If there was ever a test of a conductor’s mettle, it’s Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.
New York heard such a trial last month, when Gustavo Dudamel led that city’s Philharmonic in the Ninth for his first appearance there as music director-elect. That showing was, by many accounts, mixed. Leave it to this existential symphony — the last Mahler completed before his death, and so durationally and emotionally intense it often occupies a program alone — to yank podium stars down to earth.
Jakub Hru a, another bright baton with appointments at the Bamberg Symphony and the Royal Opera House, was similarly humbled in his Mahler 9 with the Chicago Symphony, at least as heard on Thursday night. Like Dudamel, Hru a is youngish by conducting’s standards (at age 41) and telegenic, looking like a latter-day Thomas Schippers. The Czech conductor has already made two auspicious local appearances: a rich and striking “Má vlast” in 2017 and a deftly handled program last season that affirmed his aesthetic breadth: a Dvorák symphony, Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915? and a Samuel Coleridge-Taylor ballade.
The CSO’s own music director search is anyone’s game, since New York lassoed Dudamel, and the orchestra doesn’t seem to be ruling Hru a out. After all, Mahler 9 isn’t exactly given out to guest conductors like candy.
On Thursday, Hru a’s answer to this unanswerable work was to stage it as a 90-minute death terror. Sometimes fiery, sometimes swashbuckling, almost always loud, his Ninth was a white-knuckled grapple with the abyss from first to last.
Even the symphony’s moments of hard-earned serenity had an air of unease about them. In the hands of many others, the final string sighs of the fourth movement calmly unhook listeners’ tether to Earth, floating to an uncertain forever as the blue orb recedes. With Hru a, even these bars couldn’t bear to go quietly, violas and violins surging like an ever-fainter protest. Conductor Ádám Fischer put it well when he posited that this symphony “is not about death, but about dying.” A world lives in that distinction, and it’s one Hru a clearly understands well.
Here and elsewhere, Hru a honed the CSO into a silvery blade of sound — lucid, clean and fearsome. (The diabolical stretto ending the third-movement Rondo-Burleske was the exception, Hru a inflaming the orchestra into a topsy-turvy blur.) The second-movement Ländler sneered with unusual sarcasm and bite, and the culminating Adagio sheltered the most precious solos of the evening. Bassoonist Keith Buncke was an emotional salve here and wherever he appeared, and the hyper-saturated enormity of trumpeter Esteban Batallán’s sound, easily overwhelming over a sea of strings, awed anew. An alto-range valediction by cellist John Sharp and purring lines by English horn Scott Hotstetler gently guided us toward that movement’s abyss.
But for all its sharpness, this Ninth never quite cut to the heart. Hru a’s interpretation was brassy and bold, holding up the Ninth as a virtuoso piece for orchestra — which, of course, it is. But in this piece, one seeks something much deeper than instrumental dazzle.
Besides, it was a tough night, of all nights, for such an orchestral showcase. The CSO on the whole, and the brass especially, ran somewhat ragged on Thursday, with some sketchy solis and a couple of high-profile solos coming out worse for wear.
The shakiness went far enough beyond a single section or player that one had to assume other factors were at play. The CSO is fresh from music director Riccardo Muti’s most recent residency — always a high-profile and high-pressure occasion — and is in the last push of a season that’s easily the busiest since the pandemic shutdown. Add in orchestra members’ other myriad commitments, plus the usual two-and-a-half hour dress rehearsal the morning of the concert and one can hardly blame them for the briefest, rarest betrayal of overwork.
On the bright side, we may soon see a new principal viola at the CSO, filling a seat vacant since Charles Pikler’s retirement in 2017. This week, it’s Los Angeles Philharmonic principal viola Teng Li, who played with a larger-than-life Mahlerian angst which tipped toward over-wroughtness in the Rondo-Burleske. Li would have been right at home in the Berlin Philharmonic’s grittier, more fearlessly individual Mahler 7 from the fall; in that orchestra, string soloists swing a remarkable — and rewarding — creative berth, and do it bucking and swaying. But it sticks out in the CSO, whose inner sanctum of string principals are much cooler characters: less drama, more sheen.
If the LA Philharmonic does lose Li to the CSO, it stands to gain a one-of-a-kind musician in CSO principal horn David Cooper, who, according to social media posts this week, has progressed to the finals of the assistant principal vacancy there. Cooper’s solos this week were his usual paragons of lyricism, his sound full and soft as clouds. Nowhere was this more heaven-sent than the end of the first movement, singing in delicate counterpoint with E-flat clarinetist John Bruce Yeh. Parting is such sweet sorrow.
Jaap van Zweden and Klaus Mäkelä, two other eminences with credentials worthy of assuming the CSO mantle, also conducted major Mahlers here in the last two seasons. Van Zweden led a terrifying Mahler 6 last April; I’m still not sure what he was trying to say in those performances, only that he said it loudly enough to wake Georg Solti from the dead. Mäkelä’s transcendent Mahler 5 in February remains a season highlight, but he is young and very much occupied by other posts.
Hru a is somewhere between the two, his exuberant podium manner combining lithe, catlike grace and hammer-like power. He’s still a dark-horse pick for the CSO, and after Thursday, I’d like to hear him go deeper still in future repertoire. But to count him out? I wouldn’t do it just yet.
“Hru a Conducts Mahler 9? continues through June 10 at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.; 312-294-3000 and cso.org
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.
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