The Chicago Symphony’s upcoming swing through four of Europe’s cultural capitals, beginning Friday in London, is a substantial departure from the 16 previous European tours the orchestra has undertaken since its triumphant maiden voyage under Georg Solti in 1969.
But that’s not instantly apparent by looking at the itinerary. Each of the cultural capitals that line the tour route — London, Berlin, Lucerne and Vienna — has heard the CSO numerous times. The composer most prominently featured on this tour, Gustav Mahler, rode business-as-usual class on most of the orchestra’s previous trips abroad. And as in the past, Europe’s festival public will pack the halls to hear the CSO, and the orchestra seldom plays below its highest level for them. Each tour boosts the Chicagoans’ international reputation a few more notches.
But under the surface, there’s much that is new and different this time around.
In the first place, the CSO’s eight-concert, 10-day agenda marks a change from the way the orchestra used to tour under Solti, which was to squeeze a lot of different repertory and as many cities, large and small, into a trip sometimes running two or more weeks.
By contrast, Daniel Barenboim is repeating a smaller repertory in a select number of major cities, including festival appearances at the BBC Proms series in London’s Royal Albert Hall and the Lucerne Festival, where the orchestra is launching a three-year residency. The bottom line, according to Vanessa Moss, the CSO’s vice president for operations, is building ongoing relationships with key cultural centers where the CSO can generate the maximum public and press attention.
No tour stop better typifies this new philosophy than Lucerne, Switzerland. “The idea behind our going there in consecutive years, through 2003, is to establish a more regular presence than the usual quick-in, quick-out routine,” Moss says.
As part of its collaboration with the Lucerne Festival, the CSO will present three concerts each in September 2001, 2002 and 2003, plus chamber music and educational programs. Along with Elliott Carter’s “Partita,” the orchestra’s sojourn on the scenic shores of Lake Lucerne, Sept. 11-13, will include the world premiere of Swiss composer Hanspeter Kyburz’s “Noesis,” a co-commission by the festival and the CSO.
Two other Carter works will also make up a chamber music concert by Barenboim and CSO musicians, also at the Culture and Congress Center. And four CSO principal players — John Sharp, Larry Combs, Gene Pokorny and Ted Atkatz — will teach master classes in Lucerne.
The Lucerne Festival has been working overtime to restore its former musical luster under its dynamic new executive and artistic director, Michael Haefliger. To have landed the CSO for three summers, interacting with one of Europe’s most sophisticated concert publics, is a coup for the festival CEO, who speaks of “building artistic continuity in a meaningful way.”
Special Berlin concert
Although the orchestra is spending only one day, Sept. 9, in Berlin, its appearance there is important for reasons that go well beyond one-upping the mighty Berlin Philharmonic on its, and Barenboim’s, home turf.
The music director will lead a Sunday afternoon performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 at the Berlin Philharmonie as the inaugural event of the city’s vaunted new Jewish Museum. Designed by the American architect Daniel Liebeskind, the visually striking facility traces the long history of Jews in Germany and is already the talk of the town. With Berlin’s most prominent Jewish musician leading music by a great Jewish composer with a major American orchestra in a nation now confronting its history of anti-Semitism, the concert will be rife with cultural and national symbolism.
An interesting footnote to the Berlin concert: Co-concertmaster Robert Chen will perform his part in the Mahler symphony on a precious violin — the so-called “ex-Alma Rose” made by G.B. Guadagnini in 1757, and loaned by Machold Rare Violins — that once belonged to Arnold Rose, concertmaster at the Vienna State Opera under Mahler. After Rose emigrated to England ahead of the Nazi invasion of Austria, the fabled fiddle passed to his daughter Alma, also a violinist. She formed and directed an orchestra of women inmates at the Auschwitz concentration camp before dying of botulism there in 1944.
Accompanying the CSO to London will be a group of 150 Illinois dignitaries, who will attend the weekend Proms events; Mayor Richard M. Daley’s wife, Maggie Daly, is expected to be among them. The Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau is organizing that end of the tour. Another prominent Chicagoan who will be on board for the orchestra’s Prom night Saturday will be CSO composer-in-residence Augusta Read Thomas. Her “Aurora” for Piano and Orchestra will enlist Barenboim as soloist and conductor.
The tour’s trickiest logistical maneuver will be transporting the CSO’s 22 tons of equipment, including instruments and luggage, from London to Berlin next weekend.
Since Sunday’s concert at the Berlin Philharmonie takes place at 5 p.m. — less than 24 hours after the last bravo is heard in London — management is having the cargo sent to Berlin by jet rather than by the customary fleet of trucks. Although hiring trucks is cheaper, there is simply no room in the schedule to risk a delay, especially given the crucial importance of the Jewish Museum inaugural.
Who pays for what?
The cost of the CSO’s September European tour is $1.8 million, which is covered by concert fees and underwriting from Aon Corp. and the Sage Foundation. A Chicago patrons’ tour will accompany the orchestra to all four cities where such supplementary activities as a tour of Winston Churchill’s home, a boat cruise on Lake Lucerne and a solemn mass sung by the Vienna Choir Boys are planned.
Moss says she’s crossing her fingers that everything about this latest Continental invasion follows the script. Still, she has taken enough CSO tours to expect the unexpected.
“Even though we are prepared for every eventuality, I am too superstitious to call this one a piece of cake,” she says, smiling. “With every orchestra tour there always is the possibility something will come up. They’re never over till they’re over.”
