FAREWELL SYMPHONY.(Daniel Barenboim ends tenure as music director of the Chicago Symphony)

On June 17th, Daniel Barenboim ended his decade-and-a-half run as the music director of the Chicago Symphony with a gritty, impassioned performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Before launching into the work, Barenboim delivered a speech in which he reflected bemusedly on the business of conducting. The celebrated Argentine-Israeli maestro--who has held posts on several continents, maintained a virtuoso piano career, written and lectured widely, and led the remarkable West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, bringing together Israeli and Arab players--spoke aloud the prosaic paradox that so often puzzles newcomers: the conductor is the center of attention, yet he makes no sound. He is, Barenboim said, "permanently dependent on the ability and willingness of the musicians to play in a certain way." A conductor deserves his title, Barenboim went on, only when he has acquired the players' trust. Pride filled Barenboim's voice as he declared that he had gained that trust--for much of his tenure, there was resistance from factions in the orchestra--and that he had just received the unofficial title of Honorary Conductor for Life. He then gave the downbeat for Beethoven's D-minor Allegro ma non troppo. The sound that flowed around him, grimly eloquent at the outset and electrically triumphant at the end, drove home the point.

While most of us incrementally fall to pieces over time, conductors tend to get better with age. Eventually, their legend precedes them; the respect that they have accumulated over the years does as much work as the movement of their hands. This explains how the physically shattered, emotionally unstable Otto Klemperer was, in his later years, able to deliver one staggering performance after another; musicians wanted to write themselves into his saga. Claudio Abbado is another conductor who has recently ascended to the stratosphere, seemingly incapable of giving non-transcendent performances. Barenboim is now sixty-three, and, although he had gravitas even in his youth, something in his work has deepened.

I had an adverse reaction when I first heard the great Chicago orchestra under Barenboim, a decade ago. There was a crude and chaotic quality to the sound: you could still hear the vehement aesthetic of Georg Solti, Barenboim's predecessor, but it lacked Solti's precision. Barenboim conducted with a broad beat, trying at times for profound effects that either he was unable to articulate or the orchestra was unwilling to execute. Now he no longer pushes so hard, for his personality has melded with the orchestra's. His musicianship is old-fashioned; he doesn't go in for glossy perfection, instead favoring sinewy textures, earthy rhythms, freely singing lines. He is at his best in the Viennese classics, in Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Bruckner, where he sways to his heart's content between song and structure.

His last three Chicago concerts, which took place on consecutive nights, featured not only the Beethoven Ninth but also the Ninth Symphonies of Mahler and Bruckner, plus Pierre Boulez's "Notations," Elliott Carter's "Soundings," and Beethoven's "Choral Fantasy," with the conductor at the piano in the last two. Nobody ever said that Barenboim was meek. The concerts caused considerable excitement in Chicago, even among those who had never loved the conductor. Some listeners resisted his habit of insistently programming the likes of Carter and Boulez; others resented his pro-Palestinian statements, or criticized him for failing to evangelize to younger audiences. Nonetheless, spare tickets were going for five hundred dollars and up. On the last night of the series, a young man was seen out on Michigan Avenue waving a fistful of twenties, to no avail.

The Mahler Ninth felt like a recapitulation of Barenboim's Chicago career. The first movement was rocky at times, orchestra and conductor never quite settling on a central pulse--that stuttering-heartbeat rhythm that signifies the composer's knowledge of his own approaching death. Yet the playing was ...