In Iowa City, coming together for a joyous night with the CSO and Muti

Even in the dead of a winter’s Sunday night, with temperatures in the single digits, you could feel the warmth and celebrate the life of a community coming together. The return of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to Iowa City on January 29 offered solace as well as celebration — the sort of healing that great art can help facilitate.

The crowd plainly was expecting something special, with the parking lot filling more than a half-hour before the concert’s 7:30 start, and the lobby buzzing with greetings and well wishes, with students and faculty among the crowd. When an orchestra that has won 63 Grammy Awards comes to town, everyone knows this is an event.

As the audience streamed into the 1,800-seat concert hall of Hancher Auditorium, the warmth of strings from violinists in formal wear added an elegance and gentility to the evening. The chill outside was quickly forgotten.

The University of Iowa, and Hancher in particular, had been through a lot, even before COVID disrupted cultural and educational life as we know it. The great flood of 2008 had ravaged the campus west of the Iowa River, where, coincidentally, the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics remain situated not far from Hancher.

It took eight years for a redesigned and rebuilt Hancher Auditorium to rise again, budgeted at more than $175 million. (It has taken even longer for the University of Iowa’s Stanley Museum of Art, home to Jackson Pollock’s 8x20-foot “Mural,” which went on a vagabond world tour for more than a decade before the reopened museum could bring it back.) This year marks Hancher’s “Golden Anniversary,” promoted with the slogan “We All Rise,” in recognition of not only an enduring legacy but a return from the disruption and discontinuity of the recent past.

Preceding the CSO’s concert was a moment of silence, in memory of Dr. William Stanford, a professor emeritus of radiology and a major supporter of the arts and the university. Hancher’s Executive Director Andre Perry then continued to commend the crowd for making it “past the toughest days of the pandemic ... to return to art, to return to music, to return to love.”

So, yes, art and its healing properties were very much within the collective consciousness of those gathered. And the CSO, led by Zell Music Director Riccardo Muti, proceeded to fulfill that mission. In its traditional values and rituals, the orchestra itself seemed to re-establish a sense of order beyond the ravages of time and circumstance, where the timeless majesty of Beethoven sounds eternally fresh.

“The CSO first visited Hancher in 1972, and we’ve been fortunate to have them back in Iowa City many times since,” said Aaron Greenwald, the venue’s director of programming and engagement, before the concert. “This visit has special significance because it’s the final season with CSO for their longtime music director, Ricardo Muti, a towering force in the world of classical music. This is a joyful opportunity for the Iowa City community to gather together in our splendid hall for an evening of absolutely first-rate music making.”

The CSO had last visited Hancher five years ago, so it had become familiar with the new facility before COVID shut things down. For this first tour since the pandemic, the program stuck to the repertoire that the CSO has generally been performing this season.

For violinist Rachel Goldstein, a member of the CSO since 1989, the concert represented a homecoming. “As a native of Iowa City, I remember the opening of the original Hancher Auditorium,” she said via email. “I attended, and also performed in, many concerts there, which played a part in inspiring my decision to become a professional musician. Having the opportunity to perform in the new Hancher with the CSO and Maestro Muti was a great pleasure.

“I enjoy coming to Iowa City with the orchestra. It’s been a rare occurrence, just twice in my 33-year career.”

Following a rousing ovation as Muti took the stage, with a ritual handshake from Concertmaster Robert Chen, the audience responded with rapt attention, making silences seem as powerful as the bravura passages, as the music director led the CSO through Beethoven’s relatively compact Coriolan Overture. Under Muti’s direction, the CSO’s string section in particular combined a precision like clockwork with the performance of a living and breathing entity.

Following that musical appetizer, the CSO offered a main course —Beethoven’s more expansive Eighth Symphony. Here, an occasional cough made it even more remarkable just how quiet the audience had been previously. It’s a whole different experience to have the opportunity to hear the CSO only every few years, or even once in a lifetime, instead of the familiarity a subscription base might bring. It must be different for the musicians as well, receiving such fresh appreciation. And if it meant occasional smatterings of applause at the end of a movement, mistaken for the end of a piece, so be it. The audience learned quickly.

After the intermission, the second half of the concert again preceded the main course with a shorter appetizer, and then finished with a delightfully unexpected dessert. Comparatively brief, Liadov’s The Enchanted Lake, punctuated by harp and woodwinds, sounded spacious and airy, a winged piece.

The program climaxed with Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition, where the shifts in tempo and volume, the range of sonic tones and textures, seemed like the symphonic equivalent of pyrotechnics. By the time it built to its rousing finale — through brass, timpani, cymbals and tolling bells — a charge seemed to pass through the audience, which rewarded the performance with an extended ovation, eliciting a smile from the beaming Muti and applause for the individual musical contributions.

Then the audience was rewarded with a surprise encore, a lush, warm and romantic intermezzo from the south of Muti’s native Italy, from the opera Fedora by Giordano. It sent the attendees back outside feeling warm inside — a community restored and renewed through music.