Chicago Symphony programs this week send out mixed signals

• Reprints

Guest conductor Alain Al­tinoglu led the CSO in a French bill Thursday night.

Updated: March 26, 2012 8:07AM

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra follows its post-West Coast tour successes with three different but interwoven programs that started Thursday night and run through Tuesday at Symphony Center. Even with a scorecard, it’s difficult to separate them, since they are so intermingled in terms of schedule and content, with scheduled and last-minute debuts by conductors with origins from Central European countries (replacing Pierre Boulez, who had to withdraw from these dates).

Friday afternoon gave us the first outing of a masterful “Beyond the Score” examination/demonstration/performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s 1912 chamber masterwork “Pierrot lunaire.” In it, Gerard McBurney, founding creative director of the CSO’s “Beyond the Score” series, lays out historical, personal, musicological and sociopolitical context for almost every aspect of this ever-haunting combination of German and French cabaret, sprechstimme (spoken voice) and explorations away from traditional tonality.

Running throughout the story of Schoenberg’s life from “Transfigured Night” in 1899 to “Pierrot” in 1912 are the constant strains and stains of anti-Semitism that the Jewish composer encountered in his native Vienna and his twice-adopted Berlin, repeating experiences faced by his mentor and idol Gustav Mahler. With the rise of the Nazis in 1933, Schoenberg was forced to flee Europe with his family.

Surrounding the “Pierrot” performance Friday afternoon were the first CSO performances Thursday and Friday night in almost 70 years of “The Tragedy of Salome” by Florent Schmitt, a composer infamous for one of the most overt displays of Jew hatred outside Nazi Germany. On Nov. 26, 1933, at a concert of music by the German-Jewish emigre Kurt Weill with the Orchestre de Paris at Paris’ Salle Pleyel, Schmitt rose during one of Weill’s songs from “Die Silbersee” and shouted “Vive Hitler!” He then called to end performances by German refugees and Jewish riffraff, launching a long collaboration with pro-Nazi groups and later the occupying Nazis themselves.

But in the CSO program, you won’t see a word about any of this, though there is much discussion of the complicated relationship between Schmitt and Igor Stravinsky, and much speculation on how much this often bombastic and derivative 30-minute reduction of an hourlong ballet score (which Schmitt devised for modern dance pioneer Loie Fuller) might have influenced Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” (1913).

The Schmitt closed out a French program beautifully realized by French-Armenian conductor Alain Altinoglu, who led a fine “Carmen” at Lyric Opera last season. Intelligent and capable of smoothing out many a complex passage in the Schmitt, Bizet’s own 1855 Symphony in C and Chabrier’s greatest hit “Espana,” Altinoglu had the CSO with him all the way. Eugene Izotov contributed splendid oboe solos.

Romanian-born Cristian Macelaru led an all-star “Pierrot” ensemble and actors for the “Beyond the Score” production. More on that after it is heard in concert Saturday night with Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale.” But first with Orff’s “Carmina Burana” last month and now with Schmitt, the CSO is sending out strange signals: audiences should be brought beyond and behind the score, except when they’re not.

At 8 p.m. Saturday and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, “Pierrot lunaire” and “The Soldier’s Tale”; at 3 p.m. Sunday, a repeat of the “Beyond the Score” program with “Pierrot” (highly recommended), Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan. Tickets, $19-$209, (312) 294-3000, cso.org.