A new century, new beginnings, new music. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra was primed to celebrate all three at its first concert of 2000 Thursday night at Symphony Center.
An overture to the new millennium was called for, and composer-in-residence Augusta Read Thomas was only too pleased to supply one. Although many audience members no doubt would have preferred something safe and traditional from music director Daniel Barenboim and the band, Thomas did not go that route with her eight-minute dual homage to the CSO and the century, “Ceremonial,” which was having its world premiere.
Bracketing the program with the Thomas piece and the most significant orchestral work of the last century, Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” made sense, up to a point.
Thomas wished to celebrate a juncture in history with new music that looks forward without fear of the future, like the Stravinsky score. “The Rite of Spring” was the emancipation proclamation of rhythm and dissonance in the 20th Century. Every other composer who followed Stravinsky — including Thomas, born only seven years before his death — can trace something of his or her creative personality to that revolutionary manifesto of modernism.
On the other hand, perhaps Barenboim did Thomas something of a disservice by putting her piece on the same bill as Stravinsky’s cataclysmic masterpiece, for odious comparisons were inevitable.
One found it hard to get a reading on “Ceremonial” from Thursday’s performance, which lacked necessary focus. Thomas’ typically clean craftsmanship, her keen sense of unusual sonorities, her deep understanding of what her adopted orchestra can do — these virtues seized the mind; the ears, alas, were left wanting. The overture did not so much suggest a wondrous new world just over the horizon as academic leftovers from the late 20th Century.
It’s interesting to consider that “The Rite of Spring” has been provoking musicians and listeners for nearly 90 years and will probably do so for at least 90 more. It was reassuring to discover from the orchestra’s mettlesome performance that the score has lost none of its overwhelming visceral punch.
Barenboim’s brasses and percussion seized on the eruptive, jagged rhythms and nervously shifting meters of the “Dance of the Earth” and “Sacrificial Dance” as they spread through the orchestra. The big crunching climaxes registered firmly on each listener’s Richter scale. It remains only to be added that the orchestra sounded alert and committed in all departments — praise be to David McGill’s seamless bassoon solo — and that Teldec will record the Barenboim/CSO “Sacre du Printemps” in studio sessions later this month.
Barenboim clearly has a sentimental attachment to the Dvorak Cello Concerto, a work he and his then-wife, the late cellist Jacqueline du Pre, recorded here 30 years ago. Yo-Yo Ma, his soloist on this occasion, obviously retains deep personal feelings about a familiar score he must have played hundreds of times. With so much emotion being poured out on stage, there was little room for Dvorak.
As always, Ma was a marvel both technically and musically, not so much playing the cello as making prolonged love to it. As he sweetly suffered every note, the audience delighted in his suffering. Still, the cellist’s tone seemed oddly nasal against Barenboim’s thick and heavy orchestral backdrop. Symphony Center’s dirty little secret is that the hall still does not flatter string sound and may never do so until the next renovation. Soloist and conductor never reached a sonic accord. And the concerto, with self-indulgently slow tempos from both, dragged on and on. The audience leaped to its feet in approval at the end.
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The program will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday.
