March 04--Much has been made of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's neglect of French music over the years. But just as shocking, in its way, has been the poor representation of British music on the downtown series.
Case in point: Until guest conductor Mark Elder's performance of Edward Elgar's Symphony No. 1 in A flat at Thursday night's concert, this masterpiece had been absent from the CSO's subscription series repertory for 33 long years. As a matter of fact, those 1983 performances just preceded Elder's CSO debut.
And the two Ralph Vaughan Williams pieces that rounded out the British maestro's attractive, all-English program have been relative strangers to the series as well.
So bravo to Elder (he is, lest we forget, a certified knight of Her Majesty's realm) for restoring three worthy examples of his native music to the orchestra's bloodstream in this, the first program of his two-week residency at Symphony Center.
If this had been London rather than Chicago, the hall would have been packed with clamorous concertgoers. But, faced with repertory many don't know all that well, the subscribers stayed away in droves. Their loss.
Elder prefaced his performance of the Elgar First with spoken remarks that addressed the distinctive, and indeed distinctively English, voice the composer brought to his 1908 symphony. This music, he pointed out, reflects the confidence of Edwardian England even as it departs from Germanic models.
A rude heckler in the audience appeared to take issue with his perfectly sensible observations. Everyone else sat at rapt attention as Elder led the CSO in an eloquent and searching account that went a long way toward atoning for the grievous local neglect of one of the great symphonies of the early 20th century.
Elgar's musical language, his dramatic contrasts, and, above all, his inherent nobility of manner, often have been a graveyard for non-British conductors. Elder, for whom this music is of course like mother's milk, knows exactly how it should go and succeeded, in the main, in teaching the CSO musicians to speak authentic Elgar, although scattered fuzzy entrances and recalcitrant horn playing underlined the fact that it's tough music for any orchestra.
In the epic opening movement, Elder's farsighted handling of structure and rhythmic freedom was matched by the deep, rounded and idiomatic sound he drew from the orchestra. Getting the tempo relationships right, with the proper flexibility and depth of feeling, is a tricky business, but he managed it with the deepest understanding.
