The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is about to undertake its 13th European concert tour, but nobody seems the slightest bit superstitious about that fact. Not one of the previous dozen tours has been anything less than successful. How can this one miss?
Daniel Barenboim will be taking his orchestra on a three-week, $2.3 million swing through the continent’s major music festivals. The music director will lead all 13 concerts — there’s that number again — in eight cities. The tour begins Thursday and Friday in London’s Royal Albert Hall and continues with concerts in Birmingham, England; Brussels; Baden-Baden and Munich, Germany; Lucerne; Vienna; and Bucharest, Romania.
In the larger scheme of things, no CSO tour was more important than the orchestra’s 1971 debut in Europe. Music director Georg Solti knew the time was overdue for Europeans to recognize the greatness of an orchestra that was familiar to them only from recordings. Under Sir Georg and principal guest conductor Carlo Maria Giulini, the orchestra generated the kind of audience heat and press superlatives that few leading ensembles have since matched when they played the venerable halls of Europe.
Suddenly Chicago woke up to the fact that it had a world-class virtuoso orchestra in its midst. Quick to capitalize on that initial triumph, Solti reconquered the continent on six later tours. At first critics wrote that the only rival to the CSO under Solti was the Berlin Philharmonic under his archrival, Herbert von Karajan. By the time of Solti’s final European tour of duty with the CSO, in 1990, the European press had stopped comparing Chicago to Berlin. Chicago was the best, full stop.
Barenboim’s challenge has been to sustain the momentum of those victory parades. He has done it his way, first by eschewing the competitive rhetoric and heroic poses of his predecessor and second by keeping the emphasis where it should be — on the music itself. Having presided over eight previous international tours as CSO music director, he doubtless feels he has no need to prove himself, only a duty to keep the CSO playing at its best. Given the extra degree of commitment and intensity the Chicago Symphony demonstrates on tour, he needn’t fear for this orchestra.
The music director is taking along repertoire from the past several CSO subscription seasons he believes is a fair reflection of what he and the orchestra have achieved during his seven-year tenure. Unlike some previous tours, there isn’t a note of American music — a shameful omission for an orchestra from the American heartland making a tour partly funded by American business.
Still, the symphony will give the European premiere of an important new work, British composer Harrison Birtwistle’s “Exody,” as part of its tour opener Thursday at Royal Albert Hall. Commissioned by the CSO, the work had its world premiere by Barenboim and the CSO here in January. It’s too bad the piece will be heard only once on the tour; none of the other tour cities requested it, and management did not push for it.
Otherwise, the programs are stocked with standard Barenboim repertoire, including Mahler’s Fifth, Tchaikovsky’s Sixth and Beethoven’s Seventh symphonies; Richard Strauss’ “Till Eulenspiegel”; Alban Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra; Arnold Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra; and orchestral excerpts from Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” and “Lohengrin.”
The only soloist joining Barenboim and the orchestra will be Romanian pianist Radu Lupu, who will perform the Schumann Piano Concerto as part of the tour finale Sept. 19 in Bucharest.
If there’s any departure from previous tours, it’s that the orchestra will perform fewer one-night stands this time around. Besides putting an unusual strain on the stamina of orchestra musicians, playing only one concert in a European city is relatively expensive for the management. Presenting pairs of concerts — as the CSO is doing in London, Brussels, Lucerne, Vienna and Bucharest — allows management to amortize tour expenses over two performances.
Another notable feature of this tour is that it will include the orchestra’s first appearances in Baden-Baden and Bucharest.
Baden-Baden, the southwest German city fabled for the healing waters of its spas, opened its new Festival Hall in April with a tribute to Solti; the CSO will return the favor at its concert of Sept. 9.
No concerts are more highly anticipated than those in Bucharest. Once known as “the Paris of the Balkans,” the city underwent devastating economic times under the previous Communist regime and in recent years has been making strenuous efforts to improve the flow of Western currency into the country.
