Review: With Michael Tilson Thomas, music is easy and sweet at CSO

Usually, when a soloist is welcomed onstage at an orchestral concert, that artist steps out onstage first, trailed by the conductor.

Not so on Thursday. There was one man of the hour at the Chicago Symphony, whom pianist Orion Weiss graciously acknowledged at a respectful distance during his walk onstage: conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, turning 79 this month and grappling with incurable brain cancer.

Tilson Thomas made his glioblastoma multiforme diagnosis public last year, stepping down from the New World Symphony training orchestra he founded in Miami Beach and reducing his engagements. For someone with this cancer to have survived this long, much less kept up with the strenuous demands of conducting and touring, is a miracle.

But Tilson Thomas’s health demands pickiness going forward. The appearances remaining on his calendar this season are reserved for the San Francisco Symphony, which he led for 25 transformative years as music director, and the New World Symphony — his two artistic homes.

Count Chicago as an honorary one. According to the CSO’s archivists, Tilson Thomas boasts the longest performance history with the CSO of any conductor. He made his debut at Ravinia at just 25, in 1970. More than 50 years later, Tilson Thomas swept his engagement slate clean this month, canceling appearances with the National and Toronto symphony orchestras, just so he could rest up for Chicago.

His mostly Mozart program this month is somewhat off-center for Tilson Thomas, whose sweet spot runs from late Romantic mega-symphonies through latter-day American mavericks. So, the composer’s breezy Six German Dances — never played by the CSO before Thursday, though conducted by Tilson Thomas in recent seasons — might seem off-off-center. Mozart wrote the 1787 medley for a ball in Prague, not a concert stage, and it’s less confection than pure sugar dust.

Leave it to Mozart to infuse even a tossed-off scrap of recreational music with winking virtuosity. Though never leaving triple time, Mozart knits the varying keys of each dance together with modulations so deft one hardly notices them. He also enshrines the piccolo (played with relish by Jennifer Gunn) in a semi-starring role — unusual for him outside the opera space. Tilson Thomas, gesturing economically here as with most of the evening, acted as a good-natured coach rather than a conductor, allowing the music to bob along on its own delightful terms.

Somehow, it’s been nearly a decade since Weiss, 42, performed under the auspices of the CSO. Thursday’s performance, of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A, was a reunion to remember. Weiss’ equal accomplishments as a chamber musician asserted themselves handsomely in his performance: rather than treating the solo part as a binary — either out in front of the orchestra or tucked behind it — Weiss toyed with the gray area between, sometimes tucking himself inside the texture as an equal partner with the orchestra. In the Rondo finale, he charmingly experimented with each theme return, varying it slightly each time.

Interpretively, Weiss would have been just as at home behind a fortepiano. He lends a crisply enunciated touch to this repertoire, his pedaling feather-light but certainly active. On Thursday, he painted with the same head-spinning range of colors on a modern instrument as on that more mercurial predecessor.

If Weiss drew an impressive sonic spectrum from the Symphony Center Steinway, the CSO under Tilson Thomas augmented it at both ends by a mile. The idiosyncrasies (to put it mildly) of Orchestra Hall often turn up at least a few balance issues in concerto repertoire. Instead, Tilson Thomas’s intimate knowledge of this orchestra, this hall and this soloist made for an exquisite balancing act, a few scattered ensemble moments aside.

Weiss offered, in his words, “weird Debussy” — that is, the composer’s late Etude No. 11 “for composite arpeggios” — as an entrancing encore. Weiss poured forth rivulets of those titular arpeggios, streaming from the right-hand melody, so fluidly they sounded like runs. Surely, Weiss’ long caesuras from Orchestra Hall are a thing of the past.

Schoenberg tails Tilson Thomas all season: he also conducts his Five Pieces for Orchestra in San Francisco and Miami Beach. Here, though, Schoenberg’s brilliant and bizarro talents as an arranger come to the fore for Brahms’ Piano Quartet No. 1, the full orchestration taking up the symphony spot on the program’s latter half.

Schoenberg’s insistence, repeated in the program book, that he took no liberties Brahms wouldn’t have taken himself, were he alive in 1937, is a bit of an eye-roller. Schoenberg’s hyperactive realization, complete with xylophone and tambourine, sounds Balkanized next to Brahms’ more collegial polyphony. Brahms it’s not, but Bizet appears, in the fourth movement — it seems Schoenberg absorbed “Près des ramparts de Séville” from Act I of “Carmen,” maybe subliminally — as do piquant percussive touches that would sit comfortably in Shostakovich or Prokofiev’s output.

Not infrequently, this brimming score sloshed around in execution. Thursday’s performance was a wincing one for the CSO horns, and the offbeats of the “Rondo alla zingarese” gamboled away from the low brass in its rambunctious home stretch.

At a bird’s-eye view, however, this was still an enthralling performance. The opening bars rolled mightily, like a storm-dark sea, orchestral textures shadowed by the persistent rumble of contrabassoon (another fanciful Schoenberg addition, sturdily provided by guest musician Vincent Karamanov). For its all its ensemble challenges, the last movement also packaged truly excellent individual showings from CSO musicians. Concertmaster Stephanie Jeong brought fire and passion to her solos; in a clever orchestrational Easter egg, she’s joined later by first-desk colleagues in the violas and cello, a nod to the piece’s original instrumentation. The fabulous Lyric Opera clarinetist Susan Warner, subbing on E-flat while John Bruce Yeh continues to cover for an infirm Stephen Williamson, crowned the woodwinds wherever she appeared.

Once as athletic and exuberant a conductor as they came, Tilson Thomas’ gestures on the podium have diminished starkly. He mostly stays anchored in one place, sometimes letting his left arm hang while his right beats time. But given a humbling report from his last public engagement, in San Francisco, Tilson Thomas was remarkably resilient and cogent on Thursday, only occasionally helped on and off the podium by Jeong and the CSO’s stage manager.

What gestures remain are token Tilson Thomas: highly expressive fingers giving cues like starbursts, swordsmanly swipes at the strings to indicate an especially charged attack. The Brahms-Schoenberg’s decadent Andante con moto evaporates into a delicate woodwind-crested chord; Tilson Thomas gently ushered it into silence with a mere wave, then a pinch. Simplicity made sublime.

All night, one half-expected Tilson Thomas, among the most charismatic musical explainers since Bernstein, to address the audience, or somehow acknowledge the weight of this moment in ways only the torrents of applause dared to. He never did — not directly.

But in the silence before the Brahms-Schoenberg, Tilson Thomas looked out over the orchestra for what felt like minutes, as though taking stock of each face. Later, lifting his baton for the third movement, he did something unusual: he spoke to the orchestra.

“Enjoy,” he told them. “Take it easy.”

“MTT Conducts Mozart” continues 7:30 p.m. Dec. 2 and Dec. 5 at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.; tickets $39-$325; more information at cso.org.

Weiss returns to Chicago for the Winter Chamber Music Festival at Northwestern University, “Ariel Quartet with Orion Weiss,” Sun., Jan. 7, Pick-Staiger Concert Hall, 50 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston; tickets $10-$30 at music.northwestern.edu.

Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.

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