Feb. 26--The death of Pierre Boulez last month has left Esa-Pekka Salonen as the most prominent composer-conductor now plying the waters of international guest conducting. At 57, the eternally youthful-looking Finn wears the mantle impressively, without going out of his way to impress.
The meaty program he is conducting with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra this weekend and next week -- a program that includes one of his own pieces -- fairly blew the lid off subscription-concert routine at Orchestra Hall on Thursday night. Salonen's lucid way of illuminating music that clearly engages his composer's intellect, along with his podium command, made clear why he remains so valued a member of the CSO family, nearly three decades after his downtown debut.
The ever-popular cellist Yo-Yo Ma may be the drawing card at these concerts, but it is the chance to revisit Witold Lutoslawski's Symphony No. 3, one of the very few CSO commissions of recent decades that can truly be called a masterpiece, that rates the closest attention of concertgoers.
Salonen knew Lutoslawski well and has conducted much of his music, including all four symphonies, in concert and on recordings. In the conductor's helpful remarks to the audience before leading the Third Symphony, he spoke of how the late, great Polish composer (who died in 1994) "restored a certain faith in symphonic form and thinking" and made direct communication with the audience a central objective with his late music.
Those aims came across in the CSO's performance of the symphony (1972-83) whose world premiere it gave under Georg Solti's direction in 1983, when it became an immediate sensation in the classical music world and was soon to be taken up by major orchestras everywhere.
Salonen knew what he was doing by preceding the Lutoslawski Third with Beethoven -- the innocuous "King Stephen" Overture, which received a vigorous and not at all innocuous reading -- since the symphony represents a modern take on Beethovenian procedures and, indeed, the Beethovenian symphonic tradition itself.
The four sharp iterations of the note E that the orchestra hammers out at the beginning of Lutoslawski's half-hour symphony remind you of the most famous four notes in music history, the ones that launch Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
For much of the rest of the Lutoslawski symphony, the orchestra seems to be searching for a viable way forward from those four proclamatory notes -- stopping and starting up again as various new ideas are proposed for development, only to be rejected. (Think of Beethoven doing much the same thing at the beginning of the finale to his iconic Ninth Symphony.) Only at the end of the second and final movement do the various attempts coalesce into music of powerful resolution.
Lutoslawski tailored this music with the buffed musculature of Solti's CSO in mind, and it still sounds magnificent on this ensemble. The more delicate effects -- phantom figures stealing through the strings, pages of nebulous ad libitum writing -- all registered as acutely as the crunching dramatic gestures. Salonen's ability to organize and clarify the shifting sound layers created a tingling sense of expectancy in the listener. The Chicago musicians met the score's many challenges head on, making Lutoslawski's twisty sonic odyssey exciting and rewarding to follow.
