CONCERT REVIEW: Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Paavo Jarvi creates seismic jolt in Orchestra Hall
By John von Rhein, Tribune music critic
Chicago Tribune, October 9, 2004
Scanning the shocking number of empty seats at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's first Thursday night concert of the season in Symphony Center, you had to feel sorry for those who stayed away.
They missed a terrific program that went from cool Debussy to hot Bartok to electrifying Nielsen. It introduced an impressive conductor and an exciting soloist to Orchestra Hall. And it proved just the sort of seismic event to jolt the CSO back on track after its recent spate of podium cancellations.
Imagine a French tone poem, a Hungarian concerto and a Danish symphony played by an Estonian conductor and a German violinist with an American orchestra. That's what Thursday's audience heard when conductor Paavo Jarvi and violinist Christian Tetzlaff made their downtown debuts with the orchestra in an evening of masterpieces from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.
Not many conductors can front the mighty CSO for the first time and elicit the deeply communicative music-making Jarvi did. Son of the conductor Neeme Jarvi, he is in his fourth season as music director of the Cincinnati Symphony and, on the basis of his fine showing Thursday, can be considered a plausible contender for Daniel Barenboim's job here in 2006.
The man is all music, refreshingly self-effacing in manner, as secure in his command of structure as in the details, who gets his ideas across with a firm beat and one of the most expressive left hands of any symphonic conductor today.
Jarvi began with an unusually elastic reading of Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. The music flowed in an unbroken arc of weightless sound, with Mathieu Dufour spinning the flute solo with his usual silvery delicacy.
Nothing Tetzlaff has performed at Ravinia quite prepared one for the sheer adrenaline rush of his Bartok Second Concerto. He attacked the opening movement with a controlled ferocity that kept the music, and the listener too, poised on the knife blade of anticipation. Words like "forceful" and "intense" kept coming to mind as the young German violinist answered the orchestral guffaws with furious passagework. Yet how beautifully he savored the dreamy lyricism and filigreed variations. To Tetzlaff's credit, he played Bartok's original coda to the finale, which is almost never heard.
One of the best concerto performances the CSO has given us in a long while earned Tetzlaff a roaring, standing ovation. He rewarded the crowd with a superlative reading of the "Allemande" from J.S. Bach's B-Minor Solo Partita.
The more I hear Carl Nielsen's Symphony No. 5, the more I am convinced it is one of the great 20th Century symphonies. Jarvi's riveting account (even finer than his new Telarc recording with the Cincinnati orchestra) reaffirmed its stature. The music is all about construction and destruction, and Jarvi threw himself into it with such vigor that at one point the baton flew out of his hand into the second violins. The orchestra played as if their lives were hanging in the balance. That's inspiration. That's leadership. We must have Paavo Jarvi back.
By John von Rhein, Tribune music critic
Chicago Tribune, October 9, 2004
Scanning the shocking number of empty seats at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's first Thursday night concert of the season in Symphony Center, you had to feel sorry for those who stayed away.
They missed a terrific program that went from cool Debussy to hot Bartok to electrifying Nielsen. It introduced an impressive conductor and an exciting soloist to Orchestra Hall. And it proved just the sort of seismic event to jolt the CSO back on track after its recent spate of podium cancellations.
Imagine a French tone poem, a Hungarian concerto and a Danish symphony played by an Estonian conductor and a German violinist with an American orchestra. That's what Thursday's audience heard when conductor Paavo Jarvi and violinist Christian Tetzlaff made their downtown debuts with the orchestra in an evening of masterpieces from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.
Not many conductors can front the mighty CSO for the first time and elicit the deeply communicative music-making Jarvi did. Son of the conductor Neeme Jarvi, he is in his fourth season as music director of the Cincinnati Symphony and, on the basis of his fine showing Thursday, can be considered a plausible contender for Daniel Barenboim's job here in 2006.
The man is all music, refreshingly self-effacing in manner, as secure in his command of structure as in the details, who gets his ideas across with a firm beat and one of the most expressive left hands of any symphonic conductor today.
Jarvi began with an unusually elastic reading of Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. The music flowed in an unbroken arc of weightless sound, with Mathieu Dufour spinning the flute solo with his usual silvery delicacy.
Nothing Tetzlaff has performed at Ravinia quite prepared one for the sheer adrenaline rush of his Bartok Second Concerto. He attacked the opening movement with a controlled ferocity that kept the music, and the listener too, poised on the knife blade of anticipation. Words like "forceful" and "intense" kept coming to mind as the young German violinist answered the orchestral guffaws with furious passagework. Yet how beautifully he savored the dreamy lyricism and filigreed variations. To Tetzlaff's credit, he played Bartok's original coda to the finale, which is almost never heard.
One of the best concerto performances the CSO has given us in a long while earned Tetzlaff a roaring, standing ovation. He rewarded the crowd with a superlative reading of the "Allemande" from J.S. Bach's B-Minor Solo Partita.
The more I hear Carl Nielsen's Symphony No. 5, the more I am convinced it is one of the great 20th Century symphonies. Jarvi's riveting account (even finer than his new Telarc recording with the Cincinnati orchestra) reaffirmed its stature. The music is all about construction and destruction, and Jarvi threw himself into it with such vigor that at one point the baton flew out of his hand into the second violins. The orchestra played as if their lives were hanging in the balance. That's inspiration. That's leadership. We must have Paavo Jarvi back.
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