March 20--Yo-Yo Ma's well-known zeal to take on multiple musical projects has made the superstar cellist, Chicago Symphony Orchestra creative consultant and chief Citizen Musician an invaluable resource for the orchestra as well as the cultural life of the city in general.
His apparently insatiable appetite for work is being put to productive use this year, what with his Silk Road Ensemble concert here two weeks ago and his upcoming chamber music collaboration with CSO musicians in May.
The weekend CSO subscription concerts, with conductor Charles Dutoit completing a two-week, all-French mini-festival, amount to nothing less than a Yo-Yo Ma marathon of French works for cello and orchestra. Few, if any, of our top cellists would have attempted it, let alone brought it off at the high level the cellist achieved at the first performance Thursday night at Symphony Center.
Ma favored the audience with a double header of Gallic concertante works the CSO hasn't touched in some 15 years: Camille Saint-Saens' "La Muse et le Poete" ("The Muse and the Poet") and Edouard Lalo's Cello Concerto in D minor. Thursday's performance of the Saint-Saens reunited the cellist with concertmaster Robert Chen, with whom he introduced this rarity to the CSO repertory at Ravinia in 2000.
A product of Saint-Saens' 75th year, this concertante piece has the violin-as-muse providing a calming influence on the cello-as-poet, as the two soloists pursue moods ranging from wistful to skittish to ardently romantic. The music is not top-drawer Saint-Saens but it is attractive and agreeably made, making stiff technical demands on both players.
Ma and Chen approached the score as a conversation, rather than competition, between two instruments, per the composer's intentions. With full support from Dutoit and the orchestra, the virtuoso and lyrical elements were beautifully integrated.
It was the same story with Ma's commanding account of the Lalo, a fine work that does not turn up in concert nearly as often as it deserves to. (I treasure my memory of the great Frank Miller's performance of it in the mid-1970s, my first "live" experience of the CSO.)
The sheer tonal beauty and intensity of Ma's playing, the pinpoint accuracy of his passage work high up on the fingerboard, the finesse he brought to the throbbing cantilena and dance rhythms alike -- all these things added up to a most winning performance. When the cellist wished to relax into open-hearted song, Dutoit and the CSO were right there to savor the moment as well.
Naturally the audience went wild, and there was nothing to do but play an encore, an exceedingly generous one, at that: Gabriel Faure's somber Elegy for cello and orchestra. The encore was aptly chosen, coming one night after a three-hour tribute to the late Chicago arts broadcaster and journalist Andrew Patner at Orchestra Hall attracted about 1,000 people, according to informal estimates. Ma played the piece eloquently.
Earlier in the program, Dutoit added a relaxed, gracious account of the "Noble and Sentimental Waltzes" to the mini-survey of Ravel orchestral works he began the previous week. He followed this with a shimmering rendition of Debussy's Symphonic Fragments from "The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian."
The suite contains the best sections of the incidental music Debussy provided for a 1911 Paris performance of poet Gabriele d'Annunzio's eponymous miracle play. Nobody stages the play anymore (it's supposed to be dreadful), but the score is a masterpiece: music of mystical rapture and sensuous allure that could have been Debussy's "Parsifal" had he lived long enough to expand it into an opera.
Dutoit brought out the music's subtly rapturous mystery and atmosphere in a wholly idiomatic manner. Many listeners don't associate this kind of delicate, refined French sound with the CSO, but that stereotype has been laid to rest some time ago, particularly since Riccardo Muti's arrival in 2010. I especially liked the hushed radiance Dutoit elicited from the strings in the "Good Shepherd" section, complete with Scott Hostetler's wistful English horn solo.
The program will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.; $38-$280; 312-294-3000, cso.org.
Note: Vladimir Kulenovic, music director of the Lake Forest Symphony, has received the 2015 Solti Conducting Fellow award of $25,000 from the Solti Foundation U.S.A. He will direct the Lake Forest orchestra in concerts Saturday and Sunday at the James Lumber Center in Grayslake; lakeforestsymphony.org.
jvonrhein@tribpub.com
