A keen sense of musical anticipation always attends the opening of a new symphony season in Chicago. But as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra prepares to begin its 103rd season Friday night at Orchestra Hall, that anticipation is mingled with a growing apprehension among a number of observers inside and outside the orchestra that, after two seasons, the marriage between music director Daniel Barenboim and the CSO is not working.
Barenboim’s predecessor, Georg Solti, took the CSO down off its provincial shelf, polished its greatness to a high-powered luster and established it throughout the world as one of the great invincibles of symphonic music. Our orchestra’s prestige remains: Whenever critics and other music professionals are asked to rate the top U.S. orchestras, Chicago still figures near the top of the list, if not at the very top.
But since Barenboim took over, the orchestra has begun to sound very “vincible.” The same nagging questions keep surfacing amid the intermission chitchat at Orchestra Hall: How long (some Chicago Symphony subscribers wonder) can the Chicago Symphony remain on top? And is Barenboim the conductor to keep it there? Would we be better off with somebody else?
After two seasons of Barenboim as music director, some critics say the orchestra is slipping, in its quality of sound, in its internal discipline, in its approach to making music. Among orchestra players and staff members, there are deep disagreements about the music director’s effectiveness. Some say he has made our orchestra more flexible after the relative rigidity of Solti’s final seasons. Others claim he hasn’t warmed the CSO sound at all, merely thickened and distended it.
And those disagreements are echoed in decidedly mixed reviews by respected Austrian critics attending this year’s Barenboim/CSO tour concerts in Salzburg.
Even those who routinely praise the music director’s talent, versatility and capacity for work express puzzlement as to his overall artistic objectives; the seeming lack of focus in his myriad musical activities; his inconsistencies as an interpreter; and his apparent failure to make a deeper commitment to the city and to the community the orchestra serves.
“The number of people who talk Barenboim up is getting smaller all the time,” reports one orchestra member, who declined to be quoted by name. “More than half the orchestra, as far as I can tell, is feeling upset.” (All orchestra and staff members who spoke with the Tribune insisted on doing so anonymously.)
Part of this alleged player dissatisfaction doubtless relates to an internal distrust of CSO management and trustees that still festers after the fall 1991 labor strike that closed down the orchestra for the first two weeks of Barenboim’s tenure. One must separate that dissatisfaction-which relates to extramusical factors-with general concerns over how Barenboim conducts himself on the podium.
But the concerns are real. “Barenboim is the kind of conductor who, unlike Solti, does not have a fixed idea what he wants at a given moment,” says one CSO player. “I don’t find his musicmaking so much inconsistent as I find it different in its application from one performance to the next.”
Last season’s Barenboim-led performances of Strauss’ “Alpine Symphony,” which were being recorded live, tend to support the player’s contention. The conductor’s tempos and his interpretative view fluctuated so widely from one night to the next that one was astounded Erato Records was able to splice together a performance that was deemed acceptable for commercial release. The finished recording suggests all too clearly an “interpretation” literally pieced together by the recording producer and engineers.
Even the areas of the repertoire in which one might reasonably expect Barenboim to excel have come up short.
The music director’s most revealing disaster last year was a concert performance of Act II of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” a Chicago dry-run for his complete performances of the opera at this year’s Bayreuth Festival. Waltraud Meier, a mezzo-soprano pushed up into dramatic-soprano territory, was patently ill-suited for the heavyweight demands of Isolde’s music. Her Tristan, Siegfried Jerusalem, who at least possesses the vocal heft the part demands, was not in good voice. But rather than helping singers who obviously were in vocal distress, Barenboim merely allowed the orchestra to drown them out.
Such lapses were strange, indeed, considering that the German Romantic and late-Romantic literature has long been considered the area of Barenboim’s greatest strength. But some ears find his recent Bruckner symphony performances ponderous, an adjective one also would have to apply to both the Beethoven “Missa Solemnis” and Brahms “German Requiem” he prepared here last season.
