The program
The night felt young. I saw a lot of high school students in the concert hall, dressed up and fidgety, and that energy seeped into everything. It helped that the artists matched it — conductor Karina Canellakis and soloist Conrad Tao are both on the younger side of the musician spectrum:
Tao has this rock star thing going on — chic, probably Balenciaga, the kind of outfit that says I know exactly what I’m doing. Canellakis has the quiet intensity of a more sensitive, more searching Lydia Tár. But once they start playing, what matters is that they’re serious musicians, and you can feel it immediately.
Conrad Tao’s Bartók was expressive and clearly thought through. There’s something volatile about the Bartók piano concertos, a restlessness baked into the writing, and Tao seemed drawn to that and brought out the concerto’s rougher, philosophical, instrospective zen edges. He wasn’t performing difficulty but more like having a conversation with it.
Then Tchaikovsky’s Fifth. This is Karina’s repertoire — not just something she conducts, but something she carries. And She’s talked about what it’s like to bring a warhorse like this to an orchestra that has played it a hundred times before:
Especially when you work with these top-level, historical orchestras, like the London Philharmonic or the Chicago Symphony — who have a long history of playing this repertoire and have recorded it with many different conductors — you’re dealing with a living, breathing animal. That’s the whole fun of it: to see what I’m given on that first day and try and shape that and create something together that is something completely new that no one has heard before.
I love this. A living, breathing animal. That’s exactly what the CSO sounded like tonight — not tamed, not on autopilot, but alert and responsive. The soloists did their solos beautifully, especially clarinet solos. The French horn was slightly off in tone for the 2nd mvt, if I’m being honest. Not a disaster. And that’s live music. You take the whole package.
In the waltz movement there’s a passage where the pizzicato travels through the entire string section — violins to violas to cellos to basses — and watching it happen in real time was almost surreal. Each section picking it up right as the last one let go, like a wave rolling across the stage. It’s one of those things that sounds simple on paper but in person is breathtakingly beautiful, because it only works if everyone is listening to everyone else. And tonight, they were. The CSO was completely in sync, and you could feel the room hold its breath.