After stepping down as the Chicago Symphony’s music director in 2006, Daniel Barenboim has returned to guest-conduct the orchestra just once, in 2018. In recent years, worsening health led Barenboim to formally step down as the Staatsoper Berlin’s general music director earlier this year; Christian Thielemann will succeed him next season.
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Given that, it wasn’t entirely shocking when Barenboim announced his withdrawal from a North American tour with the Staatskapelle, the house’s orchestra, earlier this month, which included a Symphony Center appearance. But it was certainly saddening. When, or if, Barenboim, 81, will return to Chicago remains unclear. With Michael Tilson Thomas on the podium and leading rehearsals with the CSO this week after his own cancer diagnosis and string of health-related cancellations, it’s hard not to feel the weight of long goodbyes this week.
On Tuesday, that adieu was refashioned into a most wonderful meeting: the Czech conductor Jakub Hru a, fresh off a triumphant run of Lyric’s “Jenufa” and a hot candidate for the CSO music directorship himself, made his Staatskapelle debut substituting for Barenboim.
To swing in on fare like Brahms symphonies — a double-bill of Nos. 3 and 1, in that order — is as close to a best-case scenario as a substitute conductor could hope for. But to make these familiar friends wholly enchanting, spilling over with passion, ingenuity and countermelodic detail, as they were on Tuesday? Hru a and the Staatskapelle are surely just beginning a long and fruitful partnership.
And it truly was a partnership. Hru a might have sketched the blueprint of this towering performance, but its heights were all the Staatskapelle’s. Their sound is pillowed and pastel, yet undergirded by a sturdy clarity in inner instrumental lines. And much like their fellow Berliners in the Philharmoniker, who appeared here a year ago, the Staatskapelle doesn’t stow its composite personalities backstage. A mid-program principal swap underscored how self-assuredly creative the Staatskapelle musicians are, a republic of soloists united in verve and devotion.
They’re emotions they wear on their sleeve, for better and worse. Smiles would sometimes seize string players in the middle of a passage and ripple, seemingly telepathically, through their section. Later, in Brahms’ first symphony, when a new round of trumpets proved consistently inconsistent, they were met by glares from colleagues in another section. Leaving the hall, the gestalt of audience comments chalked up to that: The Staatskapelle performs like you can hear their hearts. That shouldn’t be as rare as it is.
The first movement of Brahms 3 immediately showcased what this orchestra can do: sforzando attacks that thrill the air then sizzle to nothing, crescendos that seem to swell with no end in sight. Tibor Reman vivified the beginning of a tenderhearted Andante with a springy and sunny clarinet solo, and the Allegretto which followed was simply peerless: a tapestry of silken sound, violins bobbing in and out of the cello theme. There and in the first movement, hushed echoes of the melody passed through the ensemble like a dream.
The symphony didn’t quite waft away as its score promises — there was something still clenched on Tuesday, hard timpani mallets poking out in the last bars of the Allegro. It anticipated the Symphony No. 1 to follow, whose steelier approach seemed to assume, a priori, there were shallower depths to plumb in that earlier opus. A humbler overall performance — shaggier strings, beiger principal turns — didn’t help the case, though Hru a’s podium manner remained articulate and intuitive as ever.
But just when it seemed Brahms’ First made off like the awkward stepchild, then came a DNA-shuffling fourth movement, one which vowed to change the way one hears that glorious music forever and obliterated memories of any blemishes that preceded it. Hru a’s pickup at the very beginning of the movement seemed to stretch to the ceiling, made ever more wrenching by the violent flare of Stephan Möller’s timpani. Later, Hru a’s deliberate rubatos in the symphony’s last lap were more than satisfying — they were cathartic.
Karsten Hoffmann and Sebastian Posch played the horn duet transition into the Allegro non troppo as though breathing through their instruments rather than exhaling — bottomless, life-giving gales of sound. They were matched in excellence by a gleaming trombone choir, who swung from organlike to snarling in a standout and -above showing all evening.
Hru a gallantly offered kudos to every section during the extended standing ovation; a radiant Staatskapelle returned the favor with a surge of tapped feet and waggled bows. His reunion with this orchestra is plainly a question of when, not if. Lucky Berlin.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.
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