The failure of his “Missa Solemnis” was perhaps more explicable, given the fact that the performances had been delayed a year and a half because of the players’ strike, also given the fact that Barenboim and CSO Chorus founder Margaret Hillis constantly disagreed about tempo during rehearsals, according to insiders.
Still, one must wonder why Barenboim persists in taking on some of the most towering masterpieces of Western music when he doesn’t appear to have a clear idea how to realize them in a thorough or effective manner.
Other areas of the repertoire also reveal curious inconsistencies and blind spots. The conductor typically plays Haydn and Mozart in a heavy, romantic manner that flies in the face of present scholarly notions of authentic style. Even if one concedes that Barenboim’s single greatest achievement as Chicago music director was to bring Pierre Boulez to the city on a regular basis as guest conductor, the fact remains that Barenboim doesn’t conduct Boulez’s music with anything near the clarity, precision or refinement that characterize the composer’s own performances.
Even if one enjoys the spontaneous nature of Barenboim’s concerts (and this reviewer has praised a number of them), one is often brought up short by deficiencies in the playing. A veteran orchestra member puts it bluntly when he says, “I think the orchestra is playing worse than it has in years.”
Even when Solti went to maniacal extremes of interpretation, one always felt the execution was based on thorough preparation and that slipshod playing would not be tolerated; Barenboim’s musicmaking offers the listener no such ironclad assurances.
Much has been written about Barenboim’s modeling his general approach to musicmaking after that of Wilhelm Furtwaengler. But does Barenboim really understand what Furtwaengler represented musically? Always a firm structure undergirded Furtwaengler’s interpretations-one always felt their inner tension.
After many years of listening to Barenboim performances, live and on recordings, seldom has this reviewer felt any real underlying tension, that sense of pulsing inevitability that connects one phrase to another over the long span of a piece. Under Barenboim, the long line is almost always sacrificed to isolated gesture, short-term effect.
Not everything should be laid at Barenboim’s podium, of course. Still vexing, to many ears, is the brass-dominated orchestral sound Barenboim inherited from Solti. Barenboim has tried to counter this by making the lower string sonorities more prominent, moving the viola section to the outside and the cellos to the inside. The shift only has made the violists and cellists unhappy and hasn’t made an appreciable difference in the overall balance of sound.
“All Barenboim has gotten us to do is play extremely quietly, in a very intimate manner,” explains a CSO player. “But he has done nothing, as yet, to halt the onslaught of our brass section; as great as they are, it’s just too loud.”
In all fairness, it must be said that Barenboim’s hands have been tied, to an extent, by provisions of the labor contract. A clause in the labor agreement made it impossible for the new music director to remove any members of the orchestra during the first two seasons of his tenure. Now that the grace period is up, one may expect to find several shifts of orchestra personnel in the coming seasons-assuming the players who are most unhappy with Barenboim do not leave of their own accord. “The fetters are off,” says one orchestra man.
Also, after 22 years of giving Solti the hard, brass-driven sound he favors, it may be difficult for some of the older CSO players, at a subconscious level, to change their fundamental manner of playing.
“The (players) who are probably most upset about Barenboim’s conducting technique are the `precisionists,’ those who want to see a very clear beat at all times,” explains a CSO member. “These people really are more comfortable playing visually than aurally. Barenboim prefers not to give a crisp, clear beat because he feels, at certain points, that it runs counter to the nature of the music.”
Barenboim, as has often been pointed out, is a superb pianist, one of the finest of his generation and blessed with a wide repertory. Why he should enjoy such conspicuous success at the keyboard but as yet fail to prove as generally convincing in his chosen orchestral repertory is another question that surrounds this enigmatic musician.
One CSO player offers a possible explanation. “It doesn’t necessarily follow that, just because you can play an instrument particularly well, that (ability) gets translated into being able to control an orchestra.”
At 50, Barenboim not only seems to want to do it all, he wants to have it all, too. Today it’s conducting a world premiere in Chicago; tomorrow it’s playing a Schubert recital in New York; the day after, it’s flying to Berlin to begin rehearsals at the Deutsche Staatsoper. Such is life for a typical, jet-propelled modern conductor; Barenboim can never be happy, apparently, unless he’s like a circus juggler keeping a bewildering number of balls and plates aloft, all at once.
