Haitink, CSO match high standards

CONCERT REVIEW | Conductor's reading of Mahler's Sixth is deep, intimate

When principal conductor Bernard Haitink led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in astonishing performances of Mahler's Sixth Symphony at Symphony Center last fall, he did so even though he and the CSO were still getting to know each other.

Wednesday night, Haitink, 79, made his belated Ravinia debut with a one-time-only reprise that confirmed the unique nature of this partnership and Haitink's role as one of the finest Mahler conductors in the world.

In October, Haitink achieved levels of transparency and delicacy that seemed almost impossible to achieve in a work that is too often played for bombast, or worse yet, has bombast added to it. Somehow in the outdoor pavilion with cicadas humming, he found even greater intimacy with this enormous work, making it sound like chamber music -- and deeply affecting chamber music at that.

In a small conducting master class at Tanglewood in Massachusetts last week, Haitink reportedly demonstrated how minimalism in technique can achieve the greatest communication when coupled with authority. Knitting the 85-minute, four-movement symphony into a whole that eludes many, Haitink gave his large Highland Park audience Wednesday an additional object lesson. He and the CSO will take this work to Europe in September, and the fall dates will be captured on a CSO Resound CD.

In the decades of James Levine's music directorship at Ravinia, the CSO's summer home, this was the sort of standard to be expected. Since that time, indifferent administrators have put this jewel of an orchestra into the hands of second-rate orchestral conductors and shifted the CSO into the shadow of weekend pop music acts at the non-profit venue.

With Haitink, Pierre Boulez and Riccardo Muti downtown, the failure to provide a similar level of leadership for the CSO in the off-season is scandalous. The rush of principal players to thank Haitink in his backstage dressing room after the powerful performance spoke with as much volume as the most heart-stopping of Mahler's fortissimos.

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