Chicago Tribune, John von Rhein
“Especially now, with all the hoopla surrounding the centennial of Benjamin Britten, his contemporary and fellow Englishman, William Walton, has been shoved to the margins of our concert life. But Walton, who died in 1983, seven years after Britten’s passing, was a great Briton in his own musical right, leaving behind a substantial body of works that don’t deserve the neglect they have suffered just about everywhere except in his homeland.
Hats off, then, to guest conductor Semyon Bychkov for returning Walton’s Symphony No. 1 to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s downtown repertory after an unconscionable absence of 35 years. Listeners who stayed away from the first concert of the weekend series Thursday night at Symphony Center (and unfortunately quite a few did) missed a commanding yet sensitive performance that revealed the Walton First as the masterpiece it is.
The Chicago Symphony’s association with Walton’s music goes back as far as January 1936, when the orchestra gave the U.S. premiere of Symphony No. 1, just two months after the world premiere in London. With its crunching chords, windswept vistas and jazz-inflected rhythms, the score is made to order for the CSO’s pumped corporate musculature. Anybody who loves the Sibelius symphonies will love this work, although they will find the Sibelius influences skillfully absorbed and the voice unmistakably Walton’s.
Conductor and orchestra were united in their determination to make a big, blazing statement of the opening movement. Once past an oboe solo that needed more swagger, the music built inexorably to a massive, grinding climax, undergirded by stentorian brasses. Bychkov clearly understands the dark harmonic tensions that drive this music and he held them in a firm grip.
If other conductors have brought greater ferocity to the Scherzo (marked “with malice”), the orchestra hammered out the tricky, Morse Code-like rhythms decisively. Bychkov shaped the melancholy slow movement with considerable feeling, bringing out the lyrical eloquence of Walton’s woodwind writing; here the contributions of bassoonist William Buchman and Alexander Bedenko, who was sitting in as guest principal clarinet for a second week, were especially striking.
Walton’s finale contains more than a little bombast, counterbalanced by not one but two sprightly fugues. But never mind: Bychkov’s concentration and intensity made the triumphal conclusion feel like a true summation of all that had come before. Who says only British orchestras have a pipeline to the “true” Walton style? The CSO can match any London orchestra in this repertory, and, given the powerhouse brilliance it summoned on Thursday, even surpass it.
It has been a great couple of weeks for Russian concertos, or concertos by Russian composers, at these concerts. With Leila Josefowicz’s stunning account of the Stravinsky Violin Concerto still fresh in their memory, Thursday’s audience got to hear Kirill Gerstein ride to victory in Prokofiev’s formidable Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor.
Which is not to say there was anything superficial or mindlessly slam-bang about the pianist’s performance. He treated the vanquishing of the concerto’s knuckle-busting difficulties not as an end in itself but as a means of revealing the music behind the glitter. Gerstein, winner of the prestigious Gilmore Artist Award in 2010, stressed rhapsodic sweep over spiky dynamism in the opening movement, making the long, demanding cadenza, with its massive chords and torrential passage work, feel like an extended improvisation.
So it went, through the cascading 16th-notes of the perpetual-motion Scherzo, the hard, glinting textures of the grotesque march and the darting fury of the finale. Together, Gerstein, Bychkov and the orchestra kicked up a storm of honest excitement in this finest of Prokofiev’s five piano concertos. The pianist’s tonal solidity cut through the orchestral mass without the brittle percussiveness others bring to the score. After the dust had settled and the crowd had cheered its last, Gerstein looked positively refreshed, as if he were ready to play the whole thing all over again.
With performances of such quality, few audience members could gripe very much about the concert’s relatively short duration.”