It’s when this prodigally gifted musician takes on more ambitious projects than he can comfortably handle that he gets himself, and the institution, in trouble. The pattern is clear: Barenboim overbooks himself, no doubt with the best intentions; finds himself caught in a scheduling squeeze; then leaves the administration to scramble for replacements when he is forced to cancel. For the past two seasons, Barenboim backed out of numerous appearances because of illness, and this created no end of staff consternation. Programs had to be juggled; important premieres had to be scrapped; subscribers had to be told that the concerts they had paid good money to hear were being entrusted to hastily arranged substitutes.
The result was a public-relations embarrassment for an organization that can ill afford to create bad feeling among subscribers, some of whom may be feeling dubious about Barenboim as their chief conductor.
Barenboim’s deficiencies are, to an extent, the deficiencies of an administrative structure that, according to some insiders, isn’t functioning very well. “It’s one continuous crisis now, all the time,” complains a source close to the administration of executive director Henry Fogel.
Various staffers complain there’s no one to give directions or delegate authority; that too many ideas stop at the office of Martha Gilmer, the artistic administrator; that Gilmer is the only ranking staff member to whom Barenboim talks; that Barenboim is a chronic procrastinator. Two conspicuous voids in staff positions tend to fuel these uneasy perceptions. At this writing, no chorus director has been named to replace Hillis as chorus master; and the staff-conductor positions recently vacated by Michael Morgan and Kenneth Jean are being filled by as-yet-untried apprentices, Yaron Traub and Bill Eddins.
Says a source in the CSO administration who has been there for several years: “The trust between the orchestra and management is as low as it has ever been since I have been here. Fogel has everyone in the administration pretending to have answers when they don’t. The backstage politics have become so byzantine around here, there’s no way this atmosphere cannot affect the musicmaking.”
When he was new to the job, Barenboim offered all sorts of rosy visions of a future in which he and the CSO would join forces with other Chicago cultural institutions in various cooperative efforts. Three years later, the promised interchange hasn’t really happened-not unless you consider the CSO’s giving chamber concerts at the Art Institute and at Loyola University major cultural exchanges.
Barenboim himself pulled out of his collaboration with Lyric Opera on a new production of Berg’s “Wozzeck,” a precipitous departure that had people questioning the sincerity of his motives in committing himself to that ambitious shared opera project to begin with. Nor-a few token appearances in front of civic groups and one inane “town meeting” to the contrary-has he demonstrated any greater commitment to the Chicago community than Solti.
No one is disputing Barenboim’s innate musical talent or his commitment to the artistic well-being of our orchestra as he sees it. Given the deterioration of the quality of the CSO’s playing lately, however, one may certainly question the manner in which that talent is finding expression at Orchestra Hall.
Orchestras have their periods of fluctuation, just like sports teams do: The CSO of 1993 is no more the CSO of 1985 than the Chicago Bears of 1993 are the same Bears that won the Super Bowl in 1985. Perhaps the era of the CSO’s preeminence among world orchestras has simply run its course, with or without the help of Barenboim.
Barenboim is a highly clever, highly motivated man. For two seasons, the CSO audience has been more than willing to give him the chance to prove what he could do, realizing that any music director following the charismatic Solti would find himself partly obscured by a long shadow.
But even allowing for the clear differences in their artistic natures, the sense of musical excitement and accomplishment such as Solti brought to the city during his early seasons at the CSO has failed to materialize under Barenboim. It may be premature to call the Barenboim/Chicago relationship a failure but it certainly seems dysfunctional. Optimists suggest improvement is around the corner; but what if it never arrives? The international reputation of the Chicago Symphony hangs in the balance.
And time is running out. The music director’s contract will keep him at Orchestra Hall, for approximately a dozen weeks each season, through 1996-97. What kind of orchestra the Chicago Symphony will be at the end of that period rests, to a very large extent, in the hands of Daniel Barenboim.
