Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Costa Mesa - A Great Orchestra with a Big Heart
/By Truman C. Wang
1/26/2023
Photo credit: Todd Rosenberg
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s 2023 North American tour is the first for the orchestra since the Covid pandemic and the last with their Italian maestro Riccardo Muti before ending his music directorship in June, after 13 years with the orchestra. No doubt the musicians were eager to escape the frigid deep freeze of Chicago to go on this winter tour.
Among the eleven tour cities - Mesa, Santa Barbara, Stillwater, Toronto, Kansas City, Sarasota, Naples - none are major halls, as the tour was reportedly put together in haste when all the major venues had been booked.
On Tuesday, January 24, the CSO played Costa Mesa, the second stop in their whirlwind tour, and a welcome return since their memorable visit in 2017. In many respects, the Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa offers a more intimate and acoustically immersive experience than the more famous Walt Disney Concert Hall across the county line. Audience noises are muted in the Segerstrom's drier acoustics. The sounds emanating from the stage register a more direct, immediate impact.
On the morning of the concert, members of the CSO visited local schools as part of the Philharmonic Society's community outreach program. A noble endeavor. As maestro Muti noted in his brief speech before turning to conduct, "As long as governments ignore culture, the violence will continue." He asked the audience to stand in a moment of silence and dedicated the concert to the mass-shooting victims in California.
The superlative playing of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was evident from the first bars of Beethoven’s Seventh. The strings sounded full, warm and rich with the double-basses providing a firm foundation. When the oboe and flute entered, one felt one had never heard wind playing so mellifluous, so rhythmically precise, perfectly balanced, and purely tuned. I spotted a few L.A. Phil musicians in the audience, as well as the L.A. Opera’s James Conlon. On their best day, the L.A. Phil winds do not sound as smooth and seamless as the CSO. Liadov's Enchanted Lake was breathed in long spans of velty string tone, soft winds and harp arpeggios.
Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition showcased the CSO’s orchestral virtuosity, above all their renowned brass section. There was not a note out of place or out of tune in the brass playing, the visceral impact felt even in the softest passages (the Cattle and Catacombs, for example) Riccardo Muti has always been an energetic and dynamic conductor, even more impressive now at age 81. He secured exciting technically first-rate playing from the CSO, but the excitement was never for excitement's sake. All the tempi and the transitions between them seemed natural and inevitable. Mussorgsky’s Pictures was memorable above all for the breadth, warmth and lyrical beauty of Muti's reading. Whoever the CSO’s new music director might be, he or she will have a very tough act to follow.
The Italian maestro led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a Puccini encore, the tragic and achingly beautiful intermezzo from Manon Lescaut, echoing the recent tragedies in a powerfully heartfelt account.
Truman C. Wang is Editor-in-Chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, other Southern California publications, as well as the Hawaiian Chinese Daily. He studied Integrative Biology and Music at U.C. Berkeley.