Mason Bates' "Alternative Energy" was given its world premiere Thursday by Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Photo: Lydia Danmiller

With Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra set to embark on a West Coast tour later this month, the orchestra is rolling out a pair of premieres by its composers in residence over the next two weeks. The contracts of both Mason Bates and Anna Clyne were renewed this week for another two years, and each of their new works will be performed on this tour.

Bates, 35, was up first with the debut of his Alternative Energy, premiered by Muti and the CSO Thursday night.

Scored for large orchestra and Bates’ ever-present electronics, his “energy symphony” is a programmatic, environmentally conscious canvas spanning hundreds of years in four movements. The first section, “Ford’s Farm, 1896” begins in a Midwestern mechanical junkyard. After a brief orchestral introduction, a solo violin plays a rustic fiddle tune, reminiscent of early Americana. An accelerating wooden crank, like that used on early automobiles, sounds a call to arms and the music shifts from an amiable easy-going tempo to a more syncopated urban feel with jazz-inflected clarinets.

The first movement segues without pause to “Chicago, 2012” further charting the development of energy with recordings from the Fermi Lab in Batavia. The mechanistic sounds ping antiphonally from two speakers along with isolated populist fragments and percussion riffs, the orchestra gathering force and building in intensity and rhythmic complexity to a thunderous coda.

In “Xinjiang Province, 2112,” a distorted version of the fiddle tune emerges “on an eerie wasteland,” with the extreme contrasts in dynamics and timbres, painting China’s industrial center erupting into a catastrophic meltdown. This leads into the final section “Reykavik, 2222.” In a mutated environment, a rain forest now exists in Iceland and we hear wooden percussion and recordings of birds as the fiddler returns with distant tribal voices in the background.

Bates’s music is usually most convincing when he has a large canvas to work with as was the case with his The B-Sides, which Muti and the CSO played last May. There is a certain engaging, artless audacity in his writing for orchestra and the electronic element is here fluently melded with the live musicians.

Yet I confess I found much of Alternative Energy overblown, slick and superficial, centered on surface sonic glitz and “hip” populist riffing with little musical substance at its core. Bates’ music is concentrated on pulsing rhythms and shifting beats almost to the exclusion of everything else. Ultimately, that doesn’t have a whole lot to offer over the long term, much less enough to sustain a 25-minute symphony for large orchestra.

Too much of the first two movements sounds like empty vamping for big-band orchestra. (Jazz and the symphony have never really been successfully assimilated unless you’re Gershwin, Ellington or Bernstein, and that’s not the case here.) A swooning melody for celesta and harp in the opening movement sounds like cut-rate John Williams. For all the composer’s much-hyped hipness and electronica DJ background, the music often seems empty and old-fashioned, bouncing along with all the efficient soullessness of a 1970s TV cops show soundtrack.

In the third movement, the writing for piano and high percussion borders on kitsch. The last movement is especially vacuous, loping along with electronic bird noises until it finally runs out of steam in an anticlimactic coda. For all the varied percussion, shifting rhythms, and electronic elements, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that beneath all the hectic surface, there’s no there there.

No complaints about the performance with Muti giving as much complete dedication and meticulous balancing to this score as he would a Verdi opera. The orchestra provided full-metal support for this premiere with special note to Robert Chen’s violin solos and the hard-working percussion ensemble

Franck’s Symphony in D minor is not quite the concert-hall staple it was a few decades ago, possibly due to too many indifferent readings.

Thursday’s performance made one appreciate the symphony anew. Characteristically, Muti brought a wide dynamic palette and refined tonal polish to this uber-chromatic music. The dark, organ-like sonority of Franck’s scoring fits the CSO like a glove and Muti brought out the hymnic qualities well as the bravura brilliance. Aside from intermittent bobbles from the principal horn, the orchestra played gloriously for their music director, with Scott Hostetler’s plaintive and expressive English horn solo a highlight.

In a clever bit of programming, Muti prefaced the Bates premiere with a machine-inspired work from an earlier era, Arthur Honegger’s Pacific 231. Amazingly, this was the work’s first downtown CSO performance since 1930 when Frederick Stock conducted.

