Maestro Andrés Orozco-Estrada helms Chicago Symphony Orchestra in season opening night concert
As music director and now music director emeritus for life, Riccardo Muti served as conductor for all the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s the season-opening concerts in 2010-23, except for 2020 when performances were suspended because of the COVID-19 shutdown.
So, it was startling not to see Muti’s familiar presence on the podium Thursday evening as the CSO launched its 2024-25 concert line-up. He will be back for performances later this season, but the orchestra is in a transitional time as it waits for Klaus Mäkelä to fully assume his duties as music director in 2027.
That meant a different figure at the front of the orchestra — Andrés Orozco-Estrada, a 46-year-old Colombian conductor who made his CSO debut in 2016. He serves as principal conductor of Italy’s RAI National Symphony and is set to become Cologne’s general music director in 2025-26.
The enthusiastic, big-smiling maestro demonstrated an easy rapport with the orchestra, bringing winning verve and dynamism to his conducting as he compellingly shaped phrases and showed himself be master musical storyteller.
He and the orchestra’s artistic staff put together a program that appealed on multiple levels. Four of the five offerings were written by North and South American composers, two were unquestioned audience favorites and three were rhythmic romps that were just plain fun.
The evening’s centerpiece was Samuel Barber’s achingly beautiful Violin Concerto, Op. 14, a 1939-40 work that received renewed attention in the 1990s and early 2000s with major recordings by Gil Shaham and others, but it arguably remains underperformed.
Barber is a terrific melodist. The first movement builds to some forceful climaxes but it begins with and constantly returns to a gentle, evocative, Fauré-like tune. It continues with a slow second movement suffused at times with mystery, and ends on a rousing, turbocharged note.
Hilary Hahn, the orchestra’s former artist-in-residence was originally scheduled to serve as soloist, but, unfortunately, the CSO announced Sept. 5 that she would not be able to perform because of treatment for a double-pinched nerve.
Proving to be a more-than-worthy substitute was Benjamin Beilman, who won first prize at the 2010 Montreal International Musical Competition and made his subscription debut with the CSO in December 2023. He brought emotional complexity and depth, not to mention a fetching, full-bodied sound, to his playing, capturing the sense of longing and wonder in this music and nailing all its technical demands, especially in the lightning-fast third movement.
Overall, this was a powerful performance that reinforced the case for this work as one of the great violin concertos, with Beilman and Orozco-Estrada meshing well, and the orchestra delivering both the intensity and delicacy that this work requires.
Following an appreciative ovation, Beilman returned to the stage for an encore — the Gavotte en Rondeau from J.S. Bach’s Partita No. 3 in E major, BWV 1006.
The evening opened with the orchestra’s first performance of “Agnegram,” which Michael Tilson Thomas, the former longtime music director of the San Francisco Symphony wrote in 1998 as a tribute to one of that orchestra’s key supporters on her 90th birthday. Running a little more than five minutes, it is a rollicking, whimsical, mish-mash of a work with elements of dance, jazz and hurdy-gurdy thrown in, not to mention quick quotes from famous classical works. Somehow it all works, and Orozco-Estrada and the orchestra threw themselves into it with suitable abandon.
After the intermission came Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s beloved “Romeo and Juliet,” and Orozco-Estrada and the orchestra delivered an impassioned take that fully captured the work’s sense of drama from its dark conflict to romantic ardor.
The second half was supposed to open with the Overture to Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story,” but Orozco-Estrada announced from the podium hat he was going to place it second. And that proved to be a good choice, serving as an ideal lead-in to the final work.
The Overture (arranged by Maurice Peress, an assistant conductor under Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic) is a shorter (about five minutes) compilation than the more familiar suite, “Symphonic Dances,” yet it managed to pack in most of the highlights and convey the high-flying spirit of the musical.
Rounding out the evening was Alberto Ginastera’s Four Dances from “Estancia,” a kind of Argentinian counterpart to the famed ballet “Rodeo,” with its Latin-American dance flavors really coming through in the culminating whirlwind section – “Final Dance (Malambo).”
Orozco-Estrada has a real flair for these kind of fast-driving, boldly rhythmic works, and he infused both with appropriate jolts of propulsive energy and reveled in their sheer fun.