Chicago Classical Review

Buckle up. It’s going to be an interesting four weeks of music in Chicago.

Music director designate Klaus Mäkelä returns next week for his only Chicago Symphony Orchestra appearances of the season, leading two weeks of concerts. And this week, the  orchestra opened a kind of Mahler mini-fest, with three of the Austrian composer’s symphonies to be performed over the next four weeks. 

The primary reason is the CSO’s upcoming European tour with conductor Jaap van Zweden, which will include appearances at the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra’s Mahler Festival in Amsterdam next month. Fortunately, those of us stuck in the hometown bleachers will derive some practical benefit from the tour with two works featured in Amsterdam also to be prepped and performed locally. And with no Mahler on the CSO schedule next season, a spring Gustav binge is welcome, whatever the circumstances.

First up in this Mahler Mini-Me fete was the composer’s Symphony No. 7, performed by the CSO under van Zweden Thursday night.

Few American orchestras hold a more distinguished Mahler lineage than the Chicago Symphony and the connection is more historically freighted with the Seventh than most of his works. The CSO gave the American premiere of the Seventh under Frederick Stock in 1921 (albeit in a heavily cut version) and the work has done well with the CSO on disc with three excellent recordings to date. Claudio Abbado‘s extraordinary 1984 CSO performance (Deutsche Grammophon) is, arguably, the greatest recording ever made of the work.

The Seventh is on a vast scale, cast in five large movements, scored for huge forces and running 80 minutes. Yet while there are typically dark and sardonic moments in the progress of this nocturnal journey, contrasts abound with music that is also lyrical and intimate—not least the second “Nachtmusik” movement, a serenade with guitar and mandolin.

Van Zweden has shown himself an often insightful Mahlerian in previous CSO stands, notably a powerful Symphony No. 6 in 2022, a work he will lead again downtown and on tour next month.

There was much to admire in this Seventh. With all the principal players on stage at the same time—a rare happening these days at Orchestra Hall—the playing of the CSO for much of the evening sounded like the venerable crack Mahler band of decades past. The horn section was most impressive, cohesively blended and technically polished, a far cry from some of the scarily unsettled outings of last year. The orchestra tackled the numerous myriad challenges of the score most impressively in solos, by section and as a corporate entity. Individual standouts were numerous, including concertmaster Robert Chen, bass trombone Charles Vernon, tuba player Gene Pokorny, clarinetist Stephen Williamson, and trumpet Esteban Batallan, back from his voluntary exile in Philadelphia.

The frustrating thing was that so much wonderful playing by the musicians was at the mercy of such a bland and pedestrian interpretation, as directed by van Zweden.

The Dutch conductor set a typically fast pace from the jump with a forceful, emphatic approach, which was initially bracing and attention-getting. Firm momentum is never a bad thing in the Seventh, one of Mahler’s more unwieldy works.

But as this performance unfolded, it gradually became clear that van Zweden’s Seventh offered strong forward motion and clear-cut balancing but little else.

To call this Seventh “soulless” would be too harsh. Yet time and again, Mahler’s extreme contrasts—in dynamics, timbres and material—were ironed out and oversimplified. Dynamics consistently leaned toward the loud side with pianissimo markings either underplayed or ignored. Col legno bow taps and pizzicatos had little edge or intensity. Music that cries out for space to make expressive impact—the lyrical theme of the opening movement or the second Nachtmusik—felt rushed through at van Zweden’s impatient tempos.

The first Nachtmusik felt pallid and undercharacterized, conveying little of the “night patrol” quality of this unsettling quasi-march. The shadowy central Scherzo, one of Mahler’s darkest inspirations, was hardly ominous or disturbing, its pointed deconstruction of the Viennese waltz barely discernible. Mahler’s mordant humor was wholly missing in action with van Zweden’s straight-faced style.

The composer’s most individual and quirky scoring inspirations often failed to pay off. There was zero charm in the ersatz Italian serenade of Nachtmusik II with the guitar nearly inaudible. (The mandolin fared better, played by doubling violinist Simon Michal.) The offstage cowbells in the second movement were far too present and loud—rather than the mysterious, spiritual quality Mahler requested, it sounded more like a hobo was casually rummaging through an ironworker’s dustbin.

Ultimately, this was a rushed, shallow and uninvolving Seventh, for all the excellent playing of the musicians.

Surprisingly, the crazed finale came off best, with van Zweden belatedly pointing up the extremes and drawing out the contrasts. Yet even here, the worlds-collide style—with its constant gearshifts, Wagner quotations and multiple false endings—lacked an essential infectious spirit, and one reached the symphony’s coda with more a sense of relief than exultation.

Let us hope for better things next week when Klaus Mäkelä leads Mahler’s Symphony No. 3.

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

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