Commentary: Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Karina Canellakis, April 3-5 at Orchestra Hall

By Lawrence B. Johnson

Karina Canellakis may be the most accomplished conductor not on everyone’s lips, a plausible American successor to Leonard Bernstein and Michael Tilson Thomas. Such was the impression Canellakis left after her second appearance with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in concerts April 3-5. She is a huge talent, at age 43 widely and significantly tested, albeit in an oddly quiet way.

Winner of the Georg Solti Conducting Award in 2016, Canellakis has been chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra since 2019, recently extended for the second time through 2031. She has appeared repeatedly with all the major American orchestras, including the Chicago Symphony, where she made her debut in 2022. Perhaps the CSO is just now catching up: Canellakis returns next season with Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony and pianist Conrad Tao in Bartok’s Third Piano Concerto.

But her recent program at Orchestra Hall included neither a symphony nor a concerto. Canellakis offered two symphonic poems and Rachmaninoff’s formidable Symphonic Dances. The spotlight was on her shoulders throughout, and she seemed to revel in the opportunity. She certainly made the most of it.

Like many other conductors, Canellakis, a New York native whose parents were both musicians, developed mastery of an instrument, in her case the violin, before her interest recentered on the baton. While she is obviously well schooled in the craft of conducting, she also comes across as an original. Her gestures tend to be quite large, though her beat is clear, her expressive point crisp and precise, the line fluid. She drew eloquent, beautifully contoured playing from the Chicago Symphony.

The two tone poems that filled the first half of her program were comparative rarities: Sibelius “The Oceanides” and Dvořák’s “The Wood Dove” (a more common, more poetic and apt translation than “The Wild Dove” used in the CSO program book). Both works received evocative, idiomatic readings that left one wondering why they don’t show up more often.

In Greek mythology, the Oceanides were sea nymphs, not so different from the Rhein Maidens of Norse myth and Wagner’s “Das Rheingold.” And Sibelius welling, rolling, sparkling music perhaps has more to do with the nymphs’ watery domain than with the creatures themselves. It’s a shimmering 10 minutes that Canellakis allowed to flow and crest with a sure sense of the work’s rather impressionistic profile. Indeed, the kinship to Debussy’s “La mer,” written about 10 years earlier in 1905, can hardly be missed.

Dvořák’s “The Wood Dove” evokes the legend of a woman who poisons her husband only to be haunted by the cooing of a dove in a tree over her husband’s grave. The melodious tweaking of her conscience drives her to kill herself. It’s a bit reminiscent of the death and karma scenario of Mahler’s early cantata “Das klagende Lied.” Here the dove’s remonstrative piping echoes in three flutes augmented by piccolo, a lovely display of sad warmth by the CSO players. The rich examples of Liszt’s tone poems resound in Dvorak’s colorful scene-setting and in his surging depiction of the woman’s gathering madness — all quite vividly invoked by Canellakis and a keenly attuned orchestra.

The main event, however, was Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances (1940), his last work and a veritable summation of his mastery of the resources of a large orchestra. The work is laid out in three movements: a bright, arching episode followed by a melancholy waltz and a pulsing, brilliant finale. Canellakis was solidly in control of Rachmaninoff’s large structures, which she animated with urgent, incisive rhythms and a supple brand of lyricism. The last movement, which exploits the composer’s lifelong fascination with the medieval Dies irae, swelled to a close of marvelous, sumptuous power.