With nearly a century of sonic assaults, musical and otherwise, Pacific 231 has lost much of its original shock value and can seem almost quaint today. Muti led a vital performance of Honegger’s aural train-spotting that bracingly portrayed the slow startup, gradual acceleration and mechanistic cacophony.

The program will be repeated 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. cso.org; 312-294-3000.

Nicholas Kraemer led Music of the Baroque in works of Haydn and Handel Monday night at the Harris Theater.

If you can’t enjoy Haydn, then it’s quite likely — as a soprano friend puts it — that you have no soul.

Nicholas Kraemer and Music of the Baroque offered two of Haydn’s symphonies and ample soul Monday night at the Harris Theater, with neither work regularly heard and one a genuine obscurity.

Haydn’s Symphony No. 31 just precedes his sturm und drang period, yet even here the composer was experimenting within the form, often by spotlighting individual instruments. The symphony gets its subtitle (Horn Signal) by the use of four horns and while the brass has fleeting moments in the sun, the horns are used less for bravura spectacle then for varied orchestra coloring. It’s an odd work even by Haydn’s standard with a strange finale (marked “Very Moderate”) and ending with stately concertante solos before a belated burst at the coda.

Kraemer has a wonderful way with Haydn. Directing from the harpsichord, MOB’s principal guest conductor drew a superbly balanced performance that put across the tempo shifts and rhythmic acuity with an innate, idiomatic understanding of the musical wit and jumpy dynamism.

The quartet of horns (Jonathan Boen, Oto Carrillo, Gail Williams and Neil Kimel) provided mostly gleaming playing though at least one of the group was clearly having an off night. The most prominent roles are  taken by other instruments and the principals acquitted themselves superbly, including concertmaster Robert Waters, cellist Barbara Haffner, flutist Mary Stolper, double bass Collins Trier and oboists Robert Morgan and Peggy Michel.

The Symphony No 98 is one of the most infrequently played of Haydn’s late works in the genre (not that even the “popular” ones are heard that much these days). It combines sone of his wittiest music with a dark grandeur rare in these late symphonies. Haydn had recently heard of the death of Mozart and in the tragic introduction and the somber Adagio –with a strong resemblance to the slow movement of Mozart’s Jupiter symphony — it’s hard to avoid the feeling that he is paying tribute to his departed friend.

Kraemer here provided a virtual seminar in Haydn conducting — giving ample weight to the dark-hued introduction yet segueing gracefully into the ensuing Allegro and giving enormous lift to the buoyant main theme. The Adagio was imbued with apt elegiac expression without ever traversing Rococo parameters.

The Presto finale offers one of Haydn’s most simple and infectious melodies and Kraemer and the orchestra threw off all the unexpected turns and rhythmic flips with huge panache. The little harpsichord solo near the end — its only appearance in the entire symphony and likely some private Haydn joke—had just the right quirky insouciance in Kraemer’s hands.

Two Handel works made up the middle portion of the program. In the Concerto Grosso in D major (Op. 6, no. 6) for strings, Kraemer drew notably elegant and intimate string playing, by turns vivacious, fizzing and graceful with refined solo contributions by the front desk players.

Handel’s Concerto a due cori in F major, composed for a production of his oratorio Judus Maccabaeus, is cast on a larger scale with four oboes and pairs of horns and bassoons and timpani. The conductor elicited a majestic yet vigorous performance that made much of the antiphonal exchanges between the “two choruses.” The horns were challenged at times by the treacherous high writing yet the performance was otherwise finely polished and incisive with especially inspired oboe playing from Morgan.

Joshua Bell and pianist Sam Haywood performed Sunday afternoon at Symphony Center.

Sunday afternoon at Symphony Center, violinist Joshua Bell and pianist Sam Haywood presented gleaming, polished, and thoroughly engaging readings of four standard sonatas and a trio of Gershwin preludes. There was nothing unexpected either in repertoire or execution, a state of affairs perfectly suited to him and his considerable fan base.

Bell has a tendency to excessively micromanage in concertos, but the duo sonata format seems to constrain this predilection, requiring particular attention to structure and balance. His instincts and intellect serve him well in this conversational idiom, particularly with a partner as sensitive and capable as Haywood. The only mismatch onstage was Haywood’s use of an iPad (with bluetooth-enabled page turning) versus Bell’s analog printed scores. How long before human page-turners seem downright quaint?

