In 1952, the New Yorker journalist A. J. Liebling penned a withering put-down of Chicago’s cultural life entitled “Second City,” a label that was not meant to refer to the city’s census statistics.

A city that possesssed no opera company, relied on touring theater troupes from New York, and treasured a major league baseball team that was always in the cellar was hardly first rank.

No matter how modest Chicago’s cultural bank account may have been in the mid-20th century, it could boast one authentic jewel in its five-and dime artistic crown: the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Even East Coast elitists always included the Chicago Symphony among the “Big Five” American orchestras, and a succession of notable international conductors—Désiré Defauw, Artur Rodzinski and Rafael Kubelik—served as the Chicago Symphony’s music directors in that era. Under the subsequent leadership of Sir Georg Solti and Daniel Barenboim (1969-2006), the orchestra acquired an impeccable international reputation for its consummate discipline and a stentorian brass section. In those heady decades, a visit by the Chicago Symphony was a remarkable event, one that required attendance by anyone who intended to be culturally au courant.

When I left Copley Symphony Hall Sunday (Feb. 19) after the Chicago Symphony concert, I felt no such sense of occasion, although the orchestra’s performance under its new Music Director Riccardo Muti was indeed splendid, still replete with all of the musical virtues of that orchestra's Golden Age. I am not the first to note that California’s classical musical scene has matured significantly in the last 25 years, and in the last decade the San Francisco Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic have become North America’s leading orchestras, certainly in terms of their programming and arguably in terms of their musical prowess.

The problem with Chicago’s concert was a lack of depth in Muti’s programming. On paper, his choice was the classic “something old, something new” formula: Franz Schubert’s Ninth Symphony (“Great”) and a major commissioned work by the young British composer Anna Clyne, “Night Ferry.” With Mason Bates, Clyne is one of Chicago’s Composers-in-Residence. Clyne’s modernist 30-minute tone poem provided visceral excitement, and Schubert hour-long symphonic essay gave nearly every section of the orchestra the opportunity to spin out gorgeous, heart-melting melodies.

But the evening came up short in the profundity column. For the Schubert enthusiasts, I would only remind them that the subtitle "Great" for his Ninth Symphony was selected only to distinguish it from his much shorter and earlier C Major Symphony.

In the early 20th century, Béla Bartók set the bar for eerie, expressionist “night music” in various chamber and orchestral works, and “Night Ferry” owes something to this precedent. Clyne’s recurring primary motif sounds like a giant wind machine: agitated, whirring string ostinati punctuated by muffled rumbling on two bass drums. Her nocturnal journey then traverses flute incantations accompanied by harp arpeggios, foreboding growls in the bass strings and low brass, snatches of off-key circus music, and taunting mallet jibes from the percussion battery (does the composers’ union require this convention for every orchestral commission?).

Overall, Clyne knows how to use a full orchestra to great advantage and her ideas are unfailingly idiomatic. However, it did appear that her motto is, “when in doubt, give the harp a solo.” Pleasing, yes; profound, not quite.

What is there not to like about Muti’s conducting profile? In the Schubert Ninth, he remained authoritative without appearing overbearing. His beat was understated until a point of transition, and then he gave just enough clue to the orchestra to shift gears on his terms. He saved more extravagant gestures to underscore something in the score he deemed crucial, but he allowed the orchestra to do its work with customary finesse. He's only been Music Director since the fall of 2010, but the match between orchestra and conductor seems more than mutually agreeable.

The New York Philharmonic had courted Muti when they last searched for a new Music Director. He spurned them but accepted Chicago’s offer. The New York arts press turned green with envy when the Los Angeles Philharmonic opened Frank Gehry’s acoustically perfect Disney Concert Hall, because New York City’s Avery Fisher Hall—home of the New York Philharmonic—remains an acoustical disaster, even after costly makeovers.

And there just isn’t enough financial support in the Big Apple to build a new hall for the orchestra. How does the label “second city” fit for size?

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