Mark Elder with the CSO

Thanks to Jenny for getting the Ears and Eyes propers taken care of. Since everyone's appraised of that business, I wanted to give a heads up that one of the CSO's more intriguing series of the season is currently underway, and wraps up Tuesday the 11th at 7:30. (I haven't heard it yet, by the way: I'll be going to the Tuesday show.

I say "intriguing" for two reasons. For one, the guest conductor, Mark Elder, is a young and tremendously gifted and sensitive musician, as well as an innovative programmer; he is really worth making the trip to Michigan and Adams. Interestingly, (and very encouragingly), he's been given two subscription series this season, (most guest conductors get one), which may mean the CSO wants to take a longer look at him as a candidate to fill the vacant principal conductor position. Let's hope they look long and hard, because Chicago really deserves someone young and open-minded enough to forge a long relationship with the orchestra, which is really how major orchestras get their "signature sound", as the CSO did with Solti and Barenboim or the way Los Angeles is right now with Esa-Pekka Salonen. Elder would be both a better and less easy choice than some 75 year old European, a type the CSO seems overly enamored with, who would be simply too steeped in a bygone era of classical music to be able to grow with--meaning, shape and be shaped by--an orchestra over a long period of time.

Just as intriguing as the possibility of Elder taking up residence in Chicago is the quirky program he's put together. He seems incapable of putting together a "give them what they want" bill, and this series is definitely no exception. There is one familiar warhorse on the program: Brahms Double Concerto for Violin and Cello. There aren't many, (including myself), who would put this piece in the same class as Brahms' greatest symphonic works. But strangely, despite its lack of Brahms' usual formal integrity and ingenious sense of motivic flow, it contains some of his most memorable moments. And the question of its "success" as a symphonic work aside, the writing for the solo instruments is totally captivating: violin and cello, often in double stops, weave sinuous lines around each other with a proximity that enticingly approaches but rarely reaches the point of unison. And when unison lines do show up (as in the opening theme of the Adagio, a stately pentatonic tune delivered by the soloists in stark octaves) they are all the more bracing for the brilliant economy of their use.

I'm most looking forward to Elder's reading of Sibelius' 6th Symphony. This is a tremendously vital, compact work which is, confoundingly, almost never played. The CSO hasn't played it since the 70s, and that was probably an accident or something. At any rate, I hope Elder brings his ability to get inside unusual music to bear on this decidedly unusual symphony. Sibelius' post-Romantic phase, (the 3rd Symphony on, roughly), is sadly under-appreciated, probably because his emphasis on a sort of profound, inscrutable and warm formal heart underlying the music takes too much trouble for people to recognize as innovative when his contemporaries were turning music into chaos. At any rate, the Sibelius 6th is the piece I think most perfectly realizes his late-period symphonic ideal of cohesion and fluidity through the use of brief, bracingly original motifs that are expanded upon through accumulation and subtle metamorphosis rather than through sprawling, Beethoven-esque development sections.

"Searching" is a word one hears now and then to describe certain music: that of, say, Coltrane, Beethoven, and Mahler. (Though Mahler, for all his bombastic yearning and searching, never seemed to have much trouble finding, and then wallowing grotesquely in, big, universal, but ultimately banal emotion. The same could be said of another inexplicable celebrity in classical music, Shostakovitch. In fact this gripe with Shostakovitch--that is, too much easy, transparent emotion--is one that was an absolute conviction of Daniel Barenboim, and the relative dearth of Shostakovitch during the Barenboim era was one of the reasons I thought that conductor was such a big loss to the orchestra.)

The notion of music that is always searching or striving is useful in describing what Sibelius' music is decidedly not like. There is an almost mystical surety and a sense of the music being inexplicably "found" and realized from the downbeat to the final bar line of the 6th Symphony. The opening strains in the high strings, recalling sublime Rennaisance polyphony, rooted neither to harmony nor tempo, seem to just materialize from the very air. No self-aware compositional ego there. I'm guessing music as beautiful and yet anti-egoistic as this will get wonderful treatment in the hands of a fundamentally generous musician like Elder.

The other composers on the program are Webern--all I know about him was that he aped Schoenberg's 12-tone style and was a real-life Nazi!--and Delius, who was English I think, and who wrote a string quartet I really like, and...actually that's all I got on Delius. Perhaps an aficionado of the obscure out there (Brian?) could fill out the portrait of Mr. Delius a little.

So, yeah: let's all go see Elder with the CSO on Tuesday, and remember that there's a vitally important campaign going on: Elder for music director!

Been listening to:
Jean Sibelius: Symphony No. 6 (Lorin Maazel with the Vienna Philharmonic)
Fridge: Happiness
Norman Blake: Fields of November
Jason Moran: Soundtrack to Human Motion
The Sonny Stitt Quartet: Personal Appearence