GENEVA, Switzerland — The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s visit to this Swiss city — with its requisite lake and mountain views; Old Town cobblestone streets and hilltop cathedrals; and sleek boulevards punctuated by high-end watch and chocolate shops — was the organization’s first ever, but this tour stop didn’t have the historic bent of the Warsaw concert a few nights earlier.
In Warsaw you can’t help but be struck by the city’s and country’s devastating history, which surrounds you in structures built or rebuilt and a population reinvigorated after being decimated by the Nazis and repressed by the Soviets. In Geneva you can’t help but be struck by how expensive a croissant and cup of espresso are. Wait, a Swiss Franc is almost the same as a dollar?
People who previously had visited Warsaw marveled at how much it had changed. People who previously had visited Geneva said it’s pretty much the same. It’s Switzerland.
Yet if this is an environment that doesn’t offer much in the way of drama, it nonetheless can drum up some enthusiasm — which is to say that Geneva music veterans considered the standing ovation that greeted the end of the CSO’s Thursday night program to be a rarity.
Then again, the Geneva appearance of a major orchestra such as the CSO is also a rarity in itself.
“For us it’s a big event,” said Steve Roger, who helped present the program through the artist and concert programming agency Caecilia. “They’ve never been here before. Unfortunately we don’t have big orchestras at this level very often. This hall is nice, but it’s an old one.”
Victoria Hall, where the CSO performed, is an ornate jewel box built in 1893, with more than 1,500 seats on the floor and in two tiers of balconies as well as boxes positioned directly over the harp and horn players and two single rows running behind the orchestra toward the organ pipes on the back wall. The capacity is actually larger than the halls where the CSO played in Warsaw and Luxembourg, but, as Brigitte Stockmann, artistic administrator for the Geneva-based Suisse Romande orchestra, said, “It doesn’t have the facilities, maybe.”
During the intermission Roger was welcoming sponsors and donors into the cordoned-off corner at the back of the lobby, whereas in other halls they would have been in a separate reception room. The theater also lacked room for the musicians’ trunks, which wound up back in the hotel.
So Roger said the recent push to present such orchestras as the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony and now CSO is intended in part to drum up momentum to build a new hall. “We have the money for that but not the space,” he said.
The CSO’s usual Switzerland tour stop is the Lucerne Festival in the modern Culture and Congress Center, but Geneva wound up on this trip’s itinerary as the CSO assembled and reassembled a puzzle that earlier had Turkey as a potential destination.
“They had this date in between Luxembourg and Paris, so we grabbed it,” said Pedro Kranz, the concert’s official presenter with Caecilia. “And we managed to have a sponsor because it’s impossible to present it without a sponsor. It’s just too expensive, like most of the orchestras.”
Vanessa Moss, the CSO’s vice president for orchestra and building operations, said she was glad the orchestra was able to perform in a city of such international significance, not just on the musical side. Music director Riccardo Muti also has made a priority of mixing the unfamiliar with the familiar.
“It’s important and valuable to play for audiences who have never heard this orchestra live,” Moss said.
The program consisted of what the orchestra played in the first half in Luxembourg — Tchaikovsky’s “The Tempest” and Debussy’s “La mer,” in a rolling-seas sort of theme — and what it played for the second half in Warsaw, Schumann’s Symphony No. 3. Although the sound was a bit echoey during a rehearsal in the empty auditorium, once people were in the seats, it sounded full and rich, which benefited Muti’s approach as he deliberately drew out the pieces’ textures. (Musicians afterward said they appreciated the acoustics.)
After multiple bows at the end, Muti returned to the podium, turned to the audience and said simply, “Verdi, ‘Nabucco.'”
The crowd responded: “Ahhhhhh!”
After the orchestra’s gallop through the Italian composer’s opera music, the crowd was on its feet, with one woman shouting, “Bravo! Chicago! Bravo!”
“It’s an ensemble with a huge discipline and (great) spirit,” Stockmann said afterward in the tight backstage area. “You can hear it, a coherence in the sound.”
Muti emerged from his little dressing room to greet visitors, some of whom posed for selfies with him. “Far away, far away,” the conductor instructed one woman who was holding her phone camera too close for his comfort.
Afterward, Muti noted that Infanta Cristina, the daughter of Spain’s King Juan Carlos and Queen Sophie, had been seated in the second row. “So we had a royal presence,” he said.
The following morning some of the traveling party headed to Paris while others remained in Geneva for an extra day. The Paris concerts are Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, and then the orchestra travels to Vienna for a week-long residency. There’s pretty good chocolate there too.
Twitter @MarkCaro
For more on the CSO’s tour of Europe, go to chicagotribune.com/cso-europe.
