CSO, Riccardo Muti deliver exhilarating — and milestone — performance of Philip Glass symphony

Philip Glass has surpassed Beethoven’s nine symphonies, a number that has represented a kind of psychological barrier for some composers, and he shows no signs of stopping. The National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., is set to premiere his 15th creation in the form next month.

Thursday evening in Orchestra Hall, music director Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra took on Glass’ Symphony No. 11 (2016), and the performance, though not a world premiere, was still a milestone.

First off, it was the first-ever performance of a Glass symphony in Chicago by any ensemble. The Chicago Symphony had previously only performed the composer’s orchestral piece, “Facades,” on its subscription series in 1999 and featured a suite on a MusicNow program in 2007-08.

For Muti, who has never previously conducted any music by Glass, and the Chicago Symphony to take on this symphony, is a sign of how far the composer’s standing has risen in recent decades in the classical world.

Even though he was a pioneer of the influential minimalist movement, Glass was shunned for several decades by certain facets of the classical world in part because his iterative style was seen as simplistic or naïve.

© Todd Rosenberg Photography

It also didn’t help that Glass circumvented the mainstream classical establishment early in his career, forming his own experimental ensemble in 1968 that operated in some ways like a rock band, performing on college campuses and in alternative venues.

But, now, at age 85, as this concert and the standing ovation that followed the symphony made clear, Glass has become something of an éminence grise. The composer marked the occasion with an unusual letter to attendees that was tucked into the program.

It offered thanks and pointed out the composer’s ties to Chicago, where he came in the 1950s to study at the University of Chicago and spent many evenings listening to conductor Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony.

“This kind of exposure is crucial to a young musician’s formation,” he wrote in his letter. “I learned more about symphonic music during that time than perhaps any other.”

It is not surprising that the CSO began its exploration of Glass’ symphonies with the No. 11, a sprawling, exhilarating three-movement work with a super-sized orchestration that included eight percussionists, two harpists and even the rarely heard, low-register contrabass clarinet.

As Phillip Huscher points out in his unusually long and enthusiastic program note for this work, Glass had moved away from his early minimalism in his more recent compositions, adding new layers of rhythmic and harmonic complexity.

© Todd Rosenberg Photography

But in the Symphony No. 11, especially in the first and arguably most successful of the movements, Glass’ returns to some of those early hypnotic, repetitive devices intermixing them with newer elements to create an intoxicating, sometimes breathless kaleidoscopic swirl of overlapping sound and texture.

Muti admirably negotiated all the moving parts and intricate repetitions, and the musicians all seemed to embrace Glass’ distinctive style, with notably fine playing from the brass, especially the trombones, and the harps and percussion.

But as exciting as it was to witness the orchestra’s foray into symphonic Glass, the evening’s highlight arguably came on the first half, following the Overture to “The Ruins of Athens,” Op. 113, a rarely heard little gem by Beethoven.

London-based pianist Mitsuko Uchida, a regular and much-loved guest artist with the CSO, returned to perform the work with which she made her debut with the orchestra in 1986 — Beethoven’s stalwart Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58. She delivered just the kind of performance that would be expected of this veteran soloist — thoughtful, probing and profound — with Muti and the orchestra right there with her. She was especially effective in the slow second movement, offering a spacious, reflective, introspective and, at times, other-worldly take.

The emphasis with Uchida is always on the poetry, so this was never going to be a performance that emphasized the concerto’s sweep or grandeur. But she was able to deliver power and punch when necessary, not to mention some wonderfully light and agile passagework.

The audience gave her an extended standing ovation, recognizing both her spellbinding performance and no doubt her esteemed place in the international keyboard world.