Under the lively leadership of Jonathan Rush, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra completed a residency at Ravinia in an amazing fashion on Sunday evening. Joined by violinist Rachel Barton Pine, the CSO demonstrated musicianship at its finest in performing a program of music from the middle of the 19th century.
Violinist Rachel Barton Pine headlined the first half, starting with José White Lafitte’s Violin Concerto in f-sharp minor. In 1997, this concerto was on the CD she recorded for Chicago’s Cedille Records, Violin Concertos by Black Composers Through the Centuries, which was re-released in 2022. Pine found this work at the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago. Experiencing music like this makes me so grateful for Pine’s and Cedille’s efforts to call attention to the tons of great music that has been ignored and never recorded or performed.
On Sunday Pine and Rush brought out the charm and finesse written into this minor-keyed work. From the orchestra’s opening, with a baton in his right hand and wide swings of his left arm, Rush called out the orchestra’s various sections. The sound gelled wonderfully, creating a lush atmosphere. A delightful clarinet solo by Jay Shankar added to the mood.
Pine gave a delicate and precise performance. Even when playing rapid runs, whether fingering or sliding to each note on the fingerboard, everything came out clearly and in perfect tune. Especially memorable was the way she handled the cadence at the end of the first movement’s opening section. The slow, middle movement allowed her and Rush to take charm to a whole new level.
After that amazing performance, Rush took to the microphone to announce, “but we’re not done yet.” This was a great segue into the next work on the program, which allowed Pine to show off ever more powerful technique, as anything by Niccolò Paganini is bound to do. Being the most celebrated violinist of his day, Paganini wrote several concertos that allowed him to show off his amazing skills. While these concertos are interesting musically, the rondo finale of his second violin concerto No 2 in b-minor, La Campanella, is the most familiar. In Pine’s and Rush’s hands, it was filled with flourish and flash, a dynamite performance.
But Pine wasn’t done yet. As an encore, she played a transcription to solo violin of Mephisto Walz, a piece Franz Liszt wrote for piano. In transcribing it, Nathan Milstein managed to preserve its difficulty and fireworks. No problem for Pine, who waltzed right through it.
After intermission, Jonathan Rush led the CSO through an outstanding work that demonstrated how great this orchestra is. Hector Berlioz wrote Symphonie Fantastique as a story of the unrequited love of an artist. In doing so, he altered the symphonic form by adding a fifth movement. He also created an idée fixe, a melodic line that shows up throughout the piece in reference to his beloved.
The opening movement, “Reveries Passions” has lots of starts and stops, quiet intros and rapid ascents, starting slowly with woodwinds, moving to higher strings, then to strings and brass, lower strings, and back to upper strings for a sped up episode, before returning to a slower tempo. It finally settles on the first violins, which sound the idée fixe for the first time. Rush carefully mixed together these episodes to create a wonderful aural palette. Phrasing during the tempo shifts was precise, allowing for a nice mix of drama and joy.
The second movement “Ball” in a waltz time starts with the harps, strings, and woodwinds passing quick tunes back and forth. After the bucolic “Scene in the Country,” the drama resumes bigtime with “March to the Scaffold,” which the strings led backed up by percussion. Eventually the brass shone brightly during the march, with a full panoply of horns, trumpets, cornets, trombones, and tubas, backed up by percussion. Following the idée fixe on clarinet, this movement ends in one of the greatest orchestral interpretations of life in all of music: the sounds of the scaffold coming down and a head rolling off the platform. In the hands of Rush and the CSO, it was magic. The excellence continued in the finale.
Ravinia’s season continues tonight with American tenor Matthew Polenzani, backed up by pianist Kevin Murphy, performing songs by Franz Schubert, Gerald Finzi, Robert Schumann, and Charles Ives. Tonight, Martin Theater at Ravinia, 7:30pm.
Tomorrow afternoon is a free performance by RSMI Singers. Bennet Gordon Hall, general admission with ticket. Gates open at 12:30. For more info on these and other performances, click here.
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