It has been nearly three decades since the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under its then-music director, Georg Solti, blew the roof off venerable Carnegie Hall.
Back in 1971, Manhattan concertgoers had never heard anything quite like Solti’s mighty band parading its powerhouse virtuosity in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, the first of what would be a long string of Solti blockbusters. The heavily sold-out house erupted in a veritable feeding frenzy at the end of the 70-minute symphony. The thunderous ovations went on and on into the night.
On Monday, the CSO was back in America’s most famous concert hall, playing the same Mahler symphony to another packed house under current music director Daniel Barenboim, in their third and final concert of this year’s Carnegie series. The hall again erupted in cheers and bravos. But times have changed. This time around, there was less a sense of blatant salesmanship at work than a conductor using an orchestra (whose excellence is now a given) as a means to try out ideas as they occur to him. The results were often exciting, if only because you never knew what to expect next
Now that the orchestra has returned home, Barenboim’s Carnegie work week has only begun. He is in the midst of a three-day workshop of master classes for young conductors and pianists, part of a two-year Carnegie initiative celebrating what he now prefers to call his “first 50 years” as a concert artist. Barenboim the soloist, chamber musician and conductor all share this Perspectives series. But the spotlight this week is on Barenboim the educator, as he works with the young musicians of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, culminating in a concert here Thursday night.
As a matter of fact, Barenboim the teacher also dominated the CSO’s weekend residency. Because he believes an audience can better appreciate the works of today when they are bracketed with important music from the last fin de siecle, on Monday he presented all five of Pierre Boulez’s orchestral “Notations” in harness with the Mahler symphony. His readings clearly sought to demonstrate more what these scores have in common than what they don’t.
Boulez’s symphonic reworkings of his early piano pieces were not helped by Barenboim’s tendency to thicken textures. Even so, the CSO played these densely packed miniatures with both subtlety and impact, especially the newest, “Hieratique,” which the conductor repeated so the audience might better penetrate its complex layers of sound.
The long shadow of history also falls on the Mahler Fifth Symphony. The composer began writing the work in 1901, only a decade after the CSO was founded and Carnegie Hall was built. For this Chicagoan, the thrill of Monday’s performance lay not in hearing what Barenboim did with the piece (the reading was oddly disjointed, now lacking in tension, now lurching into overdrive) but in its reminders of what a sterling string choir the CSO possesses.
For all the acoustical tweaking done to the “new” Orchestra Hall, it still does not deliver an acceptably open, shining string sound the way Carnegie, or any other first-rate concert hall, does. Sadly, it probably never will, barring the use of electronic enhancement or another expensive architectural and acoustical overhaul. Does Barenboim notice? Does he care? He should.
