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Concert review
Hrůša, CSO deliver a season highlight with bracing central European works
For those handicapping the race for music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra things got a bit more interesting on Thursday morning.
Esa-Pekka Salonen announced he is resigning from the San Francisco Symphony at the end of the 2024-25 season. “I have decided not to continue as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, because I do not share the same goals for the future of the institution as the Board of Governors does,” said the Finnish conductor in a released statement. Reportedly, the cancellation of a European tour and other artistic cutbacks were the reasons for his decision.
Salonen is among the finest and most popular of regular CSO podium guests and has been a fixture on any informed short list of potential successors to Riccardo Muti. The fact that he will be free in the fall of 2025 gave local EPS fans a thrill up the leg since his availability could make him a more plausible candidate for music director.
But on Tuesday Salonen cancelled his scheduled May CSO appearance—leading Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, no less—so he could receive the Polar Music Prize the same week in Stockholm. That doesn’t sound much like someone who is interested in building a closer relationship with the CSO.
Jakub Hrůša may not turn out to be the next music director of the CSO either. But Thursday night’s concert—the second and final week of the Czech conductor’s March stand—proved even more exciting and successful than last week’s performances with a refreshingly offbeat program played with intensity and panache.
Hrůša received notably enthusiastic audience ovations Thursday night—not only after the performances but upon his entrances, including vociferous cheers. In recent years such greetings have been reserved almost exclusively for Muti. There was a palpable sense for the first time that a Jakub Hrůša era in Chicago could conceivably become a real thing.
It’s not often that a concert opens with Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra—in fact, never in this listener’s experience. After the basses and organ set the scene for the opening “Sunrise,” Hrůša led a majestic account of the famous fanfare marred somewhat by an over-literal brass dropout in the climactic passage.
After that, the conductor didn’t put a foot wrong, building on the notice he gave of being a superb Straussian with last week’s Tod und Verklärung. Hrůša led a whipcrack traversal that invested Strauss’s musical cheaters’ guide to Nietszche with hurtling momentum while making each section register fully.
The warmly moulded strings of the “Backworldsmen” took the edge off the sardonic diss of religious believers, while “Joys and Passions” was aptly fervent, with impressively bravura horns. Strauss’s quasi-serial fugue in “Of Science” emerged strikingly fresh and spacious, arising from the depths of the basses, while “The Convalescent” built inexorably to a massive and imposing restatement of the three-note motto.
Robert Chen’s violin solo in the “Tanzlied” was typically elegant and technically immaculate if lacking something in Viennese swagger for Strauss’s waltzing Übermensch. Chen and Stephanie Jeong were excellent, however, in the quiet penultimate section. Hrůša ensured the slowdown and hushed ending registered effectively as the alternating high winds and basses made clear that the philosophic questions remain unanswered. Too bad about the loud stage noise in the final moment of the performance.
Bohuslav Martinů remains one of the most criminally neglected of 20th-century composers. He was astoundingly prolific, writing six symphonies, over two-dozen concertos, 15 operas, 14 ballets, choral music and a dizzying amount of chamber works including eight string quartets—all with a consistently high quality of invention. Kudos to Hrůša for bringing the music of his countryman to Chicago audiences this week with Martinů’s Violin Concerto No. 1.
Hrůša, who has recorded both Martinů violin concertos with Franz Peter Zimmermann on the Bis label, could hardly have chosen a more apt work to revive with the CSO. Though written in 1933, the concerto was never played and considered lost for four decades until Sir Georg Solti gave the belated world premiere with the CSO in 1973 with Josef Suk as soloist.
The concerto is characteristic of Martinů in its bustling Neo-Classicism with occasional nods to Stravinsky. Yet other elements are Martinů’s own, such at the fleeting pastoralism and the sheer quirkiness of the writing, both rhythmically and in the rapid-fire contrasts of material.
Making his CSO debut, Josef Špaček proved a sterling solo advocate for this strange yet oddly endearing score. The Czech violinist was fully in synch with the motoric opening movement, his steely technique handling the angular bonhomie as surely as the passing lyrical strains. In the Andante, Špaček rendered the lovely main theme with a beguiling tenderness and sweetness of tone that recalled Suk, his illustrious predecessor.
The soloist vaulted through the rough-road bravura of the crazed finale, Špaček and Hrůša ratcheting up the tempo and intensity to a slam-bang coda. With Hrůša and the orchestra backing their soloist with equally vibrant support, this was a brilliant and winning performance, the first by the CSO since the concerto’s premiere 51 years ago. May we hear more of Martinů’s engaging music in seasons to come.
Špaček responded to the clamorous ovations with an equally fizzing encore of Aleksey Igudesman’s Funk the String, morphing his violin convincingly into an electric guitar in a blistering demo of speed and virtuosity. As with Gil Shaham’s encore last week, Hrůša took a harpist’s empty chair onstage to enjoy his compatriot’s solo showpiece.
The evening concluded with the suite from Béla Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin. The 1920s ballet score relates the lurid tale of a criminal quartet that uses a woman to entice unsuspecting men so the trio of thugs can rob them. The victims are an old man, a young student and finally the title mysterious Asian man, who the robbers suffocate, stab and hang but find impossible to kill. Only the woman’s eventual embrace allows the mandarin to die.
Scored for large forces, the 22-minute suite contains most of the half-hour ballet. From the opening urban drive of the oscillating second violins, Hrůša led the orchestra in a vivid, hard-charging performance that brought out the scenario’s incipient violence and eroticism. Bartók’s uninhibited scoring was put across with vehement power and impact, from the aptly strident brass, to the floor-shaking organ pedal points and a harrowing final chase of the mandarin by the criminals.
Individual highlights abounded, from Stephen Williamson’s sensual-sleazoid clarinet luring of the victims, to William Welter’s plangent oboe painting the naive student. Especially striking was the sassy playing of the trombones—led by the remarkable 84-year-old Jay Friedman whose stellar playing over six decades as principal is pretty miraculous by itself.
The program will be repeated 1:30 p.m Friday and 7:30 p.m. Saturday. cso.org
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March 20
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