Review: Chicago Symphony Displays Out-of-Character Modesty at Carnegie

NEW YORK — Every ensemble performing in Carnegie Hall, where audiences and acoustics seem to welcome if not invite blockbuster programs, must be tempted to show off, at least a little. And none have succumbed more readily than the Chicago Symphony Orchestra did in the 1970s and ‘80s, when it was directed by Georg Solti.

It was a paltry New York season then that did not include a Mahler or Bruckner symphony, or even a Wagner opera, from the City of Broad Shoulders. So all the more remarkable were the modest affairs that the conductor Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony brought to Carnegie over the weekend, with no huge statements, no overarching themes.

They seemed calculated to demonstrate a malleability and versatility fostered in later years by Daniel Barenboim and honed to a fine touch by Muti. Especially revealing was Jennifer Higdon’s new Low Brass Concerto, commissioned by the orchestra and heard in its New York premiere on Friday evening.

“Normally, when people think of brass, they think of power,” Higdon wrote in a program note. That was certainly true of Solti’s brass section, which he drove like a Mack truck.

But Higdon was also looking for majesty and grace, she wrote, and she elicited other, individual qualities from the orchestra’s three trombonists — Jay Friedman, Michael Mulcahy and Charles Vernon — and its tuba player, Gene Pokorny. Her melodious concerto, based in smooth but not monolithic chorale textures, opened into shifting, glinting trios, duets and solos that bespoke subtlety, humor, even tenderness at times.

Telling along the same lines was a trombone master class at Carnegie on Saturday morning, in which Friedman advocated compact tone (“try to make the sound smaller than the equipment wants it to be”) and differentiated articulation (“contrast is the key to style; evenness is the opposite of style.”). All this in good measure, of course, and the concerto soloists and the orchestra’s high brasses proved excellent models of moderation in both concerts.

Still, accidents happen, and the trumpets went momentarily but badly astray in the rising clamor at the end of Brahms’ Second Symphony Saturday evening. That work — Brahms’ mellowest, least troubled symphony and hardly a blockbuster — was the biggest work on either program, and Muti, not always a convincing Brahmsian in earlier years, seems to have developed a greater affinity for the composer.

The Saturday program was filled out by Verdi’s “I Vespri Siciliani” Overture and another new work commissioned by the orchestra, Samuel Adams’ “many words of love.” The Adams work took its inspiration from Schubert’s song cycle “Winterreise,” specifically a phrase from “Der Lindenbaum” (“The Linden Tree”): “On its bark I carved do many words of love.”

Not that you’d be likely to notice. Adams effectively buries the little melodic fragment in an extravagant, churning brew of live and digital sound whose main structural elements are extended, sometimes monumental, stepwise rises and falls. The program notes also mention a concern for “the ailing earth,” though here, too, you would not necessarily discover that concern without (even with) reading them.

Adams’ own note describes the work’s paradoxical qualities: “tonal but noisy, lyrical but austere, Schubert but not at all.” No argument here.

The other unhackneyed works in the slightly odd mix of Friday’s program were Stravinsky’s piquant “Scherzo Fantastique,” Chausson’s vocal-orchestral hybrid “Poème de l’Amour et de la Mer” (“Poem of Love and of the Sea”), and the Four Sea Interludes from Britten’s opera “Peter Grimes.” Mezzo-soprano Clémentine Margaine was a superb soloist in the Chausson, richly sonorous and warmly expressive, and the pairing of that work with the Britten was striking.

Like the concerts themselves, the encores were anything but show-off-y: Giuseppe Martucci’s “Notturno” (Op. 70, No. 1), a longtime Muti favorite, on Friday and the B flat Intermezzo from Schubert’s incidental music for Helmina von Chézy’s play “Rosamunde” Saturday.