May 06--Listening to the thoughtful synergy of British and German music Donald Runnicles conducted with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Thursday night at Symphony Center was rather like rummaging through a family album in which the portraits bore striking resemblances despite the fact that they were separated by generation.
Anchoring the program were works by the greatest composers of Edwardian England and mid-20th century England, respectively, Edward Elgar and Benjamin Britten -- the former's "Enigma" Variations and the latter's "Sinfonia da Requiem." Disdainful of Elgar's music in his youth, Britten came to praise his great musical forebear as a true professional who, like Britten himself, learned from Europe while creating a modern English music.
The German composer Richard Strauss in turn praised Elgar as the most progressive English composer of his day, and the symphonic works Strauss wrote early in his career exerted a major influence on Elgar's.
Strauss' "Death and Transfiguration" formed the middle panel of Runnicles' triptych, and in the sympathetic performance the Scottish conductor drew from the CSO one could discern the stylistic and expressive through-line that runs from Strauss' tone poem, written in 1889, to Elgar's "Variations on an Original Theme" (to revert to its actual title), composed a decade later.
The "Sinfonia da Requiem," which dates from 1940 when the conflict in Europe was gathering strength, is music of mourning by a dedicated pacifist. Each of the three connected movements takes its title from a section of the Roman Catholic Mass for the dead.
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Runnicles had the measure of this music, its grim despair as well as its hope, and so did the orchestra musicians, from the funereal tread of pounding timpani in the opening "Lacrymosa," through the jagged harmonic clashes of the central "Dies irae" to the hushed consolation of the final "Requiem aeternam."
Principal trumpet Christopher Martin led the skirling trumpet duo in the "Dies irae" Thursday, the same day that the New York Philharmonic announced he would assume the same position with that orchestra in September. (The CSO has granted him a leave of absence for 2016-17 but he will retain his first-chair post here during that time.)
From death-haunted Britten to death-haunted Strauss: Runnicles shaped the Wagnerian ebb and flow of "Death and Transfiguration" in a commanding, dramatic manner that attested to his operatic bona fides (he serves as general music director of Berlin's Deutsche Oper). His fluid pacing and transitions, especially his attention to detail, met their match in exemplary orchestral execution.
That said, the loudest climaxes felt rather congested and I missed the rounded, glowing Strauss sonority I have heard this orchestra achieve while on tour in some of the acoustically superior concert halls of Europe. For this one blame Orchestra Hall, not Runnicles.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra and founder Theodore Thomas introduced Elgar's "Enigma" Variations to American audiences in 1902, less than three years after its world premiere in London. It wasn't the only Elgar work that had its U.S. premiere here -- "The Dream of Gerontius," "In the South," the first two "Pomp and Circumstance" marches and other pieces also kept the composer's music in the ears of local listeners. Would that living composers got that kind of serious attention by today's CSO.
Runnicles led the "Enigma" with real musical feeling and idiomatic assurance, making this the high point of the evening. Each musical portrait in Elgar's masterful gallery of friends had its own color and character, and together they formed a deeply considered totality. The guest conductor made much of the light, dancing quality of the more mercurial variations, and the famous "Nimrod" was warmly shaped, giving off a noble eloquence that nearly always feels forced in the hands of conductors less sensitive to the idiom than he.
The orchestra came through beautifully for Runnicles, and each solo passage was taken with virtuosic distinction. A high point of the CSO's 125th anniversary retrospective, indeed.
The program will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago.
John von Rhein is a Tribune critic.
jvonrhein@tribpub.com
When: 8 p.m. Saturday, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday
Where: Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.
Tickets: $30-$217; 312-294-3000, www.cso.org
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