2013 eloquent evenings9/22/2023 ![]() ![]() The closing pages, coming full circle to the opening, were beautifully done with Mathieu Dufour contributing stellar flute playing. Climaxes were imposing and full-blooded with brass having an apt raspy edge (and fine solos by Daniel Gingrich). Yet as the music develops, the performance seemed to organically gather power, force and ballast. Thursday’s performance began in simple and straightforward manner, the opening theme almost briskly casual. The opening two-note motif is like a sigh, the simplest of themes that grows from its warm first appearance in strings into ever more wide-ranging, harmonically complex regions, morphing into acidulous muted brass among other guises and timbres. Written at the end of Mahler’s life, the Ninth is imbued with a sense of departure and farewell-from his wife Alma, from the symphonic form as his last completed work in the genre, and from life itself. The performance also benefited from a different orchestral layout, with violins split, basses left and cellos left center. Tilson Thomas seems to get the best of both worlds, with attentive focus on details of dynamics, expression, and tempos shifts while also being free enough to invest the music with a raw vitality that is part of Mahler’s world as well, without crossing the line from sentiment to schmaltz. ![]() Yet there is a raucous, subversive element in this music that gets somewhat subsumed with Haitink for all his textual probity. To be sure, Haitink’s 2011 performances were characteristically inspired: highly polished, scrupulously balanced and firmly objectivist in style. Yet I’m not sure Tilson Thomas has a current peer in this repertory. There are several superb Mahler conductors extant today: Riccardo Chailly, Christoph Eschenbach, Simon Rattle, and the CSO’s own former principal conductor, Bernard Haitink, who led the most recent CSO concerts of this work two years ago. Thursday night’s vital and richly eloquent performance of Mahler’s epic Ninth showed what Chicago audiences have been missing and more than made up for the balance. Yet while he has been a semi-regular guest conductor with the CSO, his Mahler assignments in Chicago have been few, bafflingly so. The American conductor is one of our finest exponents of Mahler’s music, as his performances and superb recorded cycle with his San Francisco Symphony have shown. Thursday night it was the turn of Michael Tilson Thomas with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. 9 may well be the most profound work ever written in the genre, yet even with the composer’s obsessive markings and instructions, this deep, searching music remains highly malleable and can bloom in the hands of podium guests with widely divergent approaches. The greater the music, the more readily it responds to different interpretations. Michael Tilson Thomas conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s Symphony No.
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