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Jul. 31--James Conlon's final tour of Ravinia duty for the summer last weekend found him and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra wrapping up their surveys of Erwin Schulhoff orchestral works and the late Shostakovich symphonies.
Truth be told, I would not have traded one of Shostakovich's searing symphonies, of which the 15th entered Ravinia's repertory on Friday, for all three Schulhoff orchestral scores the music director presented this summer.
That the Czech composer (who died in Nazi hands after a curious career odyssey from 1920s bad-boy iconoclast to jazz pioneer to fervent Marxist) was a talent is indisputable. But Shostakovich was a true master, and Schulhoff could only pale by comparison.
Shostakovich's 15th is a strange and strangely moving score. Enigmatic allusions to Rossini and Wagner are tucked in among jaunty tunes, coded ironies and the skeletal rattling of percussion. Could a birth-to-death autobiography be implied? A scalding indictment of Soviet (and particularly Stalinist) Russia? We may never know. The final symphony, like the final quartets, remains a defiantly closed diary of the soul.
Conlon offered a lucid, poker-faced account that missed the eloquence, bite and fine organizational hand Charles Dutoit brought to his CSO performances of the symphony last spring at Orchestra Hall. But hats off to him for bringing it to the attention of the Ravinia public.
Someone once wrote that Schulhoff's early music seems to exist for the sole purpose of poking fun at others' music.
That's an apt observation in the case of his early Piano Concerto No. 1, written in 1913 when he was fresh from his studies at the Cologne Conservatory. The craftsmanship is remarkably assured for a composer of only 19. Too bad music that goes down so pleasantly is so lacking in memorable ideas. Beyond its spunky, nose-thumbing charm there is nothing to make one want to listen to it again. The nimble soloist, Philippe Bianconi, did his considerable best to sell this trifle to the folks who came to hear the Mahler Fourth following the intermission.
At least Schulhoff's First Symphony, the local premiere of which Conlon directed on Saturday, made a more serious claim on the audience's attention. A single-movement symphony made up of four related sections, it's very much a product of its time (1925), full of echoes of the music of better-known inter-war composers like Hindemith and Weill, laced with slinky orientalisms and a kind of urbane folkloric flavor of the type one associates with Bartok. The attempts at achieving formal unity are interesting, but the obsessively repeated ostinatos of the pompous finale soon grow tiresome.
Conlon surrounded the Schulhoff and Shostakovich performances with above-average readings of standard Russian repertory -- Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony on Friday and Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto on Saturday. Yefim Bronfman barreled headlong through the concerto's glittering bravura matter as if he had a Metra train to catch outside the gate. Sending mighty currents of electricity coursing through the muggy evening air, his Rachmaninoff was as thrilling as the Schulhoff was just loud.
jvonrhein@tribune.com
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Copyright (c) 2006, Chicago Tribune
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