Mendelssohn’s sonatas, oddly neglected until a half century ago, have long been favorites of Bell. In his hands the F major sonata was lyrical, lithe, and confidently idiomatic. Haywood seemed right at home, making easy work of the composer’s formidable passagework with crisp transparency and an unflagging sense of line.

Bell’s sound might not seem suitably weighty for Brahms’ darkly-hued Sonata No. 3, but the pair brought a tight rhetorical focus to Brahms’ late masterwork. The third movement gained measurably from an unusually brisk tempo, and the pianist’s formidable technique never showing signs of strain here or in the majestic finale.

I’ve heard edgier versions of Ysaÿe’s unaccompanied Sonata No. 3 (Ballade), but none that could match the vivid color palette and sheer poetry of Bell’s reading. He managed to convey the oddly obsessive quality of the score without sacrificing the unwavering beauty of his sound. Jascha Heifetz’s beloved arrangements of three Gershwin piano preludes revealed an intensely personal vision, but Bell avoided the overwrought caricatures that sometimes mar the second of the set, Blue Lullaby.

Blues idioms were furthered explored in the Ravel Sonata, a work featured on Bell’s new disc French Impressions and one perfectly suited to the duo’s strengths. The violinist’s subtly colored hues in the opening movement were neatly echoed by Haywood, while the breathless scampering in the final Perpetuum Mobile was a bracing adrenalin rush. Needless to say, both played with the same measure of astonishing accuracy and polished finesse evident in every other work. Bell played a lone but lengthy encore, a zesty and vibrant reading of Sarasate’s chestnut, Zigeunerweisen.

Artistic curiosity seems to develop early in a career, so it may be too late to hope for a spark to explore beyond the familiar scores he learned in his teens. In the meantime, Bell looks, sounds, and moves like the remarkable wunderkind of 25 years ago.

David Finckel and Wu Han performed in the opening program of the Chamber Society of Lincoln Center Friday at the Harris Theater.

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center opened its new Chicago residency series Friday night at the Harris Theater with a program of  music for clarinet, cello and piano.

As pianist Wu Han noted in her charming opening remarks, she and cellist David Finckel, current artistic directors of the Chamber Music Society, decided that for this inaugural event of the three-year Harris residency, they would come to Chicago themselves to perform. The couple was joined by clarinetist David Shifrin — their predecessor as artistic director of the New York ensemble for over a decade — and the relaxed and convivial feeling of friends playing together was manifest throughout the evening’s performances.

Three works by German composers made up Friday’s program with Beethoven and Brahms framing the evening.

The concert led off with Beethoven’s Clarinet Trio. While this lightish early work (1798) doesn’t quite display the rambunctious genius to come, there are ample musical delights therein.

The three musicians proved simpatico collaborators in this music bringing out the playful spirit with vivacious, lightly inflected playing. Finckel’s burnished tone launched the lovely main theme of the Adagio, sensitively echoed by Shifrin (too bad the intimacy and dynamic subtlety of the playing suffered repeated bronchial outbursts from coughers). The performance was rounded off with a personality-plus rendition of the final theme and variations thrown off with great joy and panache, the trio making the most of Beethoven’s rhythmic flips and harmonic curveballs.

Brahms’ Clarinet Trio is a much better known quantity. The obligatory “autumnal” is often applied to Brahms’ chamber works, but certainly applies here. The Lincoln Center musicians brought out the vein of reflective introspection in their relaxed, conversational style, with Shifrin finding a klezmer-like coloring in some of Brahms’ Hungarian-contoured melodies.

David Shifrin

The centerpiece, Max Bruch’s Eight Pieces, may be the least-known work on the program but offered the finest playing of the night.

Bruch wrote these separate movements for clarinet, viola and piano in 1909, but they could easily have stemmed from a half-century earlier, written in the composer’s lushly melodic style.

Bruch advised against playing the entire set in concerts and instead encouraged musicians to make up their own groupings of individual sections. The four excerpts heard Friday (Nos. 6, 2, 3 and 7) made a nicely varied and effective 19-minute suite.

