Randall Goosby debut with Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Photo credit: Todd Rosenberg

A welcome podium return and a soloist’s fine CSO debut
By Lawrence A. Johnson
Minnesota Star Tribune
June 6, 2025

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is back from its extended European tour. And while Thursday night’s concert had more heft than last week’s one-night-only American program, it resembled the proverbial curate’s egg, somewhat lacking a center of gravity.

In fact, the results proved more successful in practice than they looked on paper, due in part to a fine CSO debut by a gifted violinist and, especially, to the welcome return of Sir Mark Elder to the podium in his first Orchestra Hall stand in nine years.

The British conductor was a popular, regular CSO podium guest in the pre-Riccardo Muti era, leading consistently inspired concerts, which included memorable performances of both Elgar symphonies and a wonderfully illuminating three-week Dvořák Festival, which opened 16 years ago almost to the day.

It was good to have Elder’s thoughtful and intelligent brand of music-making in collaboration with the CSO once again. That extended to his preferred orchestra layout—split violins, basses left, cellos stage center—which, along with his deft balancing, seemed to provide a greater degree of clarity and transparency.

The evening led off with Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 7. The Russian composer’s final major work is a restless, enigmatic piece with abrupt contrasts in material between balletic lyricism and characteristic flash and brilliance. Its origins as a “children’s symphony” surface at times in its gentle nostalgia and fitful whimsy.

Elder led an alert and incisive performance of Prokofiev’s Seventh Symphony—amazingly, the CSO’s first in 38 years. He brought poised expression to the recurring opening theme, and a touching piquancy to the playroom music-box elements without neglected the passing grotesqueries. Elder was especially inspired in conveying the lurking valedictory feeling of the symphony, which was particularly manifest in the tick-tock coda, the conductor observing Prokofiev’s original quiet ending. The musicians played with rich expression and commitment, if sounding a bit tentative at times in a score they either haven’t looked at in nearly four decades or ever played at all.

Two debuts were in the offing with the evening’s centerpiece, as violinist Randall Goosby made his first Chicago Symphony appearance in an American concerto that was also having its CSO premiere.

Goosby is an ardent advocate for the music of Florence Price and the 29-year-old musician has recorded both of the pioneering black composer’s concertos for his instrument. Price’s violin concertos are among her “lost” works that only came to light as recently as 2009, when they were discovered in an abandoned house in St. Anne, Illinois, which was Price’s former summer home.

Price’s Violin Concerto No. 2 betrays some of the composer’s weaknesses, including a rather herky-jerky structure and her fondness for over-scored percussion. Yet the 12-minute single movement also shows Price’s gift for tender lyricism and Goosby winningly brought out that affecting quality. Playing with a sweet, slender tone and ingratiating, communicative style, the violinist was fully in synch with Price’s intimate nostalgia and light virtuosity. Elder and the CSO provided their soloist with close and sympathetic support.

The ungenerous program (just over one hour of music) was filled out slightly by Goosby’s brief encore of Price’s organ work, Adoration. Played in his own arrangement for violin and strings, Goosby again showed himself ideally suited to Price’s music and he gave this melodious miniature ardent advocacy, just skirting the schmaltz, backed gracefully by the CSO’s front desk strings.

Performing Wagner opera excerpts in concert has gotten a somewhat bad rap in recent decades. But considering that Chicago is unlikely to get a production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg anytime soon, it was worthwhile to conclude the evening with a suite of excerpts from Wagner’s opera.

Elder is just as inspired an opera conductor as he is in symphonic music, as those who caught the unforgettable Peter Grimes he conducted at Lyric Opera in 1997 will recall. Elder led his own flowing continuous suite of the usual Meistersinger suspects, drawing playing of rich string tone, vivid brass and idiomatic punch from the musicians. This was spacious, magisterial Wagner by any measure, from the deep-toned and eloquent Prelude to Act III to the buoyancy of the Dance of the Apprentices and the stirring and majestic conclusion of the Meistersingers’ entrance and the Prelude to Act I.

Let’s hope that it’s not another nine years before Mark Elder returns to Chicago.

Read the original article here.