Pinchas Zukerman’s program Friday evening at Symphony Center– performed by chamber orchestras of various proportions drawn from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra– proved a pleasant musical digestive for those subscribers who overindulged at Thanksgiving dinner.
Once again Zukerman wore his familiar hats as violinist, violist and conductor, casually switching from one capacity to the other. Gone were the podium and its hieratic connotations. Zukerman’s aim was to create enlarged chamber music, to enter into warmly spirited dialogues with his colleagues rather than imposing his musical will on them.
The first half was devoted to lesser-known Beethoven works. Zukerman conducted the two Romances for violin and orchestra from the fiddle, framing his patrician solo playing with warm and gracious accompaniments.
Next he turned to a rare novelty, Gustav Mahler’s transcription for string orchestra of Beethoven’s String Quartet in F minor, Opus 95, in its first CSO performance. Several weeks ago the Tokyo Quartet favored us with the “Serioso” in its original form. The music took on a very different expressive character this time around: What was before an intimate conversation among four string players revealed unsuspected symphonic dimensions, the music fraught with heroic minor-key struggle.
Zukerman rounded out his agenda with contrasting 20th-Century pieces, one that cried (Paul Hindemith’s “Trauermusik” for viola and strings) and one that laughed (Stravinsky’s “Pulcinella” Suite).
Hindemith wrote his 1936 Mourning Music for England’s King George V. At Friday’s performance the audience was free to regard it as a funeral ode for another British monarch named George–Solti, who had passed away in September. Zukerman acquitted himself eloquently as both violist and conductor.
The drypoint neoclassicism of Stravinsky’s ballet suite after Pergolesi–and other 18th-Century Italian masters–gave various first-chair soloists a chance to make merry. All were excellent, not least Joseph Guastafeste and his droll double bass.
The program will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday.
– Earlier in the day, also in Orchestra Hall, the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra gave its first concert of the winter season under its new music director, Rossen Milanov. The quality of the performances suggested a successful partnership is already developing.
Trained at Curtis and Juilliard, the young Bulgarian-born conductor clearly enjoys working with this group of eager, talented young musicians and they with him. More important, he clearly knows what he wants and how to achieve it. His predecessor left him with a fine youth orchestra and he is canny enough to build on that achievement. Brahms’ Second Symphony went well despite some rough patches. The upper brass at times sounded unruly and the solo woodwinds did not always play out confidently, but the violins sang sweetly. Flutist Elizabeth Phelps and violinist Melanie Pikul, winners of the orchestra’s 1997 Concerto Competition, were the impressive soloists.