All three musicians were fully inside of Bruch’s distinctive vein of darkly ruminative late Late Romanticism. Finckel and Shifrin played with fuller, more expressive tone than in the preceding Beethoven in the opening Nachtgesang (Nocturne). The restless agitated No. 2 proved worthy contrast, the confection closing with the Seventh Piece’s skittish hyperactive energy.

Yet most striking was No. 3. With superbly sensitive keyboard work by Wu Han, the two men provided wonderfully supple contrasts—Finckel’s cello elegiac and unsettled, Shifrin’s clarinet providing easing balm.

The program will be repeated at Lincoln Center 5 p.m. Sunday and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. chambermusicsociety.org.

The Chamber Society’s next program at the Harris Theater will be March 20 and feature pianists Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Anne-Marie McDermott, Andre-Michel Schub and Wu Han. harristheaterchicago.org.

Riccardo Muti, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and CSO Chorus following ther performance of Orff's "Carmina Burana" Thursday night. Photo: Todd Rosenberg

To add to the hoopla of Riccardo Muti’s return to the podium Thursday night, it was announced earlier in the day that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and its Italian music director would launch Carnegie Hall’s 2012-13 season with three programs in October.

Muti and the CSO will open the Carnegie season October 3 with Carmina Burana, the first of three New York programs and the principal work on this week’s Chicago concerts.

Carl Orff is remembered almost exclusively for his sprawling 1937 opus, a profane oratorio of sorts inspired by medieval monastic texts that celebrate all the country pleasures of drink, sex and gluttony.

Yet for all its lusty fervor and boisterous choruses, Carmina Burana presents a decidedly bleak and medieval world view — one of intense loneliness, spiritual vacuity, unslaked longing and a kind of compulsive desperation in pursuit of salubrious pleasures. Against the unceasing wheel of fate, man has about as much chance of happiness as Orff’s slow-roasted swan.

Muti has long experience with Carmina Burana, most famously leading a Berlin Philharmonic performance in 1980 in the presence of the 84-year-old composer. Many interpreters prefer to concentrate on the rousing choral moments at the expense of the quiet interior passages. Characteristically Muti gave us both, with a fizzing, at times electrifying performance that made one appreciate the musical ingenuity of Orff’s cantata anew.

Rarely will one hear the massive climaxes put across with this kind of sonic force allied to such airtight ensemble. Muti’s balancing of the large forces was extraordinary even by his standard, with chorus, orchestra and large percussion battery all gleaming and brilliantly manifest. The explosive power of those uninhibited moments was staggering.

Yet just as striking was the tonal elegance of the playing and choral singing as with In Springtime or the vernal freshness of the Round Dance, highlighted by Mathieu Dufour’s flute solos. Muti and the orchestra and chorus consistently brought out the multihued palette of this score, the tender delicacy as well as its primitive rhythmic punch.

The only debit of the evening was the uneven trio of soloists. Soprano Maria Grazia Schiavo was less than grazia Thursday, her shallow tone and hectoring approach resulting in a fluttery, short-breathed In trutina. Countertenor Max Emanuel Cencic proved nearly inaudible in his Song of the Roasted Swan, unable to project, much less bring pathos or wry irony to his solo.

Only Stephane Degout matched the high musical level of Muti, the CSO and CSO chorus. A wonderful Papageno in the Lyric Opera’s recent Magic Flute, the French baritone sang with warm, rounded tone and keen intelligence, avoiding the usual caricature in the song of the dissipated Abbot and bringing a touching, genuine feeling to Dies, nox et omnia.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Chorus sang magnificently in one of their finest outings of recent seasons. Duain Wolfe’s singers conveyed the raw fervor as well as the melancholy of Orff’s score, and the Chicago Children’s Choir under Josephine Lee, provided bright-toned vocalism in their brief appearances.

Schubert’s Symphony No. 3 was the welcome palate cleanser of the evening.

Muti is often at his best in cornerstone Austrian repertoire, and so it proved again Thursday. The Italian conductor’s Schubert is more incisive and sharply pointed than most with a middleweight sonority that offers an admirable balance between Viennese refinement and German weight. Yet there was ample charm, particularly in the lilting Allegretto and vigorous Menuetto with rustic and characterful solo work by clarinetist Stephen Williamson and oboist Eugene Izotov, respectively.

Charm was in scant supply in the opening work, Dmitry Smirnov’s Space Odyssey, heard Thursday in its world premiere.

