Esa-Pekka Salonen offers a mushy Mahler No. 6 with the CSO

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Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen

Updated: January 18, 2012 8:06AM

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s December three-week Mahler mini-survey comes to a close this week with one of the revolutionary composer’s greatest, if belatedly appreciated, works, Symphony No. 6. Guest conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, a lifelong advocate of new music, added to the challenge Thursday night at Symphony Center by also presenting a world premiere: a violin concerto by American composer James Matheson, written for his Swarthmore College roommate, CSO principal second violin Baird Dodge.

A hundred years after Mahler’s untimely death, fascination with the composer and debate over his work’s merits continues and grows. Even so, the Sixth was a late arrival to Orchestra Hall. Antal Dorati, a name not usually associated with the CSO, introduced it here in 1968, and Solti and Bernard Haitink later performed with the CSO. Considering this legacy, Salonen, who picks and chooses his Mahler, faced certain expectations that were hard to ignore .

New interpretations, atmospheres and types of sound can and should be welcome. But Thursday the conductor laureate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic seemed to offer no interpretation at all. He started with a strong rhythmic purpose in the opening marches, one that essayist Theodor Adorno heard as prophesying the barbaric advances of Germany across Europe just 30 years after the symphony’s composition. But this rhythmic sense remained locked in, and with a remarkable lack of dynamic changes, it seemed as if Salonen thought that this was a piece about rhythm.

His clarity and clean podium technique and this pulse that never really went away did prevent the gentle andante movement from falling into the schmaltz offered by some lesser conductors. Except for the principal horn, which ranged greatly in quality, the CSO gave the boyish Salonen (now 53, if you can imagine) everything he wanted, with tremendous string and wind playing and leadership from principal trombone and tuba. But this too often meant they gave him beautiful, loud, undifferentiated sound. Still, in the quieter portions, the quartet of principal winds, the English horn, the first violin, the on- and offstage cowbells, were handled with breathtaking delicacy. By the 80-minute work’s end, it was not clear just where the march to nowhere had arrived, and while there was a stillness, it held neither fear nor catharsis.

This same precision boosted Matheson’s 24-minute three movement work, as surely did Salonen’s own recent experience as a composer of his own formidable and Grawemeyer Award-winning violin concerto. Unlike many younger composers who have a basic idea and then try to orchestrate it, the Cornell graduate school-trained Matheson writes in full orchestral 3-D. Waves of tonal sounds moved across the stage, and sections had individual voices and even voices within the sections.

Much of the meat of the work is in the long 14-minute first movement, marked “Caprice,” and Dodge, a very fine orchestral player and leader stepping out as a CSO soloist for the first time in his 15 years here, kept the focus on the work’s almost non-stop, intricately whirring solo line, even in those passages where Matheson could tamper some of the orchestral sound.

Commissioned by the CSO and the L.A. Phil, the work has clear influences of Philip Glass and John Adams, but as influences, not blueprints or source material. The repetitions and building transformations have Matheson’s own, bustling character. A lovely, introspective slow movement, “Cha­conne,” gives way to a brash “Dance” finale where Matheson loses his own voice and somehow takes us into a John Williams soundscape, complete with ringing chimes.

E.T. needn’t go home just yet, but greater depth at the end and some tinkering that would not prevent a soloist even of Dodge’s very high level from being heard at times could make this a piece well worth rehearing.

Recommended. Repeats at 8 p.m. Saturday, 220 S. Michigan. (312) 294-3000.