Haitink shows delicacy, subtlety, heart in Ravel

REVIEW | He has no interest in works' show side

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. The first half of November belongs to principal conductor Bernard Haitink and his unique fusion of refinement, passion and preternatural sensitivity.

While 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."

The soloist for the Ravel Left Hand Piano Concerto of 1929-30 was a 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.

The promoted half of the concert was the first CSO performance of Mendelssohn's complete Incidental Music for "A Midsummer Night's Dream." I'm just not sure that an hour of this, 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.

Andrew Patner is a local free-lance writer.