Journey review


[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] [ TubeNet BBS ] [ FAQ ]

Posted by JR on January 21, 2004 at 14:33:30:

By John von Rhein
Chicago Tribune music critic
December 20, 2003

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which has never had an American-born music director, must look enviously on its closest Midwest rival, the St. Louis Symphony. Just last week, that orchestra named David Robertson, whom many (including me) consider the most gifted of the new generation of American conductors, its music director as of the 2005-06 season.

Robertson was a very smart choice, as any Chicagoan who has closely followed this magnetic dervish of a maestro through his consistently fine series of CSO guest appearances the last four seasons will tell you. The good news is that St. Louis is only an hour's flight from Chicago.

By happy coincidence, the California-born conductor is closing out the CSO's calendar year this weekend at Symphony Center with a program that, while a tad tame by his standards, should fill subscribers with seasonal comfort and joy.

Indeed, Thursday's audience, which included several hundred music educators who are convening in Chicago, burst into wild bravos before the mighty final chord of Carl Nielsen's Symphony No. 4 ("The Inextinguishable") scarcely had died away, responding as much to Robertson's heat as the orchestra's fire.

And fire is precisely what is needed in any performance of the Nielsen Fourth. The first of the work's four linked movements must sound like galaxies exploding. With Robertson, you did not think of flaming nebulas so much as an orchestra brought to a boil by an interpreter in perfect control of the conflicts raging within the music. Not since Jean Martinon has any conductor at the CSO caught the urgent intensity that drives this masterpiece as perceptively as Robertson.

It was all there in a single unbroken line. The simple charm of the woodwind-dominated intermezzo. The strings racing with furious, breathless precision. The titanic duel between two pairs of timpani. The final resolution in a glorious blaze of E Major. Robertson got playing from the CSO musicians even more brilliant than what Pierre Boulez had achieved with them the previous weeks.

Our guest conductor began with Beethovenian guns blazing. His tensely dramatic account of Beethoven's "Egmont" Overture was marred only by errant wind chording, perhaps due to the absence of several key woodwind principals.

I'm all for orchestras bringing back new works that truly merit a second hearing, but I have to wonder who at the CSO deemed John Stevens' "Journey," Concerto for Contrabass Tuba worthy of a reprise little more than three years after Gene Pokorny, the orchestra's principal tubist, premiered it at Orchestra Hall.

Stevens is professor of tuba at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music and also a professional tubist. You must admire his attempt to turn this growling behemoth into a legitimate solo instrument. His operative metaphor is a train chugging through an American landscape -- a homage to Pokorny's love of America's classic steam locomotives. Think Fafner the dragon roaring and spluttering his way across Aaron Copland's prairies.

Pokorny is the finest tuba virtuoso the city has heard since the late, great Arnold Jacobs. He galumphed gamely through the score and was warmly applauded for his efforts. But neither he nor Robertson could make the concerto sound like anything more than an amiable if forgettable bag of trite tuba tricks.


Follow Ups: