There was a lot of brain power and good intentions onstage during the Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert Thursday night at Symphony Center. Would that it had resulted in a more consistently successful evening.
Guest conductor Michael Tilson Thomas had put together an intriguing program: the CSO's first stand-alone performance of the delicate, long-lost "Blumine" movement from Mahler's First Symphony; the witty, Jeremy Denk as soloist in the Beethoven Third Piano Concerto and Arnold Schoenberg's 1937 orchestral transformation of the 1861 Brahms G Minor Piano Quartet.
The "Blumine" was a genuine discovery and a valuable contribution to the CSO's somewhat unusual yearlong commemoration of two key Mahler anniversaries. Written in 1884, perhaps as incidental music for a staging of a mid-19th century German poem, it was incorporated in the initial 1889 performance of his First Symphony, abandoned by him five years later, not published by him with the score, and lost entirely until it was found in the Yale University Library in 1966 and its performance the next year conducted by composer Benjamin Britten.
With a sometimes poignant trumpet theme expertly played by principal Christopher Martin and quiet, even tentative responses from the rest of the ensemble, Tilson Thomas rightly presented the piece alone as the orphan it is. (The CSO's only previous offerings of the work, by Eugene Ormandy in 1969 and Christoph Eschenbach at Ravinia in 2002, were as a reinserted second movement into a symphony Mahler rightly knew was not its home.) Just under 10 minutes long and thoughtfully paced and shaped by Tilson Thomas, it was the evening's highlight and even something of an historic occasion.
Denk, 41, has a strong reputation as a piano partner to such instrumental soloists as Joshua Bell. His weblog "Think Denk" is one of the more amusing and analytical out there. He has given an array of performances by current composers seeking to recapture lyricism, including Jake Heggie, Tobias Picker, Ned Rorem and Libby Larsen. Whether this devotion to these schools allows for the deep investigation and reimagining necessary for meaningful performances of masterworks with major orchestras was not given a fully positive answer here.
Schoenberg's arrangement of the Brahms chamber work into something approaching an acid-trip symphony is no stranger here. Frederick Stock led it just seven months after its 1938 Los Angeles unveiling. Erich Leinsdorf programmed it twice downtown and James Levine twice at Ravinia. Robert Craft recorded it with the CSO in conjunction with a 1964 Ravinia engagement. It is a work with many unusual noises: chiefly from the triangle, contrabassoon, glockenspiel and xylophone that Schoenberg added, but also through reassignment of piano parts to winds and other unexpected — and often illuminating — combinations.
But it is not a work for noisemakers, and in recent decades, with Christoph Eschenbach and Tilson Thomas, that's what we've had with the CSO. There's no doubt that MTT loves this work, but does he do so for its effects or its purpose? Conducting this exercise in serious fun without relying on a score, he had you wishing for more of his musical intelligence and less of his well-known showmanship.
Andrew Patner is critic at large for WFMT-FM (98.7).
Fact Box: Chicago Symphony OrchestraSOMEWHAT RECOMMENDED8 p.m. SaturdaySymphony Center, 220 S. MichiganTickets, $19-$199(312) 294-3000, cso.org
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