CSO Review | Pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet combines wild virtuosity with relaxed grace
The dream times continue at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with a blissful three-man minuet of some of the world's greatest conductors making delicious music week after week.
Last month was music director designate Riccardo Muti's time and January programs will mark the upcoming 85th birthday of conductor emeritus Pierre Boulez. The first half of November belongs to principal conductor Bernard Haitink and his unique fusion of refinement, passion and preternatural sensitivity.
Next week's concerts hold more of Haitink's out of this world Bruckner and Haydn. This week he ventures into other periods with Ravel and Mendelssohn. Ravel's 1918 orchestration of his 1905 piano piece "Alborada del gracioso" ("Morning Song of the Buffoon") is an orchestral showpiece of longstanding. But Haitink has no interest in the show side of pieces instead showing us the delicacy, subtlety and even heart that defy Stravinsky's famous putdown of the French composer as a "Swiss watchmaker." Principal bassoon David McGill offered the first of several extraordinary solos over the evening. Although there are a number of fine players of his instrument, including his section colleagues, there's simply no other bassoonist who has his tone and line.
The soloist for the Ravel Left Hand Piano Concerto of 1929-30 was another unique instrumentalist. Jean-Yves Thibaudet has a way of combining an often wild virtuosity with an almost relaxed grace that sets him apart from many other performers of his generation. From the first chords of this single movement work (commissioned by the wealthy Paul Wittgenstein after losing his right arm in the First World War), the Lyon-born, Los Angeles-based Thibaudet showed both a total command of the work and tremendous daring, power and delicacy. Player and conductor were of one accord, with Haitink getting great support from principal trombone Jay Friedman in the jazz-inspired sections. Permanent substitute contrabassoon Sue Nigro had the earth rumbling in the work's opening passages. Thibaudet's thrilling performance was one to rank with those Robert Casadesus or Leon Fleisher. Perhaps there will be an encore in subsequent performances.
The promoted half of the concert was the first CSO performance of Mendelssohn's complete Incidental Music for "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Opp. 21 and 61. The 1826 Overture, a perfect work written when the composer was all of 17, has been a standard of two centuries and such sections of the rest of the score as the Wedding March took their place in popular culture when they were penned 17 years later. While there are few conductors besides Haitink who could give this score its proper lightness and precision, I'm just not sure that an hour of this music, intended to accompany Shakespeare's play and with successful ballets set to it by George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton, works as a stand-alone concert piece. My guest compared the experience to eating a whole bowl of exquisite after-dinner mints.
But whatever the quantity, exquisite they were. Guest flute Kersten McCall, principal of Amsterdam's Concertgebouw Orchestra, illuminated the overture and scherzo. The girls of Emily Ellsworth's Anima -- Young Singers of Greater Chicago, were a wonderful chorus of fairies with young American soprano Erin Morley and mezzo Sasha Cooke their spirited leaders. Sir Thomas Allen, the terrific British baritone, read brief excerpts of text culled from the play by the Juilliard's Ara Guzelimian. Haitink gave each section its unique character from the moody nocturne to the protomodern funeral march and the braying dance of the clowns.