CSO Serves Sea-Food For Your Ears And Brain
By Alexander Hough in Arts & Entertainment on May 4, 2010 9:00PM
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in the home stretch of its season, has packed May with the types of late Romantic and early modern "greatest hits" that draw the biggest crowds and also play to the orchestra's strengths. We love to be challenged at concerts, to say nothing of the thrill we get by letting people know we enjoy obscure art, but, well, we're pretty excited.
The run of low-risk / high-reward concerts begins this weekend with a program that crams together Claude Debussy's "La Mer" (1905) and Peter Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto (1881). "La Mer," Debussy's symphonic sea sketches, will be the subject of the season's final Beyond the Score presentation. The first half of Beyond the Score shows consist of a multimedia presentation about a particular piece, with live music excerpts by the CSO and visual accompaniment on a large screen. The second half is an uninterrupted performance. The beauty of this set-up is how the listening experience is augmented when it immediately follows the educational portion, but the benefit for classical music newbies to take a brief dip in the water, so to speak, ahead of time shouldn't be understated. Music, particularly dense and often-unfamiliar classical music, sounds better on the second go-around. The Beyond the Score concerts will be Friday and Sunday afternoons.
Thursday and Saturday's program will include CSO concertmaster Robert Chen playing Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, a piece so difficult the violinist to whom the piece was dedicated, Leopold Auer, said it was impossible to play (spoiler alert: it's not). Tchaikovsky is one of those composers you know, even if you don't think you do ("1812 Overture" and "Nutcracker," to name a few), and the Violin Concerto is one of his best, featuring Tchaikovsky's signature sweet melodies, but with fewer of the transitional difficulties that sometimes plague his work. "The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca" (1956) by Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů rounds out the full program.
Beyond the Score on Friday at 1:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3:00 p.m., full program Thursday and Saturday at 8:00 p.m., Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan, $22-$120, $10 students