Cleveland Orchestra 2015 - 2016 season - Programme and Reviews

 

2015 – 2016

 

Subscription Week 1

 

                                         MOZART          Symphony No. 41 in C major, K. 551, 'Jupiter'

                        RICHARD STRAUSS          Eine Alpensinfonie, Op. 64

 

Franz Welser-Möst, conductor

 

Cleveland Orchestra embarks on new Severance Hall season from musical high point

 

The Cleveland Orchestra and music director Franz Welser-Most launched the 2015-16 season Thursday with performances of Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony and Strauss's "An Alpine Symphony."

 

There's nowhere now to go but down. Figuratively and musically, the Cleveland Orchestra now stands on a kind of acme.

 

Having undertaken two symphonic masterpieces on their season opener Thursday night at Severance Hall, one of which depicts a mountain climb, the ensemble and Franz Welser-Most can only proceed with less lofty scores.

 

There's little room to ascend in terms of execution, either. Though not exactly flawless, the first performance of the new year did entail several high-points that certainly will be tough to top.

 

At no point, for instance, are more brass players likely to occupy the stage than took part Thursday in Strauss's "An Alpine Symphony." Neither is the group likely to generate higher volume than it did at the work's various peaks.

 

But these just amusing observations. In fact, the performance boasted much more than mere numbers. Packed within the work's 50-minute single movement was a little of everything: drama, nuance, charm, and long, radiant spells on par with any great Mahler or Bruckner.

 

Welser-Most and the orchestra came out with guns blazing, and tore through the first several sections with riveting zeal. A series of delightful evocations followed, including a babbling brook, a luminous waterfall, a serene mountain meadow, and a sublime summit portrayed by a haunting oboe and overflowing with trombone brilliance.

 

The descent, in music as it would be real life, was more perilous, and therefore more exciting in its way. As fogs, visions and storms set in, Welser-Most ceded some of his control, and tiny, gripping fissures in the musical bedrock appeared.

 

In the final scenes, however, as calm returned, there was no doubting the security or expressive focus of ensemble or conductor. The two forces were in perfect, eloquent synch. Theirs was a truly "alpine," or elevated, performance.

 

The high bar Thursday was set immediately by Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony No. 41, that embodiment of Classical symphonic virtues. On top of that, Welser-Most and the orchestra gave a performance that for long stretches represented at least one person's version of the ideal.

 

Color this audience member pleasantly surprised by the roomy, thoughtful performance Welser-Most gave of the opening Allegro. Instead of brazen fire, the conductor fueled his reading Thursday with tenderness, clarity, and concern for detail.

 

If only the Andante had remained on that level. Instead, a promising, lyrical beginning yielded to textural imbalances and a gradually quickening pace.

 

Captivation, once again, was the only response to the symphony's finale. Demanding and receiving ever higher speeds and intensities amid counterpoint, Welser-Most crafted a magnificent display of his orchestra's virtuosity and a terrific Mozart thrill ride. The pulses of listeners rose with the tempo, but took much longer to subside.

 

Subscription Week 2

 

                                          MAHLER          Symphony No. 3 in D minor

                                                        

Franz Welser-Möst, conductor

Kelley O’Connor, mezzo-soprano

Women of the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus

Cleveland Orchestra Children’s Chorus

 

Cleveland Orchestra reaches new heights with Mahler's Symphony No. 3

This time, it was more than an aphorism. It was reality. Playing Mahler's Symphony No. 3 at Severance Hall Thursday, the Cleveland Orchestra lived out to a rare extent the composer's famous maxim that great art should contain everything.

 

While not perfect, the performance under Franz Welser-Most had listeners convinced for long stretches that all had been said, that nothing remained to be expressed. For nearly all of the symphony's 100 minutes, rich emotional and dramatic content rendered irrelevant all technical flaws as well as most of the outside world.

 

The boldest case of this phenomenon was surely the symphony's sixth and final movement. After all the storm and stress, after visions sublime and somber, the orchestra offered a resplendent, expertly paced summation, in which nuances and details took on incredible significance.

 

Both orchestra and conductor shone in music of exquisite softness and palpable yearning, gradually honed over its vast expanse into a majestic peak. If only the audience had basked in its glory a little longer, quietly, before applauding.

