Järvi makes a commanding CSO return as young cellist impresses in Elgar
Lawrence A. Johnson
16.02.24
Chicago Classical Review
Photo: Todd Rosenberg
"The Estonian-American conductor has been a consistently excellent CSO podium guest and showed why once again, drawing fiery, committed and superb performances from the musicians throughout the evening’s program. Järvi is a conductor we need to hear more frequently in Chicago."
What a difference a week makes. Unlike the tired and rough-edged Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert heard last week, from the first notes of Beethoven’s Leonora Overture No. 3 Thursday night, the orchestra sounded refreshed, energized and vital under the precise and inspiring baton of Paavo Järvi.
Lawrence A. Johnson
16.02.24
Chicago Classical Review
Photo: Todd Rosenberg
"The Estonian-American conductor has been a consistently excellent CSO podium guest and showed why once again, drawing fiery, committed and superb performances from the musicians throughout the evening’s program. Järvi is a conductor we need to hear more frequently in Chicago."
The Estonian-American conductor has been a consistently excellent CSO podium guest and showed why once again, drawing fiery, committed and superb performances from the musicians throughout the evening’s program. Järvi is a conductor we need to hear more frequently in Chicago.
“This opera will earn me a martyr’s crown,” said Beethoven of his sole work in the genre, Fidelio. He continually revised Fidelio—originally titled Leonore—throughout his life, including writing four overtures for the opera.
Beethoven decided that the Leonore Overture No. 3 was too long and elaborate for a theatrical curtain-raiser but it makes a first-rate concert work as shown by Järvi and company Thursday night. For a piece as familiar as this, Järvi led a notably fresh, taut and crackling account that had a bristling immediacy and sense of theatrical greasepaint. The introduction, depicting Florestan in his prison cell, unfolded with atmospheric unease, and the main Allegro went with a fizzing, cut-and-thrust Beethovenian drama. Mark Ridenour lofted a noble offstage trumpet solo and the propulsive final section went with a fizzing exhilaration and galvanic sense of release.
Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto hasn’t been heard in a decade at CSO subscription concerts, and Thursday night’s performance proved worth the wait with the fast-rising Sheku Kanneh-Mason making an outstanding Orchestra Hall debut.
As the young British cellist of the moment, one would expect a worthy showing of his country’s most celebrated concert work for his instrument. And indeed the engaging Kanneh-Mason delivered a notably youthful, fresh and dedicated performance of Elgar’s concerto.
For all its popularity, Elgar’s Cello Concerto is a challenging work to pull off successfully. Many soloists go for an overtly bravura style, which tends to overshadow the subtle sadness that permeates this wartime score.
Kanneh-Mason had both qualities dexterously balanced throughout in his impassioned and eloquent Elgar performance. Playing his magnificent 1700 Gofriller instrument, the soloist’s febrile, burnished sound was a consistent pleasure to the ears. While he handled the solo virtuosity fluently—a couple pitchy moments apart—Kanneh-Mason proved an impassioned advocate for Elgar’s nostalgic score. He imbued the Adagio with a hushed, elegiac feeling and brought spirited energy to the galumphing finale, ensuring the yearning reprise made its touching effect before the emphatic coda. Järvi supported the soloist with a sumptuous, full-blooded symphonic canvas befitting this Late Romantic score.
The ovations recalled Kanneh-Mason to the stage. He favored the audience with an encore of his own composition, Melody, the gentle theme, given a plaintive, inward rendering.
Carl Nielsen’s music often paints a world where order is continually upended by chaos and disorder. Nowhere is that more bracingly manifest than in the Danish composer’s Symphony No. 5, which concluded the evening.
Even more than in Elgar’s concerto—which was written during the First World War—Nielsen’s Fifth (1920-22) seems to be haunted by the recent hostilities. The war’s violence and carnage is palpable in the first movement, where the uneasy landscape is fractured, dominated by a militaristic snare drum and martial percussion. A theme for strings—Nielsen’s richest lyrical outpouring—is undermined by a malign, increasingly violent snare drum, though the heartening theme eventually triumphs.Paavo Järvi is especially inspired in music of Northern and Eastern Europe and he directed a masterful, acutely concentrated account of Nielsen’s challenging score. The crucial wind writing was full and rounded, and the disparate elements and competing contrapuntal lines were scrupulously balanced with Nielsen’s most hectic passages emerging clearly and effectively.
Jarvi gave the lyrical theme sumptuous treatment and the malevolent snare drum—played by Cynthia Yeh with daunting power in its forceful ad libitum attacks—was as jarring as it should be.
After the dramatic first movement, the challenge in this score is ensuring that the second movement—made up of four shorter sections—doesn’t come off like an anticlimax. To his credit, Järvi maintained the intensity and anarchic energy to the coda. In his dramatic sweep through the concluding movement, he pointed the contrasts, underlined the fugal writing and built to a resounding and effective final peroration.
The musicians clearly enjoyed playing this music under Järvi and there were smiles aplenty from the string first desks in the whirling craziness of the finale. All sections contributed to this imposing performance with special kudos deserved to Cynthia Yeh’s forceful snare drum playing and Stephen Williamson’s expressive clarinet work, especially his haunted, keening solo at the end of the first movement.
Cliff Colnot, longtime conductor of the Civic Orchestra and the CSO’s MusicNOW series died Monday, age 76, after a long illness. Colnot was a fine musician and a clarifying exponent of even the knottiest contemporary scores.
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