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.
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