A s principal conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 2006, Bernard Haitink has featured more prominently on the orchestra's own CD label than anyone else, and the results have generally been less impressive than his earlier studio recordings of the same works. There's been a staid stateliness about his conducting of Mahler especially, which does not leave a good impression when captured on disc. This performance of Ein Heldenleben, from concerts in Chicago in 2008, has the same sense of solid but ultimately uninvolving music making. Though the orchestral playing is of the highest class, the music never swaggers, and that's a quality that Ein Heldenleben relies on. But the performance of Im Sommerwind, Webern's 1904 orchestral idyll, is far more successful, with its Wagnerian and Straussian overtones, and just the occasional hints of the radically terse music to come from the composer a few years later. Haitink moulds it exquisitely, while the Chicago string players spin diaphanous curtains of sound.