The prolific Russian composer wrote this seven-minute work to recapture some of the lively spirit of the “old-fashioned overtures” that have traditionally opened concerts citing curtain-raisers by Glinka, Verdi and Berlioz as inspirations.

Not in this galaxy. Smirnov’s cacophonous work lurches unconvincingly from martial drums and melancholy wind writing to elephantine bombast. Riffs from Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra fitfully peek through but it is Smirnov’s background as film composer that seems most evident in this noisy, massively overscored music with substance in inverse proportion to its volume. Muti and the orchestra delivered a resounding performance, however, and the composer — rather dismayingly — was enthusiastically applauded by the audience.

The program will be repeated 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. cso.org; 312-294-3000

The Pacifica Quartet performed Sunday afternoon at Mandel Hall.

As the University of Chicago’s resident performing ensemble, the Pacifica Quartet maintains a regular presence on the University of Chicago Presents series.

If Sunday afternoon’s Mandel Hall concert looked a tad conservative on paper, at least by Pacifica standards, the end result of juxtaposing two stalwarts of Romanticism — Beethoven’s Razumovsky Quartet in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1 and Dvořák’s Piano Quintet in A Major, Op. 81 — actually worked surprisingly well.

Beethoven’s three Razumovsky Quartets revolutionized the genre, so much so, that neither the works’ first performers nor audiences know quite what to make of them.

This was particularly true of the first quartet of the three — Op. 59, No. 1 in F Major — which was not only the first of the group prepared and performed, but also the most massive.

A masterpiece of demonstrating the art of how much can be done with so little, the motif of the work is a single note in rhythmic pulse that is introduced in the second movement by the cello showcasing Beethoven at his most mischievous, the spirit that dominated the Pacifica performance.

By the third movement, the cello takes a more serious role as the motif transformation becomes more radical and expansive until giving way to a finale that manages to work in a Russian folk tune in honor of the count that commissioned the set with that kind of bizarre assimilation that only Beethoven seems to be able to pull off.

This was a performance of remarkable scope and intensity with an eye on the overall structure of the piece from its introductory movement that served as an overture of the drama and humor to follow to its confident and rousing finale.

Despite having been composed some eighty years later, Dvořák’s Piano Quintet in A Major, Op. 81 is as complacent in its Romanticism as Beethoven was as revolutionary in helping to establish it by breaking free of the forms of Classicism.

By the time of Dvořák’s Piano Quintet, the expansionism that seemed so radical in Beethoven had given way to a free-form view of structure that perfectly suited Dvořák’s lingering melodies. Indeed, the motifs in the Dvořák work are longer and more melodic which means that Dvořák need not be so innovative with them.

The wholesale myth that Dvořák’s music is principally derived from genuine Czech folk material may have initially helped promote his works in his day, but it has also served to minimize Dvořák’s own extraordinary gift as an imaginative melodic composer in his own right.

In actuality, while the Quintet does paraphrase many features and forms associated with Czech music — the second movement is even called Dumka — remarkably, every one of these themes is Dvořák’s own, yet still evocative enough as to sound familiar within a single hearing.

Jorge Federico Osorio

Jorge Federico Osorio has long made Highland Park his home, but seemingly had to prove himself the world over before being given his due as a concertizer of choice here. The Mexican-born pianist made the ideal collaborator for the Pacifica and together they made a compelling case for music that can be wallowed in by performers.

Here, however, all forces involved were careful to pace themselves so that Dvořák’s grand melodic moments made their greatest impact with nuanced fluctuations of dynamics and balances.

Some of the quiter moments were almost elegiac and yet Dvořák’s playfulness, clearly an inspiration from Beethoven, was also revealed in sharp relief.

Charles Dutoit led the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Sunday afternoon at Symphony Center.

The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra stopped at Symphony Center Sunday afternoon, the venerable English ensemble drawing a respectable and quite appreciative audience. With Charles Dutoit, music director since 2009, leading the proceedings, one expected a firm degree of discipline and control and largely got it.

