Chicago Classical Review

Anne Akiko Meyers and conductor Giancarlo Guerrero paired up for the Philip Glass Violin Concerto No. 1 this past summer at the Grant Park Music Festival, toward the end of the latter’s accomplished second season as the lakefront festival’s artistic director. Thursday night the pair were again together downtown, slightly further south and across Michigan Avenue, offering the first Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances of Arturo Márquez’s Fandango for Violin and Orchestra.

Márquez composed Fandango for Meyers in 2021, and the California native gave the world premiere with the Los Angeles Philharmonic that year at the Hollywood Bowl. A 2023 recording of that performance garnered the composer a Latin Grammy for Best Classical Contemporary Composition, and Meyers brought the work to the Grant Park Music Festival the following summer. Thursday’s commanding performance from Meyers and the CSO made clear what sets the work apart.

Márquez’s score is clearly in the spirit of the great Romantic violin concertos, though updated with 21^st-century sensibilities and the composer’s distinctive Mexican and Spanish influences. Each of its standard three movements channels a different dance form, resulting in a novel synthesis of the Romantic virtuoso tradition and the composer’s own Latin heritage.

In the opening “Folia Tropical,” Meyers traipsed acrobatically in rhapsodic flights above an insistent orchestral ostinato, delivering pristine double stops and guttural accents. She sang the sonata-form movement’s ardent second theme with lyrical sweep, with Guerrero sustaining a sense of fantasy and momentum. The first movement received such vigorous applause the conductor needed to coyly remind the audience there were two further movements.

“Plegaria” is a softly stepping chaconne that proceeds with ruminative expression. Meyers maintained this tension as she spun increasingly elaborate variations of the movement’s opening material, before the texture evaporated in an ethereal harp diminuendo. “Fandanguito” opens with a vigorous violin cadenza, which gives way to the soloist’s fleet arpeggiation, recalling “Winter” of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

Meyers remained a stunning solo protagonist throughout, bringing unremitting flair to this closing movement’s technical demands, supported by Guerrero’s sensitive treatment of the colorful accompaniment. If some of Márquez’s musical conceits grow somewhat tired over the work’s 35 minutes, the audience nonetheless ate it up, leaping to their feet in an eager ovation.

The evening opened with Roberto Sierra’s Fandangos for Orchestra, composed in 2000. A sense of restrained potential energy captures the titular dance’s seductive qualities, with swirling connecting material that evinces the composer’s studies with Ligeti. One was reminded of Ravel’s modernist retooling in La Valse,particularly in the shattering tam-tam strikes near the work’s close. Guerrero, conducting from memory, fully projected the 13-minute work’s pulsating sensibility with the CSO.

Elgar’s Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma), Op. 36, was offered in a characterful reading after intermission. The CSO gave the American premiere of Elgar’s most famous work in 1902, and Guerrero brought out the clever musical quirks of the composer’s sketches of his intimate circle: one friend’s laugh, another’s stammer, yet another’s rambunctious dog. The centerpiece of the Variations is of course “Nimrod,” which Guerrero led with forthright nobility of spirit.

Sitting first chair, violist Sunghee Choi was eloquently didactic as “Ysobel,” which depicts a string-crossing exercise, and principal cellist John Sharp graciously sang the poignant melody portraying Elgar’s chamber music partner Basil Nevinson. CSO English horn player Scott Hostetler won the evening’s versatility award moving from the oboe section in the first half to handle the organ duties stage right in the Elgar.

The program will be repeated 1:30 p.m. Friday and 7:30 p.m. Saturday. chicagosymphony.org

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