The heightened sense of anticipation was palpable Tuesday evening at Symphony Center.  The Chicago Symphony Orchestra had made quite statement last week, heralding the beginning of its three-week Beethoven Festival with triumphant performances of the Eighth and Fifth symphonies.  But just as Beethoven raised the stakes on symphonic music with his Third Symphony, the CSO and Bernard Haitink upped the festival ante in their performance of the beloved Eroica.

At the time he composed the Third, Beethoven had admitted in writing his increasing hearing loss and began to retreat into his own dark mind.  The bucolic opening, however, belies the sense of dread into which the second movement would descend; for the time being, Haitink had the orchestra galloping through the Allegro while allowing just enough space for lyricism in the flute and clarinet to shine.  The conductor delivered the jarring chords with purpose but without weighing them down, and, as in the Fifth, proved his ability to sustain the suspense before charging into the recapitulation.

Haitink connected the funeral march of the second movement with the boisterous first by not reducing the march to a muddy crawl.  Rather, he achieved a foreboding effect through percussive low strings.  Similarly, the ensuing fugue never lost intensity while maintaining transparency.  The march returned, though barely a melody, and oboist Eugene Izotov floated a solitary, distant cry above it, infusing all of Beethoven’s anguish in one sustained note.

The Scherzo grew naturally from the abyss, the music emerging refreshed and vibrant.  Haitink’s humming tempo elicited bobbing heads in the audience.  The horns glowed in the Trio, perhaps a little heavy, but with a collectively rich tone.  The orchestra danced through the Finale, led by pinpoint articulation in the strings.  Beethoven proves his mastery of variation here, and Haitink let the Romanticism simply emerge without force.  As the ovations poured down from the balconies, Haitink made his way through the center of the strings to shake Mathieu Dufour’s hand, an acknowledgement rightly deserved after the flautist’s crystaline passes.  The volume of cheers was as much for his playing as for his decision to remain in Chicago.

The program began with the Second Symphony, forever overshadowed by its successor, but no less elegant.  The sunny introduction was blended with an urgency in the violins, though Haitink kept the tension restrained.  The orchestra seemed to revel in the fleeting moments of warmth and light through the second movement, and performed with childlike enthusiasm in the third.  The orchestra achieved a stately stride in the conclusion, a quality of writing that Beethoven would employ repeatedly in his remaining symphonies, but issued in the Second and Third with urgent resolve as he began his life’s struggle.