CSO and Haitink close season with magnificent Mahler Ninth

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Bernard Haitink showed his mastery of the music of Mahler in conducting the CSO. | © Todd Rosenberg Photography

Updated: September 24, 2011 12:23AM

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has played Mahler’s Ninth Symphony for just over 60 years, starting when George Szell in 1950 led a performance here of a work then considered an oddity and a jumble. It later became the province of Chicago’s greatest leaders: Solti, Giulini, Levine, Boulez and Barenboim. All but Claudio Abbado gave important and memorable concerts of it downtown or at Ravinia. Giulini, Solti and Boulez also presided over significant recordings of the piece here.

In Chicago as elsewhere, the Ninth, Mahler’s 1909-10 summation of his symphonic life’s work and his last completed score, is an event. The last time the CSO offered the 80 to 90 minute work (interpretations find a wide latitude) at Orchestra Hall was five years ago this month as a part of Barenboim’s spectacular farewell sequence of three nights of “The Nines” of Mahler, Bruckner and Beethoven. The emotions of that evening still resonate.

Think of these things as parts of the biography of the work rather than of its astonishing composer. There are artists whose biography lifts the estimation of their creative output. And then there are those, perhaps no more so than Gustav Mahler, whose masterpieces actually get bogged down by constant “identification” of personal details and alleged intentions in the score. Few conductors have played so important a role in the biography of Mahler’s music while leaving the composer’s real or imagined biography to others than Haitink, whose career began and developed in Amsterdam, the city most receptive to Mahler and his music from the beginning of the 20th century.

Haitink, who led the CSO for four years as principal conductor between the Barenboim and Muti eras, has been playing full Mahler cycles and recording them for half a century. Even before the concert Thursday began, there was a sense of occasion: this great Mahler champion, now 82, leading this great Mahler orchestra, which has such affection and respect for Haitink, in the Ninth for the first time.

These expectations were met and then some. The Haitink signatures were all there — an innate sense that music flows, a control of dynamics that is total but never mechanical, an understanding of both individual lines and the way they exist when woven together (see the fierce conclusion of the Rondo-Burleske), a pacing that starts before the downbeat and remains at work until after the last notes have died away (and few works die away in the way that the last moments of the Ninth do).

There was more. It almost sounds silly to say this, but Haitink tamed the sold-out audience. You could hear the quiet. You could feel the attention. Even between movements, coughing and rustling was at a minimum. This actually relates not only to the conductor’s prestige, but to his understanding of the work itself. The breathing of the strings in the opening andante comodo refers to every part of the piece to come. The four movements are each finely defined and constructed, but are always a part of the whole symphony (here 82 minutes of music).

The rich, 21st-century sound of the CSO strings and their concertmaster Robert Chen, bequeathed to us all by Barenboim, was rarely harnessed as fully as it was Thursday. Leading the violas, assistant principal Li-Kuo Chang, with Chen, brought a tenderness and elegance to his solos that was brilliantly matched by such principals as flute Mathieu Dufour, oboe Eugene Izotov, cello John Sharp, bassoon David McGill, clarinet John Bruce Yeh and bass clarinet J. Lawrie Bloom and piccolo Jennifer Gunn.

Is the piece “about” death? life? struggle? acceptance? rebirth? Haitink knows that it is — like any truly great work of art — about all of these. His Ninth, with its unusually spacious scherzo/laendler and animated final adagio movement, reminds us that the piece is about us.

Principal horn Dale Clev­enger played on all of those great CSO recordings. His life this year, with the loss of his beloved wife and colleague Alice and his own technical challenges, has been as complex as anyone’s could be. He mirrored this with his own humanly difficult playing, his best of the season. This was an evening of what Mahler, our eternal contemporary, is all about.

Andrew Patner is critic at large for WFMT-FM (98.7).