ESO connects with rousing all-Russian program

This weekend's second Classic Series concert of the Elgin Symphony Orchestra's 2008-09 season has been chosen with his usual care by music director Robert Hanson.

It's an all-Russian program whose top-billed work is the most familiar of all piano concertos: the Tchaikovsky First, with Russian-born pianist Mikhail Rudy the soloist. It's hard to believe it's a half century ago that the young Texan, Van Cliburn, made this concerto the centerpiece of his victory in the first International Tchaikovsky Competition.

Obviously, the Tchaikovsky concerto is familiar territory for Rudy, who grew up with this music in his soul and has enjoyed a wide-ranging international career as soloist with nearly all of the world's leading orchestras. Friday's performance was typically Russian, big-hearted and extroverted, and Rudy received a well-earned standing ovation.

Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, last performed by the ESO in the 2001-02 season, is the best known of the composer's 15 symphonies, and for a very good reason. When his opera, "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk," received a scathingly negative 1936 editorial/review in Pravda, Shostakovich was devastated. His newly completed Fourth Symphony, a bold work he felt might offend the Soviet hierarchy, was withdrawn while in final rehearsals, and the Fourth's greatness was not to be recognized until its belated 1961 premiere.

Meanwhile, in short order between April and July 1937 Shostakovich composed his Fifth Symphony, a much more mainstream work. Premiered in Leningrad in October 1937, it was an immediate success (a 40-minute ovation) and Shostakovich's artistic "rehabilitation" was well under way.

Many have argued that Shostakovich's motives were different, that his new symphony was more a musical rebuke than a bow to Soviet pressure. Whether or not he "sold out" to Stalin and his cronies has been debated among scholars for decades. In any case, the Fifth Symphony has become his most popular orchestral work.

This amazing score includes a march-like first movement, a short allegretto, an achingly beautiful slow movement that would make Mahler proud, and winds up with a nine-minute finale with its crowd-pleasing march-like theme and closing brass chords repeated over and over against emphatic bass drum and timpani strokes. Hanson and his orchestra gave this great score a real workout, resulting in a rousing response from Friday's matinee audience.

The concert opened with an atmospheric reading of the brief prelude to Modest Mussorgsky's unfinished opera "Khovanschina," in an arrangement by Shostakovich.

Elgin Symphony Orchestra

What: Robert Hanson conducts music by P.I. Tchaikovsky, Dmitri Shostakovich and Modest Mussorgsky

Guest soloist: Pianist Mikhail Rudy

Where: Hemmens Theatre, 45 Symphony Way, Elgin

When: 8 p.m. Saturday, 3:30 p.m. Sunday

Tickets: $25-$63. Call (847) 888-4000, or visit elginsymphony.org.