another.  The four distinct and varied movements flow logically, even warmly. Haitink stretches the work slightly to almost an hour -- still Mahler’s shortest entry -- but this, too, seems right on.

Where do the salutes to the musicians start?  With concertmaster Robert Chen both for his elegant and just ironic enough playing of the Devil’s Fiddle movement and his overall leadership of the seductive strings?  Or the unearthly blending of principal winds flute Mathieu Dufour, oboe Eugene Izotov, clarinet Williamson and bassoon David McGill?  Surely, by taking the first chair, associate principal horn Daniel Gingrich, with his history-laced tone and style, was the concert’s MVP.

In her CSO debut, Swedish soprano Klara Ek, a preferred Haitink collaborator, understood what she was singing about and never cutesied things up, neither of which can be counted on normally.  Subsequent performances will probably right the balance of the childlike offering and a large orchestra.  She’s back, too, for the Haydn.

The only shame of the week is that the illness of German violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann removed Alban Berg’s great 1935 concerto from the program and the substituted Schubert B-Flat Major Fifth Symphony of 1816 shifted the time references of the pairing.  Working with an appropriately reduced ensemble, Haitink of course gave the earlier piece just the right mix of elegance and youthful spirit.

CSO fiscally strong, but still posts small deficit from roller-coaster season of cancellations

Here is my Wednesday October 19 suntimes.com and Thursday October 20, 2011 Chicago Sun-Times report on the October 19, 2011 annual meeting of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association.

CSO posts a deficit for last, unusual, season; but fiscal health is strong 

BY ANDREW PATNER 

For first time in five years, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra finds itself in the red.

At its annual meeting Wednesday afternoon, the CSO Association reported a deficit of $927,000 on operating expenses of $64.7 million for the fiscal year that ended June 30, an under the budget line of about 1.4 percent.

Riccardo Muti’s first season as CSO music director saw a record level of fund-raising success. But his two extended absences for illness, and an unpre­cedented number of cancellations by solo recitalists and an entire sold-out visit by the Cleveland Orchestra meant lost revenues that resulted in the CSO’s first deficit since 2006.

“We believe that it is very important not to try to hide any aspect of our circumstances,” CSO Association president Deborah F. Rutter said in a telephone interview Wednesday before the meeting at Symphony Center.  “And we do so in the larger context of being individually and comparatively a very strong institution and facing a very good future.”

Rutter said there had been “tremendous momentum” when Muti arrived in Chicago 13 months ago, culminating in the huge success of a free CSO concert in Millennium Park attracting some 25,000 people.  “That was reflected in a surge of subscription and single-ticket sales,” Rutter said. “Then some of that momentum stalled.”

The Millennium Park concert as well as another free concert in the Pilsen neighborhood also added to expenses. In addition, the cancellations of 10 recitalists impacted the bottom line. Among the artists bowing out due to illness were pianists Maurizio Pollini and Murray Perahia. Because of the February blizzard, the Cleveland Orchestra, under music director Franz Welser-Möst, had to call off its sold-out concert.

But fund-raising had a marked upswing with $24.2 million raised in annual gifts, a 15 percent in­crease over last year.  Additional gifts of $1.4 million brought the association’s total fund-raising in all categories to some $25.6 million. Total assets increased by $32 million to $455 million.

“Some recovery in the economy and increased confidence in the business community meant we saw very nice increases in corporate donations,” Rutter said.

Even with the setbacks, ticket sales were up, including a 1 percent increase in subscription sales and a 17 percent increase in single ticket sales for a record $4.8 million.  Ticket income for a all CSO and other Symphony Center presented events was $20.6 million. Additional earned income, such as that from touring and building rentals, was $6.6 million.

In the interview, Rutter said the reported and current season numbers indicate that “live concert music is thriving. Our challenge is to work with the different expectations for participation and experiencing music that today’s highly curious audiences have to keep up our mission for a very long time to come.”

Bass player Stephen Lester, chairman of the CSO players’ committee, told the gathering that this had been a year of “wild swings, tragedies and wonderful triumphs” for the orchestra.  Through all of this, Muti has been not only "our great musical inspiration, constantly pushing us to improve,” he said, “but also shown himself to be a warm and caring human being with true insight and commitment to all of the communities we work with.”