The CSO’s concerts Sept. 18 and 19 will be given as part of the monthlong George Enescu International Festival, named for Romania’s greatest composer and directed by the Romanian-born American conductor Lawrence Foster. Lavishly funded by the Ministry of Culture and stocked with good European orchestras like the Orchestre National de France and the BBC Philharmonic, the festival represents a determined bid to attract the international tourist trade nine years after the overthrow of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
If the CSO was willing to travel as far as Romania to perform, why did it not schedule concerts in Prague and Budapest as well?
“We knew the festival had a good reputation, and, frankly, they were able to pay a reasonable fee. That’s still difficult in Prague and Budapest and most of the former Eastern bloc countries,” explains CSO President Henry Fogel.
Baden-Baden isn’t the only new hall the Chicagoans will visit. On Sept. 11 and 12 Barenboim’s band will play in the concert hall of Lucerne’s new, $134-million Cultural and Convention Center, designed by French architect Jean Nouvel. The old Kunsthaus at the Lucerne International Festival of Music was an acoustical black hole, dry and lifeless in sound. Spokesmen for this year’s visiting orchestras — including the Berlin Philharmonic and the Royal Concertgebouw of Amsterdam — all welcome Lucerne’s new hall, which sports an acoustical design by the renowned American acoustician Russell Johnson, who also designed Symphony Hall in Birmingham.
As a matter of fact, the CSO will return to Birmingham, commerce capital of the English Midlands, for a concert Saturday. Illinois Tool Works is sponsoring the Birmingham event, with Ameritech underwriting the CSO’s Sept. 8 concert in Brussels’ Palais des Beaux Arts. Friday’s London Proms concert is being sponsored by Searle.
The orchestra has not performed in Brussels for more than 10 years, so the Sept. 7 and 8 concerts also are greatly anticipated.
Rounding out the tour will be the Symphony’s fifth visit to Munich Sept. 14, marking the first time Barenboim will have conducted the orchestra in that Bavarian capital; and concerts Sept. 15 and 16 in Vienna’s historic, acoustically mellow Musikverein.
A glaring absence on the tour schedule is Salzburg, the crown jewel of European festivals. “Overtures were made and conversations were had,” Fogel says, but the stumbling block was scheduling. Festival director Gerard Mortier could guarantee dates only in late August, when the orchestra was still in residence at Ravinia. “We hope to be back shortly after 2000,” says Fogel.
The most expensive CSO tour tickets are not in Munich ($112) or Vienna ($66), but in Baden-Baden, where the best seats are fetching $162. The cheapest tickets are in Bucharest — 85,000 Romanian lei, or $10. Otherwise, the top tickets cost $53 in London, $95 in Brussels, $106 in Birmingham and $119 in Lucerne. At this writing, all concerts were well sold, while both Lucerne events have been sold out for months.
By now, CSO tours abroad are plotted as carefully as the Normandy landing. They are the result of a complex process of artistic planning, fundraising and strategizing that involves virtually the entire institution and begins four or more years in advance.
In addition to 110 regular orchestra players and the 10 extra musicians required to play the Birtwistle piece, the tour party will include a dozen staff members, two physicians, two representatives of TravTours (which handles the hotel arrangements), family members and a patrons group of 40 trustees and governing members. Making sure all 185 of them make it from Chicago to Bucharest and back is the responsibility of Vanessa Moss, vice president for operations, and Heidi Lukas, operations director.
Moving people is one thing; moving more than 16 tons of equipment across Western and Eastern Europe, quite another.
After the CSO’s final Ravinia concert of the season last Thursday, some 240 pieces were loaded aboard trucks and sent to O’Hare to be transferred to an Air France cargo jet. The cargo, supervised by longtime CSO stage manager William Hogan, consists of instruments and their trunks, wardrobe trunks, music and other items ranging from percussionists’ stools to Barenboim’s podium.
The cargo jet is due to leave early Monday for Paris, where its contents will be loaded onto four carriers — two trucks and two trailers. The trucks will be ferried across the English Channel late Monday and are due to arrive in London the following night, to be unloaded in time for the orchestra’s first rehearsal Wednesday afternoon at the BBC Music Studios in London.
