Season openings at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra are almost always more about where the orchestra has been than where it is headed. The concert with which Riccardo Muti began the orchestra’s 126th season Thursday night at Symphony Center stuck to precedent as it continued the retrospective tone of the 125th.
The central components of this subscription program were works by Anton Bruckner and Richard Strauss, bedrock Austro-German symphonic repertory that has long defined the CSO and the international reputation Muti has made it his business to burnish. Other programs later in the season promise a greater degree of musical adventure, beginning with next week’s Muti-led exploration of neglected 20th century Italian orchestral works by Catalani and Martucci.
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The audience Thursday clearly was happy to have both the maestro and his musicians back in harness. Beginning his seventh season as music director, Muti elicited from his orchestra the kind of electric, yet warmly contoured playing that has marked their partnership at its best. It augurs well for the season.
Along with familiar music there was a familiar musician, Christopher Martin, unexpectedly back at the helm of the trumpet section. The New York Philharmonic had announced earlier this year that the CSO’s principal trumpet was to become that orchestra’s principal this season. This was followed by an announcement from the CSO that Martin would take a leave of absence from the CSO in 2016-17. But Martin was very much present on Thursday night, and playing wonderfully.
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A CSO spokeswoman later explained Martin has agreed to play “a limited number” of CSO concerts this season, most involving touring repertory. So both orchestras will benefit from his services this season. Nice work if you can get it.
Although the orchestra had devoted much of its attention during its 125th anniversary celebration to works given their U.S. premieres by the orchestra, one piece managed to slip through the cracks, Mussorgsky’s “A Night on Bald Mountain.”
It turns out that Rimsky-Korsakov’s extensive reworking of the Russian tone poem was first heard in America in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The CSO was augmented to 114 players for the occasion, according to research by the orchestra’s indefatigable archivist, Frank Villella. Even though this quasi-pops piece didn’t fit the rest of the program, it made a properly sulphurous curtain raiser.
The program’s other tone poem, Strauss’ “Don Juan,” has seldom been out of the CSO repertory since its first Chicago performance in 1897, when the score was less than a decade old.
No music director since Fritz Reiner has quite matched what he achieved in this familiar piece in terms of crackling vitality and splendor of orchestral sound. But Muti, working within more elastic tempos and shrewdly balancing of strings and brass sonority, came close. Alex Klein, the CSO’s newly reinstalled principal oboe, was given plenty of leeway to caress his solo lines in the love episode, and he did so very beautifully. A few audience boors managed to disrupt the quietest passages and most pregnant silences with their coughs.
Muti ended last season with a Bruckner symphony and he began the new season with another, the majestic Seventh.
With the sound of the Vienna Philharmonic’s Bruckner still fresh in his ears and mind, Muti (who had conducted that orchestra in the Austrian composer’s Symphony No. 2 in Salzburg last month) led a Seventh of deep eloquence and sensitivity. This was one of the finest entries to date in his ongoing Chicago cycle of the Bruckner symphonies.
In the opening movement one was especially struck by his ability to draw finely graded intensities of sound while barely moving his arms — such was his control of the sound-mass. The expansive paragraphs built with a far-sighted directionality that held harmonic tension across Bruckner’s sometimes awkward stops and starts. Muti’s all-encompassing view balanced the epic and the intimate, the worldly and the spiritual. A great Bruckner orchestra was prepared to give him everything he asked for and did, a few recalcitrant horns notwithstanding.
For the magnificent Adagio that is the beating heart of this 70-minute symphony, the four Wagner tubas added their baritonal color below the horns. Can any orchestral brass choir in the world match the CSO’s in the mighty chorale that ends this slow movement? A pity that the hard, dry Orchestra Hall acoustics doesn’t allow string sound to glow as it naturally does in a sonically superior hall such as the Vienna Musikverein.
Martin’s trumpet drove a moderately paced scherzo set off by a particularly gracious treatment of the pastoral trio. Hearing what Muti and the orchestra achieved in the finale reminded me of something the then-music director designate said at a town hall meeting here in 2009: “I will try to make music that makes you feel you have received something important.”
This Bruckner Seventh was an important statement. And the audience received it in that spirit.
John von Rhein is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @jvonrhein
When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday
Where: Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.
Tickets: $34-$220; 312-294-3000, www.cso.org
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