Principal guest conductor Pierre Boulez represents the pioneers of French music so well on programs of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra that it has been easy to forget composers who are not in his lineage.
Yet five years before the CSO played a note by Boulez himself, it introduced a score by a more conservative colleague who has since acceded to the position left vacant by the 1992 death of Boulez’s teacher, Olivier Messiaen.
The elder statesman of French music is now Henri Dutilleux, a solitary who followed no school of composition and engaged in no polemics but formed his own expressive language under the influence of Maurice Ravel, Bela Bartok and Albert Roussel. At 82, the fastidious Dutilleux has composed for more than 60 years but acknowledges less than half his output and considers only five of those works first rate.
Thursday night at Symphony Center, Lynn Harrell and Herbert Blomstedt collaborated on the first CSO performance of one of the masterpieces, “Tout un monde lointain pour violoncelle et orchestre” (“A Whole Distant World for Cello and Orchestra”).
Completed in 1970 on a commission from cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, “Tout un monde lointain . . .” was inspired by the writings of Charles Baudelaire and is in five linked movements lasting about 27 minutes. Each movement has a motto from Baudelaire but seeks less to dramatize the words than capture their atmosphere in a musical equivalent.
The orchestra is large but seldom used all at once. The solo cello plays continuously. A chordal motif heard in the first movement supplies materials for the others. Dutilleux employs serial techniques but the overall effect is lyrical and rhapsodic, proceeding by delicate chirrups, flickers and splashes of color.
In 1991 Harrell was the first American cellist to take up the score and has since made a recording. On Thursday he realized an inward, musing quality to perfection, alternating with a will-o’-the-wisp lightness that preserved the characteristic reticence of Dutilleux’s expressivity. Guest conductor Blomstedt elicited some of the season’s most evocative playing. Members of the orchestra voiced approval of Harrell’s command even before the audience did.
After intermission came a chestnut often roasted during the great days at Orchestra Hall, Antonin Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony. The performance was fresh and unforced but also forward-moving–which meant a minimum of expressive shaping in the interest of symphonic tautness. Anyone following a score would have found it true to the letter and the spirit, with a particularly fine graciousness in the Allegretto. But other conductors in Chicago, particularly Rafael Kubelik, achieved a greater sense of delight and spontaneous excitement.
The concert began with a restrained account of “The Hebrides” Overture by Felix Mendelssohn. Here Blomstedt was ever the classicist, suggesting the score’s pictorial elements in the clean lines of a monochrome engraving that brought more light than Romantic heat.
The program will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday and 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave. Phone 312-294-3000.
