Chicago Classical Review

Cancellations at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra can cut in several directions.

Sometimes they can result in replacements that feel hastily thrown together, or that suffer in comparison to the works and/or performers that had been originally scheduled.

But sometimes the substitutions can form a coherent and appealing program all by themselves. Such was the case Thursday night at Symphony Center where guest-turned-substitute conductor James Gaffigan began a weekend series of subscription concerts that were to have been directed by Pekka Kuusisto. 

In a video posted online last month, the Finnish conductor and violinist announced that he is pausing his U.S. engagements over political and ethical concerns, including tax obligations for foreign artists.

While Kuusisto’s withdrawal deprived the audience of hearing The Fiddlers, an unfamiliar string-orchestra piece by the lamented Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, much of his program (using a somewhat reduced version of the CSO) was retained. The agenda included Grieg’s Holberg Suite and the CSO premiere of Sound and Fury by the orchestra’s former composer-in-residence, Anna Clyne.

His cancellation gave subscribers a chance to catch Gaffigan in action three weeks before his previously scheduled return to the CSO podium for the season.

Assistant concertmaster Yuan-Qing Yu graciously assumed the solo duties Kuusisto was to have taken in Fritz Kreisler’s seldom-heard Violin Concerto in C (In the Style of Vivaldi). 

And Gaffigan tied a Classical bow on the revamped program with Haydn’s always-welcome Symphony No. 101 (“Clock”), which was replacing the announced Haydn symphony, No. 64. 

Written in 2019, Sound and Fury is one of the latest Clyne works to take their cue from other works of art—in this case, Haydn’s Symphony No. 60 (Il distratto) and Macbeth’s final soliloquy from the Shakespeare tragedy.

The composer’s acute ear for orchestral color, sonority and dramatic impact is on full display in 17 minutes packed with incident. Strings whirl with ferocious drive, punctuated by a brief Haydn quote in the trumpets. Harmonies suggestive of Elizabethan, even Middle Eastern modal music, undergird melismatic melodic figures, to striking, centuries-spanning effect. Momentum builds and recedes, finally giving way to a prerecorded recitation (the voice is the composer’s own) of the famous “Macbeth” monologue that ends with “Life’s but a walking shadow…full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” 

Such disparate source materials should not coalesce so seamlessly, certainly not to an expressive yield greater than their sum. But they do—and the result is one of the most engaging, finely detailed and ingeniously wrought pieces one has heard from Clyne in recent years. 

Gaffigan and the CSO appeared fully in command of the score’s percolating dynamism and counterbalancing calm. 

They kicked off the program with Grieg’s Holberg Suite. The guest conductor was ever mindful of textural transparency and warm melodic flow. His body of strings was large enough to ensure richness of sonority, yet small enough to sustain a delicate intimacy of expression, especially in the penultimate Air.

For many years Kreisler, one of the great fiddle virtuosos of his day, allowed the C-Major Concerto to be passed off as a work of Vivaldi’s, with musical fillips of his own, fooling a generation of music critics and listeners at a time when the Italian Baroque master’s music was virtually unknown. 

Only in 1935 was it revealed that the piece is entirely Kreisler’s own—a virtuosic recreation of the Vivaldi manner (or, rather, what was understood as such at the outset of the last century), designed primarily to display the performer’s prowess. 

Yu is said to have learned the concerto in short order after she was tapped to replace soloist Kuusisto. But there was nothing tentative about her absolutely assured reading—she clearly had the music in her fingers and heart. She spun the warmly romantic Andante doloroso  section sensitively, her tone full but never cloying. The brisk outer movements also came off tidily, the violinist clearly relishing her close interplay with Gaffigan’s bustling strings and chamber organ.  

Oddly enough, neither Kuusisto with his announced program mix nor Gaffigan with his revised compilation included what would appear to be the obvious Haydn pairing to the Clyne piece—Haydn’s 60th symphony.

No matter. What we got with Gaffigan’s “Clock” Symphony was perfectly charming: Haydnesque classicism met contemporary vitality. Swaying with the tick-tock rhythmic pulse of the slow movement that gives this masterpiece its nickname, his baton-less hands molding singing phrases in midair, he and his forces made brisk work of the outer movements, complete with hair-trigger attacks. 

The only disappointment, to these ears, came in the opening Presto where the pair of trumpets and hard-sticks timpani overbalanced the strings.  

The program will be repeated 1:30 p.m. Friday and 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Symphony Center. cso.org

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