CSO, Riccardo Muti triumph in launch of monumental Beethoven season

One can only imagine what the Viennese audience thought on April 2, 1800, when the ambitious young composer Beethoven, from the distant German city of Bonn, arranged a concert at the Burgtheater next to the Imperial Palace in the heart of Vienna, to offer music of Haydn, Mozart, “and me!”

The card that Beethoven had to play was his First Symphony, and the local newspaper chroniclers didn’t bother to show.

One doubts the performance sounded as polished and knowing as it did on Thursday night at Symphony Center, from the hands of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the guidance of music director Riccardo Muti. But I’ll bet the Viennese musicians were surprised and delighted by the First Symphony’s rhythmic spring, clever harmonic twists, and droll handoffs at lickety split-speeds, like a game of catch for aces.

That’s the kind of musical writing that shows respect for virtuosos, who enjoy a challenge, by a composer who knew he was one in a million.

Surely Muti was offering a similar challenge to his Chicago musicians, and to his audience, as he set the stage for a season-long CSO project that will trace the trajectory of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, spanning 24 years, by a composer who was already suffering from ringing in his ears and would be 60 percent deaf by 1801.

Beethoven was in fact completely deaf when he wrote many works within his “mind’s ear” alone, including the Ninth Symphony, which will culminate the current season in June with its choral “Ode to Joy.” Even after centuries, Beethoven’s symphonies remain formidable benchmarks. It is expected that a conductor and the instrumentalists not only play them well, but also present them in a way that reveals new insights about their relationship to each other, and about Beethoven’s relationship to us.

Muti, who has done complete Beethoven cycles with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic, and Milan’s La Scala Orchestra, marked the onset of the CSO’s project with a thoughtful tactic. The concert’s showpiece was the Third Symphony, the revolutionary “Eroica,” from 1805, which Muti put on the second half. He set up the “Eroica” by offering, on the first half, two vastly different Beethoven works in same key of C major — the very late “Consecration of the House” Overture from near the time of the Ninth Symphony, and then the First from 1800.

© Todd Rosenberg Photography

The juxtaposition framed Beethoven’s journey: The ten-minute 1822 Overture, with its gobsmacking double fugue (the musical equivalent of two simultaneous horse races on the same track) established for us just where Beethoven’s music was ultimately headed. Then came the fleet, bubbling First Symphony, from two decades earlier, rhythmically vibrant yet delivered with the warmth of a knowing smile. It’s riddled with marvelously delicate interplay, especially among the winds, who delivered at an exceptional level. Two of the orchestra’s recently appointed principal players — oboe William Welter and bassoon Keith Bunke — have completely settled in, sounding supremely poised as they finished each other’s phrases.

It’s no small thing for a new musician to adjust to the particular acoustics of Orchestra Hall, with its unforgiving resonance, where it is hard to hear each other on the stage and to gauge volume. But even the newest principals — horn David Cooper, who started in July, and trumpet Esteban Batallán, who was sitting in the orchestra although he doesn’t officially start until Sept. 30 — seemed to be settling into their groove as the “Eroica” wore on. In his tenth season, Muti has effectively re-stocked the majority of the principal player slots with a new generation.

Beethoven had intended to dedicate his Third Symphony to Napoleon when the military strategist was still waging battles across Europe in the name of the democratic ideals that America had inspired. But when Napoleon made himself Emperor of France in 1804, Beethoven is said to have scratched out the dedication on his manuscript and penned in the word “Eroica” instead. In interviews, Muti has described the move as a defiant record of the composer’s own faith in the human, in the possibilities of mankind.

Hearing this impressive assemblage of musicians respond to the tremendous arc of the “Eroica” as Muti envisions it, with its fierce dissonances and solemn, unrelenting brilliance, makes one hope for a recording that can remain as a testament to the CSO at this phase of its history. The orchestra has recorded the “Eroica” under past music directors Sir Georg Solti and Fritz Reiner. But Muti’s way with the work, which never really departed from singing even in its most grief-stricken moments, kept it grounded in the personal. The effect was by turns devastating and exhilarating.

NOTE: The next set of Muti’s Beethoven concerts in celebration of Beethoven’s upcoming 250th birthday is Feb. 20-23, 2020, when Muti will conduct Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. For a complete list of CSO Beethoven events this season, visit cso.org.

Nancy Malitz is local freelance writer.