Recommended: CSO's Successfully Depressing Program

By Alexander Hough in Arts & Entertainment on May 19, 2010 9:00PM

Sometimes a concert looks great on paper, but, for one reason or another, it doesn't meet expectations. Such was the case with the baffling Chicago Symphony Orchestra dance-heavy concert we recommended last month. With strangely mismatched music and long pauses between pieces, including an unusually lengthy intermission, the show never got any momentum going. And while the Hubbard Street dancers were terrific, the audience was filled with their riffraff fans. (That's right, dancers, we're picking a fight, an altercation that'll probably look a lot like this.)

The CSO's concerts this weekend feature a simple, dramatic programming formula and should avoid the same fate. The show will begin with the American premiere of Detlev Glanert's "Theatrum Beastiarum," which guest conductor Semyon Bychkov recorded in 2007. The work, written in 2005, is a companion piece for his 2006 opera "Caligula," which is based on Albert Camus's play that, written between 1938 and 1944, clearly touches on something more, and more immediate, than the reign of the infamous Roman emperor.

Despite its nominal reference to beastiaries, medieval catalogs of real and imaginary animals, the subject of "Theatrum Beastiarum" is humans, not our four-legged friends. "Theatrum Beastiarum" was the musical and emotional source material for the opera "Caligula," so while there isn't any sort of narrative within the three-movement work, it remains a relentlessly upsetting look inside Caligula, Hilter, Stalin, or, most disturbingly, any of us.

The trauma of the first half should serve to darken the already-dim beginning of Gustav's Mahler's Fifth Symphony (1904), with its funeral march and violently stormy second movement. But if you make it that far without throwing yourself down Orchestra Hall's worryingly steep balcony stairs or overdosing on the free cough drops provided by Walgreens, the ensuing scherzo should be nothing less than a rainbow, the Adagietto a full, sweetly-aching expression of love, and the finale a joyful catharsis. It's a straightforward arc, a can't-miss program. We think.

Thursday at 8:00 p.m., Friday at 1:30 p.m., and Saturday at 8:00 p.m., Symphony Center, 220 S Michigan, $18-$199, tickets are limited, so call (312) 294-3000