Daniela Candillari makes her Chicago Symphony Orchestra debut like it's her own living room

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra played a string-heavy, intimate concert this past weekend, under the direction – but not the baton – of Daniela Candillari, who went stickless to lead chamber-sized forces in a creatively programmed bill. Candillari, in her CSO debut, showed easy command of the orchestra, and made the audience feel like we were dropping into her living room.

The largest piece on the program was Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, with soprano Giulia Semenzato – also in her CSO debut – and mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano singing the solo parts. Candillari nicely attacked the central interpretive issue of the piece: 40 minutes is a long time to dwell on the sorrows of Mary. She kept the walking-bass movements at a trot and leaned into the perkiness of the major-key sections, even when their texts didn’t seem to bolster the mood set by the music (“How she wept and suffered / And trembled when she saw / Her Child in agony”).

Semenzato and Cano matched each other terrifically, agreeing on the deployment of vibrato at the ends of held notes in their duets, perhaps a bit unidiomatically for Baroque music, but with beauty that justified the transgression. Their dissonances were beautifully crunchy, and their fugal amens sprightly. Semenzato occasionally seemed in her solo arias to paper over some pitch uncertainty with a wider vibrato, but for the most part, the singers brought a wonderful plangency and warmth to the melancholy piece.

Unusually for a symphony orchestra program, the Pergolesi, a Baroque-era staple, was preceded by three works less than 100 years old. Two of them, Carlos Simon’s Fate Now Conquers and Thea Musgrave’s Piccolo Play, were written by living composers. The third, sandwiched between them, was Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. What united these pieces and the Pergolesi was the intimate string focus. The Pergolesi was written for strings, singers and portativ organ, and Musgrave’s piece, a showcase for solo piccolo played by the CSO’s Jennifer Gunn, had just 15 string players backing. Even the Simon, with the largest orchestra and the only section winds or brass of the performance, had only about 40 musicians onstage.

Candillari clearly feels at home in this repertoire, as Chicago audiences already suspected. Although she hadn’t led the CSO before, she made her local major-ensemble debut at Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2022 with Terence Blanchard’s contemporary opera, Fire Shut Up in My Bones. Fate Now Conquers veers from accented and rhythmic to a thoughtful cello solo and back in a quick five minutes. Piccolo Play consists essentially of seven short character pieces showing the advanced-techniques range of the piccolo, each with an evocative title and mood. Candillari traversed these with impressive clarity, her precise beat pattern unmistakable even without the baton.

Of the new(ish) pieces, she had the most to say on the Barber. Often used in the United States as a backdrop for national mourning, the Adagio for Strings teeters on the edge of cliché. Candillari found freshness, even so. She started impossibly quiet, and then as the lines grew out of the texture, revealed a faster-than-usual tempo that let the lines sing, not just plod like a long, heavy walk through the snow. She also kept the climactic chords somewhat muted, less than the full-throated keening many interpreters bring to it.

A hall with 2,500 seats can shrink fast with this sort of closeness and attention. It’s nice to have reminders that so much of what we hear began its life in a salon somewhere.