Oh, Danny boy

Daniel Barenboim’s final month as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is filled with the sort of works he does best. Along with playing piano recitals and chamber music, his CSO programs mix Austro-German repertoire staples with the modernist composers he favors. Another added benefit is that CSO players have been gearing up for these concerts all season and will be playing with a little extra excitement.

Since he’s showing off his strengths, here’s a Barenboim Sampler: For $100, you can attend five concerts, gain a well-rounded opinion of his work and not break the bank. The least expensive tickets are $20 or less, so you can also take in fewer concerts and splurge on good seats for one or two of them and take in fewer concerts. The cheap seats in Orchestra Hall are in the vertigo-inducing gallery, but the sound really blooms up there.

The finale starts with this weekend’s CSO concerts. Barenboim’s experience leading Wagner’s epic operas in Bayreuth (home base of Wagner-worship) will be on display in Chicago beginning Thursday 25 with the last act of the composer’s last opera, Parsifal. Bass René Pape, who will sing the aged knight Gurnemanz, is the sort of singer with whom Barenboim favors working: someone willing to put the music’s beauty ahead of showing off. The concert also includes Pierre Boulez’s Notations I–IV and VII, five brief and jewellike works for an orchestra even larger than Wagner’s. Barenboim’s been conducting them for decades, too.

On Sunday 28, baritone Thomas Hampson sings American songs with Barenboim at the piano. The songs of Barber and Copland make a comfortable home for Hampson’s conversational baritone, but this is terra incognita for Barenboim, and a great opportunity to hear him outside of his comfort zone.

For many years, Barenboim believed that Mahler’s popularity stemmed more from the composer’s tragic biography than the quality of the music. He’s changed his mind on that point and now conducts many Mahler symphonies. On Tuesday 30, he leads Mahler’s Fifth and the Kindertotenlieder.

Barenboim and the CSO reveled in the dynamic extremes of the Fifth last fall, producing huge waves of sound in the first movement’s funeral march and finale. While Barenboim lets the orchestra thunder, he does it while maintaining an almost operatic lyricism. The force of the music doesn’t become bombastic, it just surrounds you. Singing the Kindertotenlieder is baritone Thomas Quasthoff, another longtime Barenboim collaborator.

Another one-shot concert follows on June 3. Beethoven has been central to Barenboim’s Chicago tenure, and tonight he leads Beethoven’s most revolutionary symphony, the Third (“Eroica”). Since Barenboim builds the orchestra’s sound up from the bass instruments, the second movement’s funeral march may sound that much more tragic with the bass voices providing the dolorous underpinning. Also on this bill, composer-in-residence Augusta Read Thomas’s new work Astral Canticle gets one of its first hearings. It features the fine concert master Robert Chen and principal flutist Mathieu Dufour. (Barenboim hired all three.)

Conductors who can lead piano concertos from the bench are few and far between, and our experience says that no one does it better than Barenboim. On June 8 and 13, Barenboim turns to the Mozart concertos he’s played for 50 years and offers two concertos for the price of one: Mozart’s last, No. 27 in B flat major, K.595; and No. 22 in E flat major, K.482. In between are Webern’s captivating Concerto and Symphony.

For your last glimpse of Barenboim, go to a piano recital, and listen to him play the second book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier on June 11. Barenboim’s recent recordings of the WTC (Warner Classics) brought lyricism to Bach’s counterpoint.

The CSO has less of an edge than when Barenboim came on board and plays more contemporary music. Barenboim prefers a richer, thicker orchestral tone rather than the high-octane approach of Sir George Solti, who preceded him, and the brass doesn’t bury the entire orchestra the way it used to, which irritates some people. But few conductors can bring out Beethoven’s overwhelming power, and fewer still are as committed to progressive modern music. We’ll miss his warm Mozart and heart-stopping Beethoven. Not to mention his cocky saunter to the podium.z

Barenboim begins saying good-bye Thursday 25.