CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Expectations for the remainder of his Chicago tenure have not been high. No new pieces were slated for his recent appearances here–instead, three weeks of standard repertoire, primarily television tapings and dress rehearsals for recording sessions and this fall’s European tour (Solti’s last as music director). Included in the first week were the Schumann Konzertstuck for four horns (with four soloists from the orchestra), the Villa-Lobos Bachiana brasileira no. 1, and the Beethoven Symphony no. 3, the Eroica; planned for the second week was an all-Beethoven program, the Violin Concerto (with soloist Anne-Sophie Mutter) and Symphony no. 5. The third-week season finale–which I am not reviewing here–was a single work, Berlioz’s grand cantata, The Damnation of Faust.
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The Schumann Konzertstuck is usually played as the uninspired masterpiece of an uninspired Romantic; but it’s a good excuse to spotlight four members of an orchestral horn section. The piece has been done here a number of times for that purpose, most notably in a very uninspired and ponderous Barenboim/CSO recording over a decade ago. Much to my surprise, the piece really sprang to life under Solti, who gave the work a heroic spirit (Solti apparently hears this, quite rightly, as a little Eroica imitation). His sprightly tempo rescued it from sounding as trite and ponderous as it has in virtually every other performance given here. The soloists, Gail Williams, Norman Schweikert, Richard Oldberg, and Daniel Gingrich (principal horn Dale Clevenger played in the accompanying orchestra, a gracious touch), were all up to the occasion; they missed only a note here and there, a considerable feat given how fast Solti took the work.
Virtually anything one can say about Beethoven’s Eroica (“heroic”) Symphony seems trivial compared to the power of the music itself. We tend to take the piece so much for granted that it is difficult–if not impossible–for us to fully appreciate the Romantic revolution in music ushered in by this piece, so grand in scope and expression that it literally burst open symphonic form as it had been known, a blow from which music never fully recovered. (Perhaps that’s part of the reason that the most enduring symphonies from the later 19th century were those of Brahms, who reincorporated classical forms into the symphony.)
Pitch was Mutter’s biggest problem, which became more pronounced as the concerto went on, since she did not stop to tune after the first movement, her only chance to do so. That was regrettable, because she ran into some real trouble with pitch in the upper register of the slow movement but could do nothing but play on into the third-movement finale. By that point, her instrument was severely flat. It was a rather humid evening, but Mutter could easily have tuned her instrument slightly sharp to compensate for her own tendency to be under pitch, much as singers learn to do. (A voice doesn’t sound the same inside of oneself as it does from the outside, and singers–good ones, anyway–learn to compensate for that difference.)
The middle movements were no less daring, although they were full of nuances, of subtlety and color that were brought out in much sharper relief with the new tempi. Although the brass was a bit overdone in the finale, the ending has never erupted forth in more triumph or glory.
