Chicago Classical Review

It was exactly 120 years ago to the day Thursday night that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra first performed at the nascent Ravinia Festival (which opened to the public in 1904 with a play titled Vivian’s Papas). In 1936 the leafy Highland Park venue would become the official summer home of the CSO, which it has remained for the past 90 years.

One could hardly devise a better event to mark that double anniversary than have Klaus Mäkelä make his Ravinia debut. In the first of two appearances this week, the CSO’s music director in waiting led the orchestra in music of Strauss and Sibelius Thursday night.

And what better sonic road test to break in Ravinia’s newly expanded stage and acoustical overhaul than Richard Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony?

Strauss’s final tone poem is one of his finest works, a 50-minute unbroken canvas in 22 sections that paints a journey up and down the title mountain as well as reflecting broader philosophical depths. Amid the flora and fauna on the upward climb, the alpinist encounters travails, discovers a spectacular summit view, and makes a quick descent amid a turbulent thunderstorm on the way back down to a safe return.

Scored for over a hundred players, the almost comically Brobdingnagian forces call for 40 brass players alone (including 20 horns with 12 placed offstage).

Mäkelä and colleagues delivered the sonic spectacle superbly without going over the top. Ravinia’s enlarged stage and new acoustical shell accommodated such massively scored passages as the sunrise, majestic summit theme and violent thunderstorm—complete with double timpani and wind machine—clearly and securely without blaring or distortion under the conductor’s skillful balancing. 

All the lighter and more subtle scenic elements—there actually are some—likewise made their quaint picturesque effects: passing a waterfall, cowbells in the meadow, and the tense unease before the storm.

Yet more than the flashy moments, this performance scored most impressively in its overall unity, firm momentum and cumulative effect. The big climaxes are almost fail-safe with a good orchestra, but many conductors lose the thread in the more subdued final sections (as with Daniel Barenboim’s 1993 CSO concerts and subsequent CD, the orchestra’s only recording of this work).

Mäkelä deftly avoided making the closing sections seem like an anticlimax, sustaining dramatic tension and focus through the Epilogue, sunset and return to the darkness of night, and conveying a genuine sense of coming full circle on this journey.

Strauss’s brilliant and audacious scoring was well served across all sections of the orchestra. William Welter delivered an atmospheric oboe solo at the summit, but this was really the brass’s night. Even with numerous ringers to round out the roster, the brass playing was consistently polished and thrilling in its cataclysmic moments. There were especially fine contributions by principal trumpet Esteban Batallan and principal horn Mark Almond, with the latter’s eloquent solo work in the closing moments particularly notable.

The first half offered a Throwback Thursday of sorts with Daniel Lozakovich as soloist in Sibelius’s Violin Concerto (as well as a nice bit of programming nexus, since Richard Strauss conducted the premiere of the revised Sibelius concerto in 1905). A regular Mäkelä collaborator, the violinist’s only previous local stand was four years ago when the conductor led the CSO in his debut.

On that occasion, Lozakovich presented a strangely subdued Prokofiev performance and Thursday night’s mixed rewards in the Sibelius had some of the same issues.

The Swedish violinist possesses an impressive technique with a slender, yet acutely focused tone. In addition to handling the bravura demands securely, his hushed playing sometimes brought out a fantasia quality in Sibelius’s lyrical passages.

Yet too often lacking in his soft-focus approach was Sibelius’s elemental power and an essential robustness. As in his previous appearance, the violinist’s penchant for slow tempos and inward, lingering pianissimos too often felt mannered and self-conscious, impeding momentum and sapping dramatic tension. 

Mäkelä released a recording of the Sibelius concerto in 2024 with Janine Jansen and Thursday night’s performance could have used more of her dramatic bite and incisiveness. 

As if to compensate for his wayward soloist, Mäkelä and the CSO served up a roiling, whipcrack orchestral palette with fiery tuttis, which made up some of the balance in surging drama and adrenaline. That accompaniment turned hectic and garrulous in the finale with rambunctious and/or overmiked timpani.

Lozakovich seemed more in his element in his encore of Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 (Milstein arrangement). The violinist brought technical equipoise and quirky bravura to this fiddle showpiece, which seemed a better vehicle for his  theatrical artistic personality.

Klaus Mäkelä conducts the CSO in music of Stravinsky and Debussy 7:30 p.m. Friday. Ravinia.org

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