
CHICAGO — Following in the footsteps of Mendelssohn and Mahler in the 19th century and Bernstein and Boulez close to our time, Esa-Pekka Salonen has managed the highly challenging task of being supremely successful as both conductor and composer. In the latter role, he has written a steady stream of major works, avoiding movements or fads and focusing on music with depth, inventiveness and, more often than not, audience appeal.
The centerpiece of Salonen’s concert Jan. 30 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was his Sinfonia concertante for Organ and Orchestra, which he wrote for soloists Iveta Apkalna and Olivier Latry, who had both requested an organ concerto from him. The work was commissioned by the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic Foundation, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, where Apkalna serves as the house organist.
Salonen, who appears with the Chicago Symphony nearly every year, often oversees two sets of concerts, as he will during this visit. Indeed, the 66-year-old Finn serves as a kind of de facto principal guest conductor, usually bringing new or adventurous repertoire that nicely complements the orchestra’s other offerings. And his appearance is almost always a high point of the season. On this occasion, he framed his still-fresh quasi-concerto for organ with Richard Strauss’ Don Juan and Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra on a program that found the Chicago Symphony at the top of its game.
Apkalna, an internationally recognized Latvian organist, served as soloist for the work’s world premiere in January 2023 with the Polish National Radio Symphony in a concert celebrating the inauguration of a new organ in the ensemble’s hall in Katowice. (Latry took part in the Berlin Philharmonic debut just a few days later.) And it was Apkalna, making her Chicago Symphony debut, who was at the organ console for the concertante’s Midwest premiere.
It is important to note that this work is a sinfonia concertante and not a concerto. In the former, the solo instrument is more closely woven into the fabric of the piece. And that is certainly the case in Salonen’s score, which has multiple organ cadenzas and plenty of call for virtuosic playing, though that virtuosity is always at the service of the work at large and never just a showy display.
In his program notes, Salonen writes that he came to the idea of sinfonia concertante after wrestling with a central question posed by the organ’s unique attributes: “The organ can cover the entire scope of a symphony orchestra in every way. It has the same or wider pitch, dynamics and color ranges. How does one write a piece for essentially two orchestras without creating redundancy issues?”

Salonen’s Sinfonia concertante is an easy piece to appreciate but a hard one to like on first hearing. In this three-movement work, the composer has crafted a kind of alien, often strange, and somewhat impenetrable soundscape anchored in large part by the unusual combination of organ, glockenspiel, and vibraphone. Indeed, unexpected instrumental combinations abound, such as the mix of flute, piccolo, and organ when the piece opens.
While the first two movements are slower and a bit more contained, the third opens with what Salonen in his notes describes as a “carnival” atmosphere, but this is an odd, uncomfortable, and at times jarring festivity, with charging strings, empty drum rolls, clipped flutes, and brass blasts. As a whole, the work is disorienting and a little off-putting, yet entrancing in its way, the kind of work, one suspects, that will definitely require multiple hearings to fully take in.
As the the conductor who has led all of its performances so far, Salonen obviously knew his way around the piece and the effect he was seeking, and the orchestra went all out to deliver to it. Apkalna was undaunted by the concertante’s technical challenges or its moody atmospherics, playing with steely determination and meshing seamlessly with everything else going on.
Oddly, considering the instrument’s highly prominent role in this concert, the program book provided no information about Orchestra Hall’s 1998 top-level Casavant Frères Opus 3765 organ, which has 44 stops and 3,414 pipes. The organ was installed as part of a $110-million overhaul of Orchestra Hall beginning in 1995 that led to what became known as the Symphony Center complex, and it was dedicated in 1999. The instrument is typically heard at most a handful of times each season, so it was wonderful to see it not only put through its paces but also featured in something other than an oft-played work like Poulenc’s Organ Concerto.
Following the Salonen piece, Apkalna returned to the stage for an encore, Aivars Kalējs’ 1997 Toccata on the chorale “Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr.” The Latvian composer brought the rich toccata style of the French Romantic organ school to this take on J.S. Bach’s setting of the early Lutheran hymn, with all its Baroque counterpoint. It is in every way a showpiece, with intricate, fast-flowing arpeggios in the hands and melody played on the pedals, and Apkalna made sure it was a crowd-pleasing tour de force in every regard. In addition, the effervescent work really showed off the Orchestra Hall organ, especially some of its beautiful flute and bassoon stops.
For the first of his consecutive CSO programs this visit, Salonen put together a line-up of works that were all orchestral spectacles in their way, highlighting sections and principals across the ensemble, starting with Don Juan. The 1888 tone poem, a kind of instrumental telling of the famous story, was the composer’s first big success, and the piece has been a favorite with audiences since.
Salonen and the orchestra offered a vivacious, multifaceted take, with more than one intoxicating moment of lush, redolent Romanticism that transported listeners back to the time the work was written. There was a constant sense of movement and drive as the conductor deftly delineated the ever-shifting moods and maximized the drama with brisk tempos and bright sonorities. Virtually every section of the orchestra got a moment in the spotlight and made the most of it — the galloping strings, penetrating flutes, and lovely, big-voiced horns. All in all, it was a thriller that nearly stole the show just as it was beginning.

Rounding out the evening was a superlative account of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra (1943), which was not the first such piece in the form but surely the one that sets the standard for all that have followed. While some of Bartók’s music remains challenging, this work has long been an audience favorite, in part because of its humor, exuberant spirit, and idiomatic flavor. As the program book makes clear, Bartók has had a significant history with the orchestra, starting in the 1920s. The concerto, long an anchor of the orchestra’s repertoire, received important CSO recordings led by two music directors, Fritz Reiner and Georg Solti.
Salonen, who will conduct Bartók’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle in his second set of concerts Feb. 6-8 with the Chicago Symphony, lucidly shaped the concerto’s overall architecture and delineated all of its wonderful individual moments. He and the orchestra delivered a performance that captured its many facets — deliberate, urgent, searching, unsettled, intoxicating, and fun — and never allowed the energy or momentum to flag.
The Chicago Symphony also rose to the occasion. One would expect the ensemble’s renowned brass section to shine, and so it did, especially the trombone section, with a sound that was appropriately brash and muscular. Also deserving special mention were the double basses, which have added a number of new players in recent years, and impressed again and again with their full-bodied, barrel-like sound. Multiple soloists could be cited, but especially notable was principal oboist William Welter, a reliably expressive player who also excelled in Don Juan.
Finally, it is worth noting that the Jan. 30 concert was the first for newly appointed first violinist Gabriela Lara, the orchestra’s first Latina and first musician hired under CSO music director designate Klaus Mäkelä. She played previously with the ensemble as a CSO Fellow and won an audition last year to become a full-fledged member. She also took first place Jan. 25 in the senior division of this year’s Sphinx Competition in Detroit, earning a cash prize of $50,000 and solo appearances with major American orchestras.