 

Not that anyone begrudged the enthusiasm. For what the orchestra accomplished in the Finale, it also crafted on a grander scale out of the symphony's other five movements: a gripping, often poignant journey marked by brilliant gestures of all sizes.

 

The two vocal sections, certainly, were highlights. Charged with singing Nietzsche in "What Man Tells Me," guest mezzo-soprano Kelley O'Connor proved a sort of musical oracle, enunciating lines as dusky and profound as they were beautiful. Similarly, the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus and Children's Chorus could not have conjured in their too-brief interlude a more radiant or innocently appealing vision of heaven.

 

The deep affinity Welser-Most and the orchestra have for waltzes was apparent in the second movement, a lavish minuet. Apparently, the order they heard from this section labeled "What the Flowers Tell Me" was to supply the dance not only with a fetching lilt but also abundant refinement and lyricism. Heaven, on this night, arrived early.

 

Opera, by contrast, informed the third movement. Taking seriously Mahler's forest imagery, the ensemble plunged into the evocation of a bustling, shadowy place, complete with magical offstage calls by principal trumpet Michael Sachs. Through it all, the orchestra kept in sight the suavity and elegance that defined its performance as a whole.

 

Problems, to the extent they existed, appeared mostly in the first movement, a veritable symphony in itself. Fixated, it seemed, on contrast and upheaval, the conductor lowered his guard with respect to balance and cohesion, and often insisted on harsh accents.

 

But the larger picture was magnificent. The turmoil resulting from the collision of march and funeral music instigated by Welser-Most was riveting, yanking listeners back and forth from glee to gloom. The conductor also demonstrated his knack for long forms, parceling out the music so that attention and emotional involvement never flagged. Along the way, too, came superb solos by concertmaster William Preucil and principal trombone Massimo La Rosa.

 

Now begins the rest of the season. Last week's opener marked an apparent high point. With Mahler Three, however, Welser-Most and the orchestra proved there's always room to climb.

 

Subscription Week 3

 

                                       MESSIAEN          L'Ascension, four symphpnic meditations

                                       MESSIAEN          Couleurs de la cite céleste

                        RICHARD STRAUSS          Also sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30

 

Franz Welser-Möst, conductor

Joella Jones, piano

 

Cleveland Orchestra warms up for Europe with transcendent night of Messiaen and Strauss

 

Franz Welser-Most and the Cleveland Orchestra warmed up for their upcoming 2015 European Tour with an eclectic but deeply connected program of works by Messiaen and Strauss.

 

In the summer of 1949, Serge Koussevitsky conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a Tanglewood concert that included Messiaen's "L'Ascension," before an estimated audience of 15,000.

 

Thursday night at Severance Hall, the audience was nowhere near the size claimed for Tanglewood, but it was certainly appreciative of the Cleveland Orchestra's fine performance of Messiaen's early and very approachable score.

 

Messiaen's music is undergoing something of a renaissance in Cleveland, with his  "Quartet for the End of Time" played at a "Violins of Hope" concert at the Cleveland Institute of Music Wednesday, and a weekend of Cleveland Orchestra concerts featuring three of the composer's most transcendent scores, including the Orchestra's first performances of "The Colors of the Celestial City," under Franz Welser-Most's insightful baton.

 

The concert was one of a number of programs that the players are taking with them on their upcoming European tour; Thursday night's line-up of Messiaen's "L'Ascension" and "Colors," capped by Strauss's "Also sprach Zarathustra," will be played this month in Brussels, Cologne and Vienna.

 

Messiaen's famous synaesthesia -- he heard chords as colors -- is generally not perceivable by most people, but his colorful sense of harmony is on full display in "L'Ascension," which he completed in 1933. Welser-Most led an aurally sensitive performance, with brass and woodwinds perfectly balanced in the first of the four symphonic meditations ("Majesty of Christ Asking for Glory from His Father"), while the strings in the last movement ("Prayer of Christ Ascending to His Father") were especially well-blended.

 

The two inner movements found the orchestra fully engaged in the composer's ecstatic hymn and dance of praise, with Welser-Most alert to the asymmetrical phrasing and rhythm. Fine individual