“Unless you live around the corner from Carnegie Hall, where the great performing ensembles of the world troop in and out on a weekly basis … only the occasional tour or outside visit provides a glimpse of what is going on elsewhere,” writes Joshua Kosman in Sunday’s (10/15) San Francisco Chronicle. “So an extended residency like the recent weekend-long visit to Berkeley by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and its music director, Riccardo Muti, serves an important purpose. And Saturday’s mighty, full-throttle concert in Zellerbach Hall, the second of three sponsored by Cal Performances, came as a powerfully inspiring bulletin on the state of things in the Windy City…. [In] the two symphonies on Saturday’s program—Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ to begin the evening, and Schumann’s Second after intermission … perhaps the most dazzling aspect of the performance was the orchestra’s pinpoint control of dynamics. In the opening movement of the Schubert, for example, Muti chose a surprisingly slow tempo, but made it pay off through a series of microscopically fine-tuned shifts in volume, which the orchestra players executed flawlessly…. At the very end of the [Schumann] symphony came a triumphant and masterfully shaped explosion, beautifully presided over in the final measures by timpanist David Herbert.”
Posted October 16, 2017
