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.

 

Comments

[Gavin Plumley]

Andrew, I don't know if you have the new edition of The Mahler Album, but the image you include at the top was probably taken in 1910, not 1911, and on a voyage to rather than from New York. Certainly the image of him aboard the SS Amerika in 1911 reveals that by that time he looked considerably older and, of course, more frail.

[Andrew Patner]

Thanks so much, Gavin. I'm afriad that I don't yet have the new edition of that amazing book, but I see now that I must get it ASAP. Will also notify the CSO folks who had given the former information in their caption as well.