June 12--With Ravinia getting under way this weekend, and the 2015 Grant Park Music Festival season starting up next week, Chicago's classical music public is thinking summer.
Ah, but the winter season is never truly over until the Chicago Symphony Orchestra says it's over. In fact the CSO has three more weeks of concerts remaining before closing the books on 2014-15. And this weekend at Symphony Center brings the first of two subscription programs conducted by the music director, Riccardo Muti, back in harness after a three-month absence.
The maestro is devoting his initial program to a continuation of his season-long cycle of symphonies by two Russian masters, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Alexander Scriabin. Previous performances in the cycle have brought out the best that Muti and his musicians can achieve together, and the red-blooded accounts of Tchaikovsky's "Manfred" Symphony and Scriabin's "Poem of Ecstasy" on Thursday night had to be reckoned among the high points of the music director's five seasons.
Both musical works were inspired by poetry -- Lord Byron's dramatic poem in the case of the Tchaikovsky's symphony, Scriabin's own verses in the case of the "Poem of Ecstasy," which is actually his fourth symphony. Tchaikovsky is usually thought of as a romantic classicist, Scriabin a mystical modernist.
Muti's interpretations blurred those facile distinctions. The result was that the spiritual journey undertaken by each protagonist followed a similar path: The orgiastic release and grandiose redemption Tchaikovsky's Byronic hero underwent at the end of the programmatic symphony seemed to prefigure Scriabin's ecstatic union with all of creation at the end of his symphony.
"The Poem of Ecstasy" was one of the first works with which then-guest conductor Riccardo Muti began wooing the Chicago Symphony musicians in September 2007 before taking them on tour to Europe where their relationship turned into a full-blown love affair. His appointment as music director followed soon thereafter. Muti's "Poem of Ecstasy" was hot to the touch back then and hot it remains.
Russian pianist Yevgeny Sudbin, who will make his Grant Park debut next week, has remarked that getting too caught up in Scriabin's music can push interpreters to the point of madness. Muti knows when to plunge in headlong, when to pull back. His knife-edged precision and refinement clarified structure even as he brought to the fore Scriabin's voluptuous palette of orchestral colors and sinuous chromatic harmonies. Every section of the huge orchestra came through brilliantly for him, notably the augmented brasses, anchored by Christopher Martin's vaulting solo trumpet. So this is what a summons from the cosmos (or at least Scriabin's cosmos) sounds like.
Muti's great countryman and musical forebear, Arturo Toscanini, called the "Manfred" Symphony "an opera without voices." Muti approached this longest and least-often-performed of the Tchaikovsky symphonies in that spirit. The lyrical pages of the opening movement sang with all the supple cantabile of a Tchaikovsky aria.
His boldly dramatic approach made the narrative events fairly jump off the page, his articulate baton and body language wonderfully expressive of the music's ebbing and flowing intensities.
The second-movement scherzo was as light and rhythmically pointed as one could have wanted. The woodwind playing here was something any wind choir might envy, with potent contributions from Keith Buncke, the CSO's newly hired principal bassoon; and guest principal flute Stefan Ragnar Hoskuldsson of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.
Tchaikovsky's finale, with its rather academic fugue, always has posed problems for conductors. Toscanini, in his 1949 recording, inflicted massive cuts on this movement. Jaap van Zweden, in the CSO's most recent performances of 2012, led a version by Russian conductor Yevgeny Svetlanov that omitted the fugue altogether. Muti proved that Tchaikovsky knew what he was doing. There were no cuts, and by applying firm forward motion to the fugue, he made musical sense of it. The serene closure of the final pages was sensitively shaped.
Muti's Tchaikovsky symphony cycle will conclude with next week's performances of the popular Symphony No. 5. He is saving the final installment of his Scriabin cycle for December, when he is to conduct the composer's own fifth symphony, "Prometheus: Poem of Fire." That's the one with a built-in light show. It is something to anticipate.
The program will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.; $33-$220; 312-294-3000, cso.org.
Von Rhein is a Tribune critic.
jvonrhein@tribpub.com
