“Make no little plans” was the advice of Daniel Burnham, the man who, in 1903, designed and built the original Orchestra Hall, home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Whatever other reservations can be voiced about the current management of the orchestra, even the flinty Chicago architect couldn’t accuse the powers that be of taking timid half-measures in the recent renovation of the hall. Three years and $110 million in the making, the celebrated orchestra’s new, greatly expanded digs at 220 South Michigan Avenue were rededicated in October as Symphony Center.

The extensive renovation comes at, as the Chinese say, interesting times for the fortunes of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The tenure of Daniel Barenboim as the orchestra’s music director—launched in 1991 with starry, well-received events such as the clever, semi-staged performances of Mozart operas—has now settled into a kind of sanctioned and complacent mediocrity, with performances that are occasionally inspired, often commonplace, and sometimes downright awful. While the technical level of individual musicians is higher than ever, the standard of the ensemble has slipped, to the point where sloppy playing is too often the norm, a far cry from the orchestra’s razor-sharp corporate musicianship under the late, lamented Sir Georg Solti. Barenboim remains indisputably one of the world’s greatest pianists, yet on the podium his performances often suffer from a desire to make an Individual Statement, which can result in a mannered, portentous brand of music-making, heavy and rhythmically dull —a kind of Furtwängler Lite, without Furtwängler’s dynamic