Muti begins CSO season on a festive note, as labor contract talks continue

So far, so harmonious.

Never mind that negotiations for a new labor agreement between the musicians of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, its union and the CSO Association have gone on nearly a week past the expiration of the old contract, with silence continuing to reign on both sides as to whatever progress has been made.

It was more or less music as usual Thursday night at Symphony Center where, yes, the first subscription concert opening the orchestra’s 125th anniversary season under music director Riccardo Muti took place on schedule and without incident. The mood inside a sold-out Orchestra Hall was festive, if expectant. There was no mention of the contract talks.

CSO spokeswoman Rachelle Roe said Thursday that those talks are “ongoing” and that the weekend concerts – the free CSO Concert for Chicago Friday night at Millennium Park and the Symphony Ball fundraising gala on Saturday – will proceed as scheduled.

None of the parties involved in the round-the-clock negotiations has uttered the S-word – strike – as yet. Still, memories of the hard-fought labor agreement of 2012 that followed a 48-hour strike by the musicians and the cancellation of a Muti subscription concert remain vivid in the minds of many locals.

But while it’s “will-we-make-it-through-the-present?” time behind the scenes this weekend, celebration of the CSO’s fabled musical past was the prime order of business on Thursday.

Muti seized the occasion to praise “the continuous chain of musicians who made this orchestra glorious for 125 years” before calling for a special round of applause for the CSO players.

“Musicians give not just their technical abilities but also an intimate part of themselves, and that is a big price,” the music director said. “So stay close to your musicians, because we need music now more than ever. If the music stops, we are finished.”

Was that a veiled warning about what could result if the present contract talks lead to a work stoppage? A caveat for our culture and society in general? Both?

Muti wasn’t saying. Instead, he let his program – two of the most beloved symphonies in the repertory, plus a nearly forgotten symphonic poem by Franz Liszt – do the talking.

This one-off agenda spoke to what Muti considers one of the CSO’s primary responsibilities: to serve as enlightened curator of the great masterpieces of the last several hundred years. That aim is unarguable. But there are those who believe the responsiblility of one of the world’s three leading orchestras in the early 21st century should go beyond functioning as a great museum for great old music. What about the new?

Muti regards Liszt’s late symphonic poem “From the Cradle to the Grave” (Liszt’s final orchestral work) as one of the composer’s greatest. It certainly is one of the oddest – austere, withdrawn, all but athematic – especially in the outer sections with their delicate scoring for strings and flute (the latter solos nicely taken by guest principal Stefan Ragnar Hoskuldsson of the Met Orchestra, not yet officially signed as CSO principal flute). Full-orchestra agitation rules the middle section, evoking a fierce struggle for existence.

This will never be a popular success as a concert piece, but Muti succeeded in showing us Liszt’s imagination as an orchestrator, and he argued its merits with considerable atmosphere and concentration of detail.

The Mediterranean congeniality of Muti’s Mozart owes as much to his Italian temperament, of course, as to the 45 years of his continuous association as guest maestro with the Vienna Philharmonic. The Mozart Symphony No. 40 he directed on Thursday was very much in that mellow, Old World tradition.

Tempos were on the moderate to slow side, textures gentle to the touch, with no sense of undue pressure being applied to the sound. Muti is a stickler about proper balancing of strings and woodwinds, and here the balance felt just right. If the Andante movement tended to dawdle, the graceful responses of his players compensated.

There certainly was no dearth of urgency in his dramatic, big-boned account of Beethoven’s mighty Fifth Symphony: Muti even eschewed the traditional hesitation between the opening four notes – the most famous four notes in classical music – and the following four. Vigorous pacing and knife-edged attacks helped maintain tension levels in the outer movements, set off by the sonorous majesty of the second and the beautiful soft playing he elicited in the third.

This promises to be a season of musical chairs among the CSO’s principal woodwinds. There were admirable solo contributions from the newly installed first bassoon, the remarkable (and remarkably young) Keith Buncke, also guest principal oboe Jeffrey Rathbun, of the Cleveland Orchestra.

— While CSO musicians remain at the bargaining table, members of the Lyric Opera Orchestra have reached tentative agreement on a new three-year contract, the company announced Friday. Terms were not disclosed, pending ratification by the Lyric musicians and board.

Under Riccardo Muti’s direction, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is scheduled to perform the annual Symphony Ball fundraising gala at 7 p.m. Saturday at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave. The program holds works by Corigliano and Elgar, along with the Mussorgsky-Ravel “Pictures at an Exhibition”; $45-$235; 312-294-3000, cso.org.

jvonrhein@tribpub.com

Twitter @jvonrhein