Chicago Symphony Orchestra
What can I say? I thought the hall sounded better. The place used to remind me of one of those food-desiccating machines they hawk on late-night infomercials: the nutritional value of the music was perfectly preserved, but the savor had been sucked out. I often wondered, rather meanly, if that was why Georg Solti flourished there like a desert flower. He was always so vigorous and precise in his immediate effects–and so curiously indifferent to the reverberating half silences where the more elusive mysteries of music are concealed. His glittering brasses and singing strings sometimes seemed like a brilliant tactic to cover up the sonic Sahara where the overtones were supposed to go. Certainly no other conductor has ever coped as well with the dead air in the hall. Some conductors in recent years have sounded like they were leading a ragged mob of musicians against a building.
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Gielen’s program last week might have been deliberately chosen to show off the best properties of the rehab: the hall’s ability to now deliver audible overtones and blended instrumental colors. All four of the pieces depend on exactly the sort of subtle shadings the hall used to smother. Beethoven’s second and third Leonore overtures create vast resonances, Schubert’s incidental music for Rosamunde requires a delicate melting of strings and woodwinds, and Elliott Carter’s ferocious piano concerto demands–well, whatever the hell it demands, it had better not be muffled. The hall came through pretty well. The sound was oddly subdued at times and the musicians uncharacteristically tentative; I got the feeling they still weren’t quite used to being able to hear one another. The brass section in particular seemed worried about being rude. But the big moments all came in their proper places, and the music held together with satisfying ease. By the end I was even becoming reconciled to that weird new Close Encounters-style sonic reflector that hovers over the stage–though I still think it looks like the CSO picked it up at a closeout of sci-fi memorabilia.
Of course my impatience may have had another cause: my suspicion that the only reason the Schubert was programmed was to soothe the audience’s jangled nerves after the Carter piano concerto. In the lobby afterward I heard several people saying that the Schubert “redeemed” the evening or “made up for” the chore of sitting through the Carter. They sounded like North Shore matrons expressing relief that a dinner party hadn’t been ruined by the intrusion of some bounder.
At first I found myself wondering if the old acoustics might have suited Carter better, because the dead air might have islanded the different elements the way he’d intended. As it was, the orchestral colors were smeared together into thick forests of sound, and at times you couldn’t tell what instruments you were hearing. The percussive melody that Oppens banged out of the piano seemed to shake itself into chiming echoes of flute and strings or dissolve into sinister surges of brass. Once I got used to it though, it worked–in fact, I ended up thinking that it was a much more interesting take on the piece than the recorded version.