Zoltan Kodaly’s Dances of Galanta made a worthy calling card for the London-based orchestra. The strings are highly impressive if unable to match the current refined corporate bloom of the Chicago Symphony, but the RPO offers muscular brass and first-class woodwinds. This was a taut, pungent reading, distinguished by Michael Whight’s febrile and evocative clarinet solos. The rhythmic intricacies and sharp contrasts in mood and tempi were dexterously handled by Dutoit and the musicians delivered the music with fleet bravura, the no-nonsense Swiss conductor keeping a tight rein on the proceedings.

Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 may not have been the most imaginative choice as the main work on the program but the strong and impassioned performance led by Dutoit succeeded in blowing the dust off of this thrice-familiar warhorse. The darkly atmospheric clarinets set the tone in the lugubrious introduction and Dutoit directed a thrustful, smartly paced account of the ensuing Allegro. Laurence Davies lofted a beautifully rounded horn solo in the Andante.

Following a rather brisk account of the Waltz, Dutoit led attacca into the final movement and whipped up considerable excitement and propulsion leading to a notably brassy and triumphant coda. While the Royal Philharmonic played well across sections, again it was the outstanding personality-plus contributions of the woodwinds that shone most prominently.

Jean-Yves Thibaudet

The just-passed Liszt bicentennial year was represented with the program’s centerpiece, the Hungarian composer’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with Jean-Yves Thibaudet as soloist.

While not quite as awe-inspiringly crass as its predecessor, the Second Concerto still is imbued with Liszt’s glitzy pyrotechnics, ham-fisted orchestration and banal themes. Thibaudet and Dutoit tamped down the unhealthy vulgarity as much as possible, and the French pianist’s blend of tonal elegance and steel-fingered bravura provided superb advocacy for this rather vacuous showpiece.

Sondra Radvanovsky and Marcello Giordani in the Lyric Opera of Chicago's "Aida." Photo: Dan Rest

Without trying too hard, one can think of any number of reasons why Aida should be problematic for 21st-century audiences: stock wooden characters, a ludicrous historical scenario, hoary Meyerbeerian pageantry and a fair amount of three-ring theatrical humbug.

There’s just that pesky issue of Verdi’s magnificent music — the principal reason why this tale of tragic love among the dunes has remained so compelling for the past one-and a-quarter centuries. The difficulty, of course, is fielding a group of singers that can handle the daunting demands of the score, providing the requisite power as well as the emotional intimacy.

The Lyric Opera’s revival of Aida, which opened Saturday night at the Civic Opera House, took awhile to hit cruising speed, with the first two acts feeling decidedly stiff and stagy. Yet with Marcello Giordani leading a strong cast and crackling musical direction by Renato Palumbo, the performance gained in dramatic cut and vocal intensity as the evening unfolded, rising effectively to the tragic heights of the final scene.

The tale of the doomed love between the Egyptian general Radames and the Ethiopian slave girl Aida remains nearly as renown for its stage trappings as Verdi’s music. Yet it is those very theatrical excesses that make the opera seem so dated today. Even with graceful stylized dancing (choreography by Kenneth von Heidecke) from the large ballet corps and majestic orchestral playing in the Triumphal March– one hapless trumpet ringer apart — it all feels overblown and silly. You find yourself wishing for the Marx Brothers to enter the stage and decimate the proceedings as they did with Il Trovatore in A Night at the Opera.

But, as they say, if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will like.

Verdi did no favors for tenors by requiring them to tackle one of the canon’s most tortuous arias two minutes into the opera. Giordani sounded husky in his middle and lower range in Celeste Aida but made up the balance with his powerful gleaming top notes.

As is his dramatic style, the Sicilian tenor effectively underplayed the somewhat stolid role of Radames but rose to the vocal challenges superbly. Giordani’s voice soared thrillingly over the massed ensembles of Act 2 and he brought an emotional depth and highly nuanced vocalism to his late scene with Amneris and the final duet.

Sondra Radvanovsky, in the title role, was the clear audience favorite Saturday with her O patria mia receiving the most prolonged ovation of the evening. It’s no secret that is not a bountiful era for Verdi sopranos and despite the American singer’s bona fides in this repertoire, I found her Aida only fitfully successful and rather anodyne both vocally and dramatically.

Radvanovsky’s soprano has fine clarity and penetration but is lacking in weight and amplitude and at times sounded a size too small for the role. She was at her finest in the quiet moments, as with the lovely pianissimo and seamless descent at the end of O patria mia and the closing O terra addio with Giordani.

