On tour in Prague, Chicago raises Mahler’s Sixth to a power of ten

PRAGUE — The Czech gentleman sat right in front for a pre-concert conversation with conductor Jaap van Zweden and the Michal brothers — Chicago Symphony Orchestra violinists Matous and Simon — who were playing in Smetana Hall for the first time since they were teenagers at the Prague Conservatory.

Then when the floor opened for questions, the gentleman spoke right away. And when the pre-concert conversation finished, there he was again, chatting with Simon in their shared native tongue. And once inside the concert hall, he was seated right next to me.

I never got his name.

He had recently retired from an American software company but had never visited the United States. Tonight was his first time hearing the CSO, which was bowing in Smetana Hall as part of its European Tour 2025.

The gentleman asked van Zweden about interpreting Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, and the conductor replied, “I bite in it and I don’t let go. ... Those woodwinds speak to nature, the brass to youthful spirit, the strings to love and affection and finally the harps summon the heavens." Then van Zweden turned to the brothers, both in their early 30s, and queried them himself: “Boys, what do you think?”

The gentleman had his own opinions, of course — on just about everything — which he shared with me as we waited for the concert to begin. He was the lone pianist in a family of violin players, which was always tough at home. He told me that Prague string pedagogue Jaroslav Foltýn, a name new to me, who had taught the Michal brothers, was “one of the great men in history.”

(The gentleman also mentioned that Americans should get over their Apple obsession and give Android a try — his polite reminder that it was time for me to turn off my iPhone.)

Prague’s Bedřich Smetana Hall, named for the other celebrated Czech orchestral and opera composer who isn’t Antonín Dvořák, shares the same polite, white, lightly gilded proscenium as Chicago’s Symphony Center. But that’s where the similarities end. The hall is a 1912 Art Nouveau riot of grandiose domes, soaring arches and colorful paintings everywhere — like a unicameral capitol building from some not-too-distant past when tax levies to build the thing would have crushed the proletariat.

Giant marble statues surround the stage; the CSO looks like it’s playing in the drained Trevi Fountain. Allegorical frescoes plaster the walls and ceilings with more reclining nudes than the 1979 film “Caligula”: imagine Smetana’s opera The Bartered Bride as directed by Bob Guccione or architect Daniel Burnham’s Orchestra Hall pimped out by renderer Jules Guérin, the colleague whose Lyric Opera House fire curtain was plenty extra already.

Smetana Hall resonates like a Blaupunkt car stereo in showroom-demo mode: all pounding basses and sharp trebles — which are positives for a Mahler symphony so frenetic. It is often said that Sir Georg Solti, the CSO’s eighth music director, ramped up the orchestra’s volume and intensity to compensate for Orchestra Hall’s dry acoustics, and van Zweden, to his credit, remains the most Solti-like of Chicago’s guest conductors.

Last night in Prague, van Zweden reminded those CSO patrons who still have four-digit customer numbers of the Solti era they always romanticize. If, as the beloved critic and polymath Andrew Patner once wrote of the younger conductor’s Chicago debut, “I would go to hear van Zweden conduct anything, anywhere,” Smetana Hall is right for the itinerary.

It was the Chicago basses’ night, with a driving opening that made the wooden floor rumble — that’s no metaphor — until it was the horns’ night, with a warm, enveloping sound that blended the ensemble. Until it was the trumpets’ night, with their sharp, klaxon-like intensity that flared above the orchestra. And did Mahler really call for three sets of crashing cymbals at once?

Van Zweden’s biting intensity had him off his feet and fully airborne in the first, second and fourth movements and the final hammer blows hit with the greatest thuds to slam Prague since the Defenestration of 1618 started the Thirty Years’ War.

The harps wafted. There was a soft, assured pluck of the violins and then complete, total silence.

“Sonore,” the Czech gentleman turned and said in Italian during the five-minute ovation, struggling for the right word in English: “I admire the differences in dynamics.” We settle on the phrase “dynamic extremes” and I assure him he’s heard Chicago’s orchestra at its very best.

The gentleman smiled. He knowingly nodded and spoke: “We were in heaven!”

After the concert, I strolled Prague, wandering Mahler’s own haunts on the other side of Old Town — he’d often worked in the city early in his career. I passed his several residences and wondered what the composer might have said of Chicago’s remarkable performance that night. And then I realized the answer.

“I could hear it all the way over here!”