Chicago Symphony Orchestra
At Ravinia the music director is expected to be more than most: recitalist, accompanist, and teacher–as well as principal summertime conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He must take the foreground role of soloist/colleague in chamber music, the less spotlighted role of accompanying and assisting other artists in their solo endeavors, and the patient role of educating, encouraging, and occasionally discouraging the upcoming generation of musicians. Of course in a larger sense these are things any conductor should be doing with an orchestra–the orchestra, after all, is the conductor’s chosen instrument; under his guidance it accompanies soloists, and his selection of musical programming educates as well as entertains an audience–but the duties are more explicit and less abstract at Ravinia.
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The first half’s main attraction was violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg in Bruch’s Violin Concerto no. 1. Salerno-Sonnenberg, clad in black trousers and a jacket in a shade of pink not found in nature, is Miss Mannerisms: she grimaced, worked her mouth, bobbed, bounced, and swayed as she played, then struck poses whenever she wasn’t playing for a few measures. Her playing was self-indulgent, sometimes tonally precarious, and occasionally sloppy, particularly in some of the runs near the end of the piece. She’s past being a prodigy (you can tell wunderkinder have moved to adult status when their ages are no longer listed in the program), and it’s time for her to work a little harder at being a mature artist.
