1st birthday gift

1st-rate extravaganza marks JCC's 100th birthday

Yo-Yo Ma, Yefim Bronfman, members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra

AT SYMPHONY CENTER

The Jewish Community Centers of Chicago celebrated their 100th birthday in stellar fashion Wednesday night with a sold-out concert featuring members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and guest soloists Yo-Yo Ma and Yefim Bronfman at Symphony Center.

The JCC's tradition of sponsoring an annual benefit concert each fall isn't quite as old as the organization itself, but in recent years the local music season hasn't been complete without its starry fall event. Wednesday's concert was a go-for-broke concerto extravaganza conducted by David Zinman featuring Ma in Dvorak's Cello Concerto and Bronfman in Prokofiev's prickly Piano Concerto No. 2. Bronfman was the star of the JCC's Symphony Center benefit in 2001, giving a duo recital with pianist Emanuel Ax that focused on music of Brahms.

There were few surprises Wednesday night, which is the way benefit concert organizers like it. Prokofiev's piano concerto, first written in 1913 when the composer was 22 and reworked extensively in 1923, was designed by the young firebrand to affront bourgeois sensibilities. His audience in 1913 was properly scandalized, but today the concerto's audacious flash and crash hits 21st century ears as early modernism's business as usual.

Bronfman played with his usual blend of pristine technical control and hard-driving intensity. The orchestra plays second fiddle to the soloist's pianistic dazzle in this work, but Zinman and Bronfman were congenial partners and punched out the third movement's swaggering march with arrogant elan.

They repeat the concerto at the CSO's regular subscription concerts at 1:30 p.m. today, 8 p.m. Saturday and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday in Symphony Center.

Ma is a regular visitor to Chicago, and his rapport with the CSO is profound, no matter who is conducting. Dvorak's Cello Concerto is deservedly one of classical music's most beloved works, a masterful pairing of the cello's incomparable singing line and Dvorak's lyrical gift.

Wednesday's audience received what they came to hear, an intensely involved superstar soloist and a virtuoso orchestra in familiar music. Ma's tone was lean and alert, and he managed to convey a sense of spontaneity in a work he has doubtless played thousands of times. A sense of ineffable melancholy and resignation clung to his lingering final note, swelling and fading, overwhelmed as the orchestra swept in to close the concerto with a song of unrestrained triumph.