Even for an ensemble that performs Bruckner as routinely as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the composer’s Third Symphony isn’t a work that turns up on concert programs often. The weekend’s performances marked the first CSO traversal of the score in twenty years, with guest conductor Marek Janowski returning to the podium. Steeped in the Central European tradition, Janowski is certainly an accomplished Brucknerian, having recorded the complete symphony cycle with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande.
Now eighty-five years old, Janowski maintains an energetic appearance and even conducted the hour long symphony from memory. Shrouded in a certain mystery, the work began with gently pulsing strings. Seemingly out of the ether, thematic material emerged in the brass, and the spacious movement was given ample room to breathe, cresting to majestic, reverential climaxes. A delicately cascading secondary theme contrasted the more angular material, and much was done to convey the larger-than-life quality of the music, an epic slowly unfurling to ultimately lead to the movement’s crashing coda.
The occasional uncoordinated entrance or other minor mishap made the present performance fall short of true technical precision, but it did little to detract. The Adagio exuded the solemnity of a pious hymn, with some particularly rich writing for the strings, and the arching melody flowed forth organically. Encouraged by the brass-heavy scoring, the Scherzo was a vigorous affair, and a vehicle for the resplendent CSO brass. A central trio was genteel and graceful, given with an authentic lilt to evoke the dances of Bruckner’s home world in the Austrian countryside. The sparkling orchestration gave the finale energetic beginnings, and powerful brass chorales served as inflection points in this long journey capped off by a blazing close.
If there’s a connective theme to Bruckner from the two composers programmed on the first half, it’s that all influenced or were influenced by Richard Wagner — and in turn, each deeply shaped the trajectory that Austro-German music would take through the nineteenth century. Carl Maria von Weber’s Ruler of the Sprits Overture is a standalone piece as the projected opera never came to fruition. Stormy beginnings were given with crisp articulation, and standout solos from the woodwinds were warmly lyrical. It’s a shame this isn’t a work heard more regularly as it made for an ideal curtain-raiser.
Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto no. 2 in A major is quite a bit more lyrical and understated than its predecessor, but there’s hardly a shortage of pianistic fireworks nonetheless. A gentle, yearning theme in the winds served as the basis for the concerto’s ingenious use of thematic transformation, in which the whole work is essentially bound by a single theme. Pianist Francesco Piemontesi entered by way of rolling arpeggios, a subtle effect before the piano writing became increasingly virtuosic, given by the soloist with panache.
Double octaves and rapid runs were suitably dazzling, and the theme morphed into a chilling march. A more inward moment saw a lovely cello passage from Kenneth Olsen, in dialogue with the pianist’s delicate filigree. The martial gesture returned at the close, this time triumphant. As an encore, Piemontesi turned to Bach in the chorale-prelude Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, presented in a transcription by Wilhelm Kempff. With detailed pedaling and voicing, it was quite remarkable the way the pianist invoked the grandeur of the organ.