Yet hers was a rather pallid Aida, wanting in intensity, vocally and dramatically. For a singer lauded for her acting ability, Radvanovsky’s Aida felt generalized with too much old-fashioned “opera acting,” for which director Matthew Lata must also take some blame.

Jill Grove has appeared to inherit the mantle from Dolora Zajick as our leading Amneris, as was made manifest by her knockout performance as Aida’s jealous rival. Rich-toned and vividly projected, the mezzo-soprano delivered a more rounded villainess than usual, singing with great feeling and bringing fire and emotional complexity to her confrontation with Radames as well as a surprisingly affecting sadness.

So too Gordon Hawkins invested Amonasro with a big voice and dramatic bite that enlivened Act 2. Raymond Aceto was a powerfully resonant Ramfis, Evan Boyer a capable King of Egypt, Cecilia Hall an admirable offstage Priestess.

Under Michael Black the augmented Lyric Opera Chorus brought majestic weight and corporate gleam to the massed ensembles.

This Lyric production is more than two decades old — how many times have you read that this season? — yet Nicolas Joel’s elegant and evocative staging (sets and costuming by Pet Halmen) still manages to supply the requisite grandeur while avoiding over the-top circus vulgarity. Apart from the Nile boat that snagged and refused to move in Act 3, there were few opening-night glitches.

Much of the success of Saturday’s performance was due to the idiomatic musical direction of Renato Palumbo. When tension sagged on stage — particularly in the first two acts — the Italian conductor managed to lift the performance with the necessary hair-trigger adrenaline, drawing refined and powerful playing from the Lyric Opera Orchestra as needed.

Aida runs through Feb. 8 and from March 6-25. Hui He and Marco Berti will sing the roles of Aida and Radames in the March performances. lyricopera.org; 312-332-2244.

Manfred Honeck led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in music of Dvořák and Beethoven Wednesday night.

This week’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra program is centered on meat-and-potatoes Czech-German repertory with two familiar standards by Dvořák and Beethoven.

Yet there was nothing the slightest bit routine about the combustible performances delivered by the orchestra under the baton of Manfred Honeck Wednesday night at Symphony Center.

The Austrian conductor, music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony since 2008, has been a CSO podium guest previously, as recently as four years ago.

Wednesday’s slightly abbreviated Afterwork Masterworks concert brought one of the most thrilling CSO nights so far this season with a galvanic performance of Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8.

Dvořák’s Eighth has received its share of memorable local outings from Carlo Maria Giulini’s warm-hearted 1978 performance (set down for posterity on Deutsche Grammophon) to the most recent rendering by Sir Mark Elder in 2009.

Fine as that impassioned performance was, Honeck managed to find an even more notable balance between Dvořák’s contrasting elements, with the confident exuberance and rhythmic swagger especially well projected.  He set a brisk pace for the opening Allegro (aptly con brio as marked) yet the CSO’s playing was compelling more for the rhythmic clarity and Honeck’s balancing as for speed. Tuttis had fire and a lean brilliance yet the music never sounded overdriven, with Honeck finding ample room to allow the Czech composer’s rustic charm to emerge with vernal freshness.

Rarely will one encounter a performance of a Dvořák symphony with the kind of rarefied dynamic nuance Honeck brought to the middle movements: in the Adagio, the carefully blended winds conveyed the dark unease as well as the lyrical warmth, and the Allegretto went with the requisite al fresco lilt.

With a clarion launch by two trumpets, the closing movement was exhilarating, Mathieu Dufour sailing through the famous flute solo with full tone and technical gleam even at Honeck’s fast clip.  Even here, Honeck managed to slow down gracefully to admire the passing view.  The penultimate lyrical passage was rendered withbeguiling tenderness — and a lovely clarinet solo by Stephen Williamson — before the exuberant final burst from the orchestra. A thunderous ovation for the Austrian conductor, which he quickly shared with the CSO woodwinds and the rest of the orchestra.

Till Fellner

The preceding performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 was no less distinctive.

Soloist Till Fellner explored a fine middle ground between Mozartian articulative clarity and Romantic weight in this early Beethoven work (the composer’s second piano concerto to be written, but published first).

