Dima Slobodeniouk admits a special affection for the scamp Peer Gynt

There are tunes by Edvard Grieg that most people already know, although they may not realize that, and one of the most famous of them will be performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Dec. 5-7 when the Russian-born Finnish conductor Dima Slobodeniouk leads the Suite No. 1 from Peer Gynt.

“But this music we will perform is just the tip of the iceberg,” insists Slobodeniouk, whose enthusiasm for Grieg’s Peer Gynt has led him, on other occasions, to prepare as much as a full hour’s worth of the incidental music that Grieg first composed for the 1867 play Peer Gynt by Norwegian dramatist Henryk Ibsen.



Both the play and the music are named after the larger-than-life rascal Peer Gynt, who thinks he’s someday going to become emperor. The wayward scamp’s unconventionally “heroic” adventures are detailed in Ibsen’s sprawling five-act, 40-scene, nearly six-hour play, for which Grieg wrote nearly 90 minutes of incidental music. Subsequently, Grieg would arrange some of this music into two orchestral suites, the first of which the CSO will perform.  


Peer Gynt remains one of theater’s legendary braggarts and procrastinators. His bizarre escapades take him all the way from the harsh isolation of Norway to the desert of North Africa and back, during which he gets into all manner of trouble.

“With its spirit of adventure, I suppose you could take this story out of its geographical context and place it somewhere else, anywhere,” says Slobodeniouk, "but there is a particularly Nordic aspect of this work that I personally recognize, in particular, in that Peer Gynt is obviously lost. He doesn’t really know where to connect. He doesn’t know where the hard ground is. He is just completely blown from one place to another by the harsh winds.

"It’s only at the end of things that Peer Gynt understands what is the most important. The excerpts we are playing will bring some of the sorrow, and some of the beauty, and of course, the extraordinarily vast landscapes. I encourage people to become acquainted with even more of this music in its entirety."

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“There is a particularly Nordic aspect of this work that I personally recognize, in particular, in that Peer Gynt is obviously lost. He doesn’t really know where to connect.” — Dima Slobodeniouk

The question of what it is that a conductor can bring to a work, regardless of whether the composer is alive or long dead, is a subject Slobodeniouk readily embraces. "I collaborate quite a lot with living composers, and I rarely ask them what they meant, because what they meant may not go along with what I am hearing in their music, and it usually doesn’t," he says. "They write from the perspective of the composer. There is the structure, there is the harmony, there is the form, of course, and these are the music’s facts.


"But what we performers think about is how we can make this piece, in fact, ’alive.’ And how we can bring something of ourselves to it. This comes naturally to us as performers; we don’t even have to try. That’s what is most interesting about a musician’s work — we are not merely repeating what other people have written. The pieces are there, yes, but they are not alive until we do them.

"This is somewhat different from some other musical genres, such as jazz or rock, where the musicians who create the pieces are also the same musicians who perform them. But in our classical music genre, we are not just dealing with museum objects. And whether Peer Gynt achieves any kind of wisdom, or whether he just meanders through life without learning much at all, is a matter for each listener to ponder.”

Peer Gynt is often referred to as the Norwegian equivalent of Shakespeare’s larger-than-life character Falstaff — both being rather wild, self-absorbed and over the top, oddly magnificent even in failure. But Grieg’s lively suite, as the CSO will perform it, amounts to a snapshot that takes only about 15 minutes at the top of the concert, leaving room on Slobodeniouk’s program for two other works about which the conductor is equally enthusiastic: Witold Lutosławski’s Cello Concerto and Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 1.

When it came to the choice of a work for the guest soloist to play, Slobodeniouk believes the planners struck gold with the Cello Concerto of Polish composer Witold Lutosławski. The work is a mid-20th century classic, which the Canadian-German cellist Johannes Moser and Slobodeniouk performed in Minneapolis with the Minnesota Orchestra a few years back.

“I remember the Minneapolis experience vividly,” Slobodeniouk says. “I was thrilled by the way Moser embraced this musical life, and I mean it not only in the way he sits down and plays this particular piece, but almost how he makes the performance seem like a ritual, a procession, an interaction, or maybe even sometimes a distraction, and how he makes the whole thing very visual.”



The CSO program will end with Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 1, written in 1895. Slobodeniouk considers it to be a very special work that he has been happy to help revive: "We are told that it had an unfortunate beginning. The premiere didn’t go so well, and there was a general understanding that Alexander Glazunov, the conductor, was not sober, and so the performance was a complete disaster.

"However, I have a different understanding, which goes as follows:
Rachmaninov, hearing that performance, decided by himself that this was no good, and not so much because the performance was not going as he liked — but that the piece itself was not going at all as he liked. So Rachmaninov refused to let it be repeated, resigning himself completely from it. Then he was in a deep depression, and he did not compose for many years.

“But this was an opinion only of the composer himself,” Slobodeniouk says. "We performers — we who play this symphony and bring it alive every time we do it — we somehow have a different relationship to it. As for me, a recording [of it] completely changed the way I heard the piece. I thought the music was so convincing, so deep and experimental, that it was in a way much deeper and broader than any other symphonies Rachmaninov wrote.”


Slobodeniouk calls this First Symphony of Rachmaninov the expression of a young composer. "I think of it as a revelation of something very personal, very touching, very dramatic. So I love it absolutely like nothing else, and I am super lucky that in this year [season] with Rachmaninov [2023-24 marked the 150th anniversary of his birth], I got to conduct all his symphonies and all his piano concertos. The performance of this symphony will be the last Rachmaninov for me this year. So that somehow I get to do this with the Chicago Symphony is like a dream.”