Chicago Symphony Orchestra
First, the hall. If you’re coming in late, the CSO is spending zillions of dollars on a multiyear rehab intended to fix, or at least palliate, the notoriously crappy acoustics. Last season, after the first big round of work was done, the place did sound better than I’d ever heard it, though there were still a lot of unsolved problems, as well as a new crop of freaky side effects. The balance, for instance, was mighty peculiar: a soloist who stood in the wrong spot onstage risked being swallowed up by a sonic dead zone reminiscent of the “cone of silence” on Get Smart. And while you could hear reverb and overtones for the first time, they had a faintly synthetic quality, as though they were being processed through a not-quite-first-rate stereo system. I’m not the only one who thought this; one night I overheard a couple of teenagers, obviously attending their first classical concert, listening with puzzlement to the sound echo off the rafters and asking each other what brand of speakers the CSO had installed up there.
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We’ve now had round two of the rehab, and while I’ll have to hear a few more concerts to be sure, last year’s problems might be history. During the Shchedrin concerto, there was a good balance between the orchestra and guest soloist Maxim Vengerov, and at times in the andante of the Brahms First Symphony I thought I could detect a lovely bloom of reverb, almost like those meltingly sweet resonances in the great concert halls of Europe. Well, maybe that was wishful thinking. But if last year the sound took a soaring leap from the abysmal to the adequate, this year it’s ascending into the decent. I doubt the hall will ever be an ideal place to hear the most delicate chamber music, but at least a full orchestra at peak volume no longer sounds like it’s been stashed in a linen closet.
It was much the same with the Meistersinger prelude. Like almost everything Wagner composed, it’s a tangle of ambivalent moods: in this case, the melancholy of the opera’s hero, Hans Sachs, intertwined with the strange, inexhaustible happiness of Wagner’s utopian Nuremberg. But Barenboim ignored that tension and conducted it as a simple dirge. That was appropriate given that it was programmed as an elegy for CSO librarian Walter Horban, who died this past summer. But here again, Barenboim was going for the strongest effects in the shortest possible distance, almost as though he was afraid he’d trip up if he dawdled.
Still, it wasn’t bad. However Barenboim is with the standard repertoire, he’s always been good with new music, and he gave this work a warmly sympathetic performance. The first movement came off as a dreamy late-Romantic mood piece, all wavering and insubstantial textures; the second movement was a tense allegro, like the onset of an anxiety attack; the finale was broad, lush, and fanciful, with an edge of occult nightmare. The whole work is formally interesting because the violin part is woven into the orchestral line with unusual intimacy, so the soloist has to carry more of the burden of development and has fewer opportunities to show off. Maxim Vengerov (for whom the piece was written) happens to be a born show-off, but he seemed intrigued by the challenge; he was deliberately holding back, so the solo cadenzas in the last movement had a feeling of genuine release and satisfaction.