After serving three years as CSO Association chairman, William A. Osborn, retired chairman and c.e.o. of Northern Trust, was reëlected to a final one-year term heading the organization, as was the full executive committee including Osborn's designated successor, Jay L. Henderson of PricewaterhouseCoopers.  Mayor Rahm Emanuel was elected honorary co-chair of the board following his predecessor Richard M. Daley who will now serve as an honorary trustee along with his wife Maggie.

 

My (radio) guests last week: Riccardo Muti and Birgit Nilsson (or voice thereof) from Stockholm

Last Monday night October 17, 2011 on 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and via free streaming anywhere in the world at wfmt.com, a report with music on Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Riccardo Muti's acceptance of the 2011 Birgit Nilsson Prize in music in Stockholm on October 13.  I reported the story, and Muti's press conference comments, in last Friday's Chicago Sun-Times and you can read that here.  Musical performances from Stockholm of Verdi by soprano Sondra Radvanovsly, conductor Gianandrea Noseda, and Swedish choirs and orchestra, and classic recordings by Birgit Nilsson herself of Lerner and Loewe (1960), the last scene of Salome (1972), and the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde (1962).

The program is posted at wfmt.com/criticalthinking for free podcast, download, streaming indefinitely. 

See you on the radio!  And the Interstream!

 

From Stockholm to Sun-Times front page: Muti's Birgit Nilsson Prize last week

My Friday October 14, 2011, exclusive front page Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com report from Stockholm on Riccardo Muti's receiving the 2011 Birgit Nilsson Prize in music.

CSO’s Riccardo Muti mum about plans for million-dollar prize

BY ANDREW PATNER 

 

Italian conductor Riccardo Muti receives the Birgit Nilsson Prize from Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf (right) during the Birgit Nilsson Prize award ceremony at the Royal Opera in Stockholm, on October 13, 2011. (PONTUS LUNDAHL/AFP/Getty Images) 

STOCKHOLM -- Riccardo Muti is a man of firm convictions. And a $1 million-dollar prize is not about to change that.

At a press conference here Thursday, a few hours before the King of Sweden Carl XVI Gustaf awarded him a statuette and certificate as the recipient of only the second Birgit Nilsson Prize, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director told an international group of journalists he would answer any questions, “except the one I know that all of you want to ask: What am I going to do with the money?”

“For me, this remains very private, very personal,” said Muti, 70, about the money attached to the award, which honors senior musicians of great accomplishment. The Birgit Nilsson Foundation, the award’s sponsor, is clearly trying to position the honor as a Nobel Prize of music: it is being given in the same city and being celebrated in the same grand section of the Stockholm City Hall as the literature, science, and economics Nobels.

“If I were to use even the total sum for philanthropic purposes, I would do so anonymously,” he said. “I do not wish to associate my name with the money I might give to help people.  That becomes vulgar, no?

“I have helped certain people and institutions in the past, but always privately. I do not wish to associate my name with publicity for this.”

Rutbert Reisch, president of the Birgit Nilsson Foundation, added, “Birgit Nilsson wanted to emphasize that the prize is given with absolutely no strings attached. She was also a very private person and very private about money, and she would endorse Maestro Muti’s statement.”

The Swedish soprano, an international star of opera and concert stages who died in 2005, endowed the prize in perpetuity through her estate. She personally selected the first winner, tenor Plácido Domingo, 10 years before her death, writing his name on a piece of paper placed in an envelope under her pillow. Domingo received his award in 2009.

Muti’s award was determined by the foundation and a five-member jury of opera figures from each of the five countries in which Nilsson made the bases of her career: Sweden, Austria, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Reisch cited Muti’s contributions across the areas of musical performance, education, social outreach, research, and advocacy.  Above all, he said that the jury emphasized the conductor’s commitment to musical scores themselves and the composers who wrote them.

“Birgit Nilsson wanted to honor those people who carry the art form forward and who leave something behind when they are gone,” he said. “Like Maestro Muti, she believed that her responsibility was to make the work of great creative artists, long since dead, come alive in performance.”

Though Muti said that while he regretted never working with Nilsson, she was one of “the artists I have most admired, because of her authority, her dignity, and her fidelity.  These values are vanishing from our world.”

Rarely attending performances of other musicians, Muti recalled how almost 40 years ago, when he was “a very young music director in Florence,” he took an early morning train to Rome to hear Nilsson rehearse a concert performance of Beethoven’s opera Fidelio with Leonard Bernstein.

