MUSIC AND DANCE : Chicago Symphony Marks Its First 100 Years

The Chicago Symphony will be 100 years old in October. It’s not the oldest orchestra in the country--the New York Philharmonic, founded in 1842, is the easy winner there--but one with as distinguished a history as any. This may come as a surprise to those reared on the legend that the Chicagoans were a provincial band until Fritz Reiner’s arrival in 1953 as music director.

The evidence of this history of excellence is a 12-CD commemorative set, “Chicago Symphony Orchestra: The First 100 Years.” The collection includes some commercial recordings (most long out of print), but mainly live performances from radio archives, principally those of WFMT Chicago, which has been broadcasting CSO concerts for at least 30 years.

The package is available only from the Chicago Symphony Fulfillment Center, 847 W. Jackson Blvd., Chicago, Ill. 60607. The price is $180 postpaid, with all proceeds benefiting the orchestra. And you don’t have to be a nostalgic, transplanted Chicagoan to consider the money well spent.

Early examples of the orchestra’s superior skills date from 1916 through 1941 when its second music director, Frederick Stock, who succeeded founder Theodore Thomas, was at the helm.

Stock leads brief pieces by Mendelssohn, Wagner, Walton, his own sweetly sentimental “Symphonic Waltz,” notably sensitive Brahms Hungarian Dances from 1926 and a 1940 Brahms Third Symphony. All are governed by a firm, flexible beat and delivered by the orchestra with irresistible warmth of string tone and elegant solo winds.

Stock, even as late as 1941, when it was quite out of fashion, encouraged subtly expressive string portamento that imparts a relaxed, Central European feeling to the orchestra’s overall sound and style.

In later years and with better recorded sound, the impact of the playing is felt with added keenness, first in the late-’40s under Belgian-born Desire Defauw, whose stint with the orchestra was so generally excoriated that his subsequent musical post was in the nearby steel town of Gary, Ind.

Whatever may have been wrong with the orchestra and with Defauw is not evident in their propulsive efforts on behalf of Prokofiev’s “Scythian Suite,” Franck’s “Chasseur maudit” and Strauss’ “Tod und Verklarung,” for in all the Chicago brass rings out with brilliant forcefulness.

Defauw’s successor, the irascible Artur Rodzinski, whose reign lasted but one stormy season (1947-48), is represented by a vital, shapely Mendelssohn “Scottish” Symphony, disclosing a luscious cello section and well-characterized solo winds.

Controversy also surrounded Rodzinski’s successor, Rafael Kubelik, who arrived for a three-year stay in 1950 and, it is generally conceded, was run out of town by the conservative tastes and journalistic vitriol of the city’s then-leading critic.

From the slender evidence presented in the Mercury recordings revived here, Kubelik’s Chicago interpretations of Hindemith’s “Symphonic Metamorphoses” and the Mussorgsky-Ravel “Pictures at an Exhibition” were somewhat lacking in wit and rhythmic lift. His return to the orchestra as guest conductor in 1983 is, however, documented by an energetic, superbly executed Roussel Third Symphony.

Fritz Reiner’s Chicago years--1953-1962--are extensively documented in RCA’s studio recordings, but they didn’t capture it all. There are some extraordinary live pleasures here, showing a perhaps more humane Reiner than the one commercially marketed: A 1954 Kodaly “Galanta Dances” may have some ragged edges but offers glorious warmth of inflection and, surprisingly for this late date and this most unsentimental of conductors, liberal applications of string portamento because it’s right for the music.

Also from Reiner, there’s a clean-lined, finely detailed 1958 Prokofiev Fifth Symphony, and from the same year the world premiere of Copland’s gorgeous suite from his “The Tender Land,” which Reiner leads with what might be described as heroic tenderness.

From the subsequent CSO music director, the under-appreciated Jean Martinon, there’s as clearly conceived, dramatic and stunningly realized a Mahler 10th Symphony, in Deryck Cooke’s completion, as this listener has encountered live or on recordings.

And among exemplars of the just-concluded reign of Georg Solti there is the world premiere (1983) of Lutoslawski’s thrilling Third Symphony, which has about it a first-encounter heat not captured in the excellent studio recordings of the symphony led by the composer and by Esa-Pekka Salonen; and Kodaly’s “Psalmus Hungaricus” (recorded 1982), in which Solti’s fiery leadership of his characterfully intense orchestra and Margaret Hillis’ CSO Chorus is fatally undercut by the bleating inaccuracy of tenor soloist Dennis Bailey.

Outstanding among the work of the guest conductors included are a profoundly moving Shostakovich 10th Symphony led by Leopold Stokowski (1966); a searing Bartok “Miraculous Mandarin” Suite from the lamented Istvan Kertesz (1968); and Erich Leinsdorf’s stylishly nasty reading of Weill’s “Little Threepenny Music,” with the swaggering virtuosity of the CSO’s wind soloists.

There’s also a curiosity of dubious worth: the legendary Josef Hofmann’s willful 1940 performance of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto under CSO associate conductor Hans Lange.

James Levine’s excellent work with the orchestra is exemplified by a tingingly ???? tense 1989 Stravinsky “Symphony of Psalms,” with the CSO Chorus in splendid fettle, and his heated and well-ordered exposition of the bloated opening movement of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony.

There are some not particularly illuminating examples of the work of principal guest conductors Carlo Maria Giulini and Claudio Abbado, and of music director-designate Daniel Barenboim (as pianist and conductor). There are also compositions by its two recent composers-in-residence, Shulamit Ran, who won last year’s Pulitzer Prize, and John Corigliano, whom she nosed out.

More about Barenboim, Corigliano and other matters relative to the Chicago Symphony’s second century in a subsequent On the Record.