This is the Chicago Symphony Orchestra week where if you blinked you missed Maurizio Pollini. The fact that the season’s second subscription program had to be worked around the Georg Solti Celebration on Saturday, and Wednesday’s Solti Memorial meant that only a limited number of listeners were able to hear Pollini perform the Schumann Piano Concerto on Thursday and Friday.
Everything Pollini plays is worth hearing, but the dry and prosaic account he gave with Daniel Barenboim conducting Thursday at Orchestra Hall made me doubt this most open-hearted of the standard Romantic piano concerti has anything to say to him. Even his pianism sounded under par, certainly not in the league of his fine Chopin recital of a few weeks ago. At best, he delivered a detailed blueprint of this thrice-familiar score. At worst, his chilly efficiency robbed the music of poetry and conveyed almost nothing of the work’s light and shade.
The best thing about the opening movement was the cadenza, played with a muscular strength that also served the pianist well in the bravura pages of the finale. But there was a curiously clipped quality to his phrasing, as if he were impatient to get to the double bar. Nor was Barenboim much help, lingering indulgently when the spotlight was on the orchestra, then racing forward as if he, too, had a suburban train to catch.
The Intermezzo passed without either musician giving any indication that he was touched by its warm sentiment. Perhaps because there were no technical or musical problems to challenge Pollini, he simply put his formidable fingers on automatic pilot. Not one of Pollini’s finest half-hours, or Barenboim’s, or the orchestra’s.
The concert borrowed its opening and closing works from programs Barenboim had conducted at Symphony Center earlier in the month. This reviewer heard Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 6. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 completed the program.
Scored for Wagner-sized orchestra, the Berg remains a dense, difficult score for even a virtuoso ensemble such as ours. It requires the analytical intelligence of a Pierre Boulez to make musical sense; Barenboim is not that sort of interpreter. And the tendency of the new acoustics to muddy loud, full orchestral textures and to flatten out gradations of tone color defeated whatever attempts he may have made to clarify the musical argument.
Correction: In a review of the CSO’s Solti memorial concert, appearing in Friday editions, soprano Emily Magee was misidentified as Emily Lodine. Apologies to both singers.
