This week’s Symphony Center subscription concerts are filled with reasons why some audience members will welcome Daniel Barenboim’s leaving the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and others will regret it.
His programs Tuesday and Thursday, pairing unpopular concertos by Arnold Schoenberg with popular symphonies by Beethoven, were directed with much the same self-belief and resolve that marked his announcement Thursday afternoon that he will be stepping down as music director following the CSO’s 2005-06 season.
The only real surprise Thursday night, in fact, was that it was no different from your average Thursday subscription concert. There was no announcement made of Barenboim’s departure, no fanfare from the orchestra. Shouts of approval rang out following his “Eroica” Symphony, but nothing more than you would expect after one of the big Beethoven showpieces.
Perhapsthe music was enough. By coincidence, this same Beethoven symphony was on the very first CSO program Barenboim conducted in 1970, when the 28-year-old pianist had only recently taken up conducting.
His “Eroica” has changed remarkably little in the intervening years. The sound he got rested on a fat and weighty harmonic foundation, accented by fluctuations of tempo and phrasing and liberal rhetorical interventions. The conductor prolonged the buildup to the big dissonant climax of the opening movement. His Funeral March was very deliberate, laden with grief, but the intended drama felt heavy and portentous.
His Beethoven Fifth two nights earlier was rather more enjoyable. He let the music’s adrenaline take over, something this master of manipulation doesn’t always allow to happen.
Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto on Tuesday and the same composer’s Violin Concerto on Thursday made for interesting contrasts. The former work is his serial system humanized, while the latter is that same system intellectualized.
The composer once quipped that a fiddler needs to have an extra finger on his left hand to play the Violin Concerto, with its knotty, angular figuration over a large, dense orchestra. But much the same could be said about the muscular keyboard part of the Piano Concerto. The difference is that the piano piece adheres to the German late-Romantic tradition (albeit with “wrong” notes), while the violin piece looks to the future without compromise.
Nikolaj Znaider, the violin soloist, savored the gnarled lyricism as if it were 12-tone Brahms, which, in a sense, it is. With his heroic technical command, deep musicality and great expressive depth, he made the rough places wondrously plain.
By the same token, one could not imagine a soloist more alive to the subtle gradations of color, texture and rhythm in the Piano Concerto than Peter Serkin. The American pianist is, like Barenboim, one of today’s prime interpreters of the piece, and his nervous intensity was wondrous to behold.
Both orchestral accompaniments may be tightly packed with musical ideas, but Barenboim took a perceptive scalpel to them.
Schoenberg performances of the caliber heard at these concerts can only make audiences less fearful of what they don’t know and promote a greater understanding of his influence on 20th Century modernism.
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Thursday’s program will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday; phone 312-294-3000.
