With his bushy white beard and rotund figure, Leif Segerstam could easily have passed for Father Christmas, a jolly elf getting a head start on the holidays, Thursday at Symphony Center.
Actually, he is a conductor and composer of no little accomplishment in his native Finland, where he serves as principal conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra and the Royal Opera of Stockholm. Thursday’s concert marked his Chicago Symphony podium debut and he used the occasion to treat the subscribers to works by Scandinavia’s best-known composers — Jean Sibelius, Edvard Grieg and Carl Nielsen.
The burly, bearded Finn makes music at the podium much the same way he puts notes on paper. He has creative energy to burn, but the energy is eccentric, undisciplined. What a curious figure he presents to musicians! His beat is so hard to follow that an orchestra of lesser stature could easily have fallen apart in Nielsen’s devilishly tricky Sixth Symphony.
In another respect, Nielsen’s “Sinfonia semplice” suited Segerstam’s manner and temperament because there is nothing stranger in the Danish composer’s catalog. The music lurches between deceptive frivolity and dark, mocking despair. New tonalities assert themselves, only to be beaten down by hostile percussion.
One would have liked even more atmosphere in the opening movement, but Segerstam generally matched Nielsen’s visionary power with genuine intensity. The “Humoreske” was a twitchy parody of 1920s modernism, wonderfully played. The guest conductor was especially good at conveying the music’s disturbing overtones, not least in the variations movement, where the CSO string players made it through Nielsen’s minefield of unison passages relatively unscathed.
Segerstam’s “February,” which began the concert, reminded us that while we have long, lousy winters in Chicago, in Finland they are longer and lousier still. Segerstam has written some 17 symphonies and other works in what he calls his “free pulsating style.” So that his ideas could pulse more freely through the orchestra, he asked the musicians to play by themselves while he took one of the two piano parts. His 15-minute soundscape suggested the bleakness of winter’s end with convulsive brass swirling over frozen string figures. This chilly piece of Euro-trash finally collapsed in a quotation from the Beethoven Fifth Symphony.
Also making his CSO debut was the young Russian pianist Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a good if erratic soloist for the Grieg Piano Concerto. He played parts of the war horse concerto with genuine romantic feeling and style, but he sometimes got bogged down in sleepy tempos that robbed the reading of freshness and spontaneity. Sibelius’ “Finlandia,” played in a blaze of patriotic fervor, closed the program. It will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday.
