As you read this, the players of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will be spending Easter weekend at home with their families, or simply sleeping off their jet lag after a successful three-week tour of the eastern United States and four musical centers in Western Europe.
The tour, our orchestra`s first under its new music director, Daniel Barenboim, had audiences and critics singing the CSO`s praises all the way from Ann Arbor, Mich., where the tour began March 30, to Cologne, Germany, where it ended amid a marathon of encores and cheering ovations Thursday night.
Barenboim seized the rostrum at a news conference Thursday in Cologne to add his own personal kudos. ”What has struck me throughout this tour was this orchestra`s ability to give of its very best every night,” he told German reporters. ”Its quickness and ability to adjust to different acoustical conditions, without rehearsal,” was remarkable, he said.
Tactfully withholding any direct comparisons between his tour objectives and programming, and those of his predecessor, Georg Solti, Barenboim said he doesn`t believe in competition among conductors or orchestras, nor does he believe in looking backward.
”I`m much more concerned with the future than the past,” he said.
His one regret, he added, is that Pierre Boulez`s second set of orchestral ”Notations” remains unfinished and so could not be included with the European tour baggage as originally planned.
He said he hopes the work will be ready in time for its world premiere in Chicago during the 1993-94 season.
Still, it was music by Richard Strauss, not Boulez, that most concerned Barenboim as he and his CSO wrapped up their continental fling later that evening in the magnificent new Cologne Philharmonie, while German TV cameras recorded the event.
A video composite of this concert and an identical program taped the previous night (”Don Juan,” ”Till Eulenspiegel” and ”Ein Heldenleben”)
is expected to find its way to American television next fall and eventually to the home video market.
The tour finale, sponsored by Illinois Tool Works, marked the orchestra`s third performance in a row of the Strauss tone poems. They were avidly received by a dressy audience of 2,157 (including the composer`s two grandsons), who had months before snapped up every seat, with some tickets fetching as much as $105. But, then, Cologne had never heard the CSO live before last week`s concerts.
If the Chicago musicians were by now fed up with Strauss, or wondering when they would find time to pack between the patrons` tour party later that night and an early baggage call the next morning, you would never have guessed as much from the caring concentration they lavished on the Strauss scores. With the Philharmonie acoustics adding their cachet to the ripe sonorities, this should make a distinguished entry in the classical video catalog. A return engagement already is said to be in the discussion stage.
From Madrid to Cologne, the consensus among European critics was that the Chicago Symphony under Barenboim remains one of the world`s finest, and that the prospects for a fruitful musical relationship are excellent.
”What musicians!” exclaimed Jacques Doucelin, critic of Paris` Figaro.
”The question is not . . . whether Chicago is better than Boston, Cleveland, Berlin or St. Petersburg. Instead it is to note that the cohesion of the entire ensemble is matched by the magnificence of each individual stand.”
Madrid`s newspaper ABC lauded the CSO`s all-Strauss program as
”exceptional” and ”sensational,” adding that Barenboim had no trouble communicating with his players because of his ”great instinctive
musicality.”
However, Anthony Payne of the London Independent gave the CSO`s Beethoven-Mozart-Strauss program a mixed review.
He found Barenboim`s bigness of sonority wrong for the third ”Leonore”
overture and complained of errant wind intonation in the Mozart G-Major piano concerto, though he praised Barenboim`s ”endlessly witty and inventive” solo playing. He found ”Heldenleben” ”a performance to wonder at. . . . The music came tinglingly alive, foreground and background always audibly in place.”