The Austrian pianist brought a rapt inner expression to the meditative Largo, with glove-like support by Honeck, as with the delicate interplay of the keyboard soloist and John Bruce Yeh’s solo clarinet. The rollicking Rondo finale — arguably Beethoven’s most sheerly joyous concerto movement — was infectious at a fast tempo, with Fellner’s bright-toned solo work showing faultless security.

Honeck’s taut, acutely focused accompaniment was in symbiotic support with his solo compatriot. The conductor’s spacious drawing out of that moment of repose before the closing tutti made Beethoven’s musical punchline even more effective.

Honeck is continuing to use the same orchestra layout favored by Sir Mark Elder the past two weeks with violins split and cellos inside left and center with basses behind. This setup seems to provide a somewhat richer, more burnished sonority than the standard CSO arrangement.

The program will be repeated with the addition of the Overture to Johann Strauss Jr’s Die Fledermaus 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday. cso.org; 312-294-3000.

Mei-Ann Chen shared the podium with other conductors in the Chicago Sinfonietta's Martin Luther King birthday concert Monday night at Symphony Center.

Mei-Ann Chen, the Chicago Sinfonietta’s new music director, sometimes refers to herself as “a young Asian lady,” deliberately evoking the stereotype of a petite woman with a ready smile and quiet voice that the phrase implies.

At first glance, the 38-year-old conductor who was born in Taiwan and relocated to the U. S. in her mid-teens, fits the stereotype well. But a fierce desire to communicate through music burns in her soul, and that ferocity was on vivid display at the Sinfonietta’s annual program honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Monday night in Symphony Center.

Chen succeeded Paul Freeman, the Sinfonietta’s founder, in the fall, so Monday’s concert was her first time sharing the stage with the mighty Apostolic Church of God Sanctuary Choir.  When the current season was being planned, she said in remarks to the audience, she was delighted for the chance to work with the choir, a frequent guest at the Sinfonietta. But, she acknowledged with a rueful smile, she quickly realized she had “no idea how to do gospel music.”

Maybe so, but Chen is apparently a quick learner. During the concert’s second half featuring the choir she shared conducting duties with two of the ensemble’s leaders: H. Chip Johnson, Jr., director of music, and Willetta Greene-Johnson, choir conductor. Exuberant, gifted conductors, they set the hall rocking with full-throated, uptempo singing from the choir and savvy, charismatic soloists, alto Rev. Ivory Nuckolls and tenor James Hudson.

But Chen’s conducting style, intense and highly expressive, is ideal for gospel music. She drew a similarly expert blend of weighty, blended choral sound and heaven-storming emotion from the musicians in the two gospel works she conducted: Total Praise for chorus and orchestra, and Champion, for chorus, orchestra and tenor soloist Travis A. Newsome.

The program’s new work was the world premiere of Harambee: Road to Victory, a sunny, 10-minute jazz-inflected piece for flute, choir and orchestra by Nicole Mitchell. A noted jazz flutist and composer, Mitchell played with the Sinfonietta for several years before relocating to California last year. A family emergency kept Mitchell from appearing as soloist herself in Harambee, but a young Chicago woodwind player and composer, Kedgrick Pullums, stepped in with confidence. At times his bright, powerful flute soared and whirled in syncopated ecstasy, at times the mood was more meditative. But he easily rode the big, uptempo waves of choral and orchestral sound deftly shaped by guest conductor Jeri-Lynne Johnson.

The concert opened with three classical orchestral pieces: Kodaly’s Dances of Galanta led by Chen, Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3 from Fidelio led by Johnson, and Central Park in the Dark by Charles Ives, which featured both women on the podium.  The Sinfonietta played both the Kodaly and Beethoven with impressively clean phrasing and subtly shaded color, but both works sounded episodic, lacking a sense of cohesive sweep.

Central Park in the Dark, with its dark, quietly rustling undercurrent intermittently interrupted by cheery outbursts, could not have been more haunting, however. Under Chen’s direction, the Sinfonietta’s strings evoked a mysterious, slowly unfolding universe. When the woodwinds, directed by Johnson, and piano burst into bits of honky-tonk high spirits, the sense of pulsing life pushing against a big, quiet city was compelling.