“Even though, as a Neapolitan, one does not care to rise early, leave home and travel -- we are happy where we are -- I had to see this great artist live.”

At a ceremony at the historic Royal Opera House in this Scandinavian city’s center, before a black-tie audience, Muti saluted the many great singers who came from that stage, including Nilsson, tenor Jussi Björling, whose centenary anniversary was marked there this year, and baritone Ingvar Wixell, also a mainstay of Lyric Opera of Chicago, who died earlier this week.

“We have no singers like this any more,” he said, with a stern look. “In part because our world, our careers, our lives move too fast. We need to save our culture, our history, for the future.”

Berwyn native and current prominent Verdi soprano Sondra Radvanovsky sang a scene from Il trovatore, accompanied by Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda, who also led the Swedish Opera Orchesta in the overture to Nabucco and later, with the Opera Chorus and the Swedish Radio Choir, regular collaborators with Muti, in that work’s “Va, pensiero” (The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves).  Earlier this year in Rome, Muti reclaimed this popular chorus as an anthem for preserving state support for music and culture in Italy.

Guests at a gala dinner afterward, including CSO Association President Deborah F. Rutter and CSO artistic vice president Martha Gilmer, heard recipients of Birgit Nilsson Scholarships perform a Puccini duet and Swedish art songs.

Riccardo Muti accepts his $1 million Birgit Nilsson Prize in Stocholm: my report

Here's my exclusive report from Stockholm on Riccardo Muti's acceptance of the second $1 million Birgit Nilsson Prize in music, from the front page of the Friday October 14 Chicago Sun-Tines : http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/music/8197862-421/csos-riccardo-muti-mum-about-plans-for-million-dollar-prize.html

Lyric Opera of Chicago's "new" "Lucia": tight purse strings sell show short

Here is my Wednesday October 12 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Monday October 10, 2010 opening night of Lucia di Lammermoor at Lyric Opera of Chicago.  Posting here was delayed by a change in travel schedule.

 

Lucia (Susanna Phillips) pleads with her lover Edgardo (Giuseppe Filianoti) in Lyric Opera’s staging of Lucia di Lammermoor.| Rich Hein~Sun-Times

Lyric Opera’s ‘Lucia’ short on its delivery

BY ANDREW PATNER

‘LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR’

◆ Through November 5

◆ Civic Opera House, 20 North Wacker Drive

◆ Tickets, $34-$244

◆ (312) 332-2244; lyricopera.org 

RECOMMENDED

The third and final act of Lyric Opera of Chicago’s sort-of new, sort-of production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor brought a wedding banquet, a murder, female hysteria and insanity, a confrontation on a gloomy Scottish moor, a suicide, and a reunion of lovers in death.

That’s the case with any presentation of this 1835 bel canto potboiler, drawn from a Sir Walter Scott best seller of its day. Monday night at the Civic Opera House, the last hour also took the lid off some of the lead singers in what had seemed before intermission little more than acceptable second-cast or regional opera work.

When this season was announced, Ryan Opera Center alum Susanna Phillips struck many as being too early in her career for a title role that belonged in their days to powerhouse prima donnas and great artists Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland. Lyric’s more recent Lucias, June Anderson and Natalie Dessay, also were well into international accomplishment when they took up this ultimate lyric-coloratura part and its (in)famous Mad Scene.

If Phillips and her colleagues had to be judged here by the work’s first two acts, an honest assessment would have to be pretty harsh. Not only were the singers disappointing and debuting Italian conductor Massimo Zanetti’s tempos erratic, Zanetti seemed to have no connection with the cast and its strengths and limitations, regularly drowning them out with the orchestra, even in the much-loved Act 2 sextet.

Soprano Catherine Malfitano’s first Chicago offering as a stage director didn’t help, either.  A great and often admirable scene-chewer in her day -- 20 roles at Lyric alone starting in 1975 -- her work gave little evidence of understanding that directing others is a wholly different art form from individual performance. While audiences chafe at “concept” productions and over-analyzed, over-explained dramaturgy, here Malfitano usually offered nothing at all but people standing -- often, as in the sextet, quite far from one another -- on a dark stage, neither interacting nor giving us any idea of who they were or why they were consumed with rage, envy, jealousy, or mad passion.

Then there was that third act, though, and Phillips delivered a creditable Mad Scene, on Wilson Chin’s high, narrow, curving tower staircase. With harpist Marguerite Lynn Williams and flutist Jean W. Berkenstock providing the only musical railings for this poor girl, driven to murder and insanity by the machinations of her evil, vendetta-obsessed brother, the American soprano brought musicality and impressive vocal choices to all parts of the scene. Perhaps some day she will grow in theatrical depth and allure as well.

There was much anticipation for the more experienced Italian tenor Giuseppe Filianoti as her denied and headstrong lover (with a particularly great name for Chicago opera buffs), Edgardo di Ravenswood.  Filianoti has had recent triumphs here in Donizetti’s own comedy, The Elixir of Loveand in Salzburg with Riccardo Muti as Macduff in Verdi’s Macbeth. But even his beautiful voice and confident stage manner were not always enough to overcome the large Civic Opera house. Still, when singing alone as the tensions build and resolve in the final scene, he delivered his big aria well, even if he added a few too many tears to Edgardo’s already ultra-weepy cabaletta.

The breakout performance here was from another Lyric alum, bass-baritone Christian Van Horn, as the meddling tutor Raimondo, who probably thinks that he’s truly helping Lucia. With both the restored Act 2 aria and especially later with the chilling “Dalle stanze ove Lucia,” announcing to the wedding party Lucia’s murder of the man she was forced to marry, Van Horn made good on the promise he showed during his Ryan years.

In his Lyric debut, Irish and American baritone Brian Mulligan took up the role of Enrico only recently when the announced singer withdrew due to an illness in his family.  Perhaps due to the short preparation, he never made clear the cruel motivations of Lucia’s bullying brother. (Ryan alum Quinn Kelsey will take the role for the two Nov. dates.)

Current popular Ryan Center tenor RenéBarbera suffered from unfortunate costuming (by Wilmette native Terese Wadden) as the doomed arranged groom Lord Arturo Bucklaw, looking more like the bearded lady Baba the Turk than the Scottish boy-heir from the castle next door. Ryan second-year baritone Paul Scholten was an impressive Normanno but first-year mezzo Cecelia Hall fell victim to Zanetti’s surging volume and Malfitano’s inattention. Even Michael Black’s fine chorus had a time with these issues.

Chin had some nice stage pictures, especially with a moorscape inspired by German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, and it was good to have Lyric’s former resident lighting magician Duane Schuler back in town. But too often this second entry in what is very much The Transition Season from William Mason to Anthony Freud as general director smacked of cost savings and lack of imagination.

 

My (radio) guests tonight: Sondheim's "Follies" cast and team members from Chicago Shakespeare Theatre

Tonight (later than usual due to WFMT's opening night broadcast of Lyric Opera of Chicago's new Lucia di Lammermoor) from 11 p.m. to 12 midnight CDT on 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and via free streaming anywhere in the world at wfmt.com, cast and production team members of Gary Griffin's new production of Stephen Sondeim's Follies opening Wednesday October 12 at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre on Navy Pier. 

Chicago theatre veterans Hollis Resnick and Linda Stephens are joined by up and comer Kari Sorenson, casting director Bob Mason, and pianist Patrick Holland on the WFMT Steinway B in performance of excerpts and conversation.

The production of Sondheim's landmark 1971 29-person-cast show on a reunion of chorus girls and their beaus -- and oh so much more -- will run in a limited engagement only through November 6.  Griffin's track record with Sondheim and other musical and non-musical theatre is remarkably strong so we've taken the unusual step for this program of taping and airing it while the show is still in previews and before I've seen it.  Fingers crossed!

The program will then be posted at wfmt.com/criticalthinking for free podcast, download, streaming indefinitely. 

See you on the radio! 

Chicago Symphony Orchestra: Muti, Mahler, and Martucci (Sinigaglia, Busoni, and Bossi, too)

Due to the Jewish holiday, there are some timing changes effecting this post and review.  Saturday's Chicago Sun-Times will have some version of this piece on the Thursday October 6, 2011

 

CSO and Riccardo Muti Mahler Anniversary Concert, with Gerhard Oppitz, piano.

  

Repeats Saturday at *8:30* p.m. (due to the end of Yom Kippur)

 

BY ANDREW PATNER

 

RECOMMENDED

 

 
The last photograph of Gustav Mahler, bound for Europe six weeks after his last concert, in New York, and five weeks before his death in Vienna.

 

Riccardo Muti has brought his Fabulous Musical Time Travel Machine to Orchestra Hall for the second week in a row to close out his fall Chicago Symphony Orchestra residency.

 

Last week was a recreationof the CSO's centennial salute, itself a century ago, to Franz Liszt.  This week brings an even rarer and more impressive feat: A near-exact retake of what proved to be the last concert (and public appearance) of the great composer-conductor Gustav Mahler. 

 

One hundred years ago, and three months before his death in Vienna just shy of 51, Mahler led what is now the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in a program of Italian composers who were his near contemporaries, along with Felix Mendelssohn's "Italian"Symphony (substituted for one work found wanting -- by Giovanni Sgambati -- and one unfinished commission -- by Alfredo Casella).

 

It's a discussion for another day as to why Muti's own repertoire of and interest in Mahler the composer is so limited, a particular oddity for a music director of the CSO, a platinum Mahler orchestra.  But Muti's respect for Mahler the conductor of operas and orchestras and, as he said several time from the stage Thursday night, "the musician" is great.  The symbolism of Mahler's musical life coming to an end with a program of then-new orchestral works from Muti's homeland, a country not generally known for its contributions to the concert hall, surely plays some part here. 

 

There was another lesson, too, and one where Muti was also on the learning end.  In podium remarks the conductor said that he was sure he would be offering a service "by bringing these pieces here for the first time."  In fact, he found, all of the pieces had been played before, and three of them twice!, by the CSO's omnivorous second music director (1905-42), Frederick Stock.  "This shows us that the bonds between America and Europe at this time were very, very strong," Muti told the audience in a humble and appreciative tone that turned scathingly humorous.  "And now, with airplanes, Internet, blah bla blah, nobody knows anything!"

 

As with the Liszt program, this was also a chance for the audience to get a better sense of what concert life used to be like.  The program was long, greatly varied, and had a structure unheard of today -- an overture and a symphony before intermission, a big piano concerto followed by a shorter modern-oriented work and winding up with a mid-length dance suite for string orchestra after.

 

Leone Sinigaglia, from a refined old Jewish Piedmontese family, was the only composer on the program to live past 1925, but he became a victim of the Nazis at 75, dying of a heart attack while being arrested by the Gestapo in his native Turin in 1944.  His 1907 Overture to Le baruffe chiozzote ("The Scuffle in Chioggia") was a sweet sound companion to a Goldoni comedy. 

 

Chicago has a good history with Mendelssohn, which Muti continues especially in this beloved A Major work of the early 1830s.  Along with bringing little-known scores to light and life, he reanimates oft-played works with elegance, verve, and precision.  As for Mendelssohn scherzos, there are two kinds of orchestras: the one with Mathieu Dufour as principal flute, and all the others.

 

Tell folks you are going to hear "Martucci's Second Piano Concerto" and you'd have  a lot of them scratching their heads.  A great keyboard virtuoso of the late 19th century (1856-1909), as a composer Muti's fellow Southern Italian Giuseppe Martucci (right) looked north of the Alps and away from the opera house for his inspiration and calling. 

 

Brahms was a particular idol and this massive, 45-minute 1884-85 B-flat minor work firmly follows the two Brahms masterpieces of the genre.  There is more to this piece than in many other neglected or abandoned works of the period, and there's plenty foreshadowing of early Rachmaninoff, too.  Bavarian pianist Gerhard Oppitz (left), 58, making a very belated CSO debut, played it as if it were Brahms and with great mastery.  But it lacks enough originality and distinct melodies or invention to rejoin the standard repertoire.

 

Ferrucio Busoni (1866-1924) is and was the most known of the 20th century composers on the program and his 1909 Berceuse élégiaque,a lullaby of mourning for the artist's mother, was the strongest individual work of the evening.  Mahler's Carnegie concert was its world première and its movements away from tonality and its alluring gauziness of sound still cause goose bumps. 

 

Organist Marco Enrico Bossi (1861-1925) also had a Goldoni-inspired entry, Intermezzi Goldoniani (1905),a buoyant light suite of dances for strings.  Despite this, and despite the one concession to time calling for two of six sections to be cut, when Muti faced the audience sans microphone and said, "This was the very last music that Gustav Mahler conducted in his life" just before giving a frenzied downbeat, the history of the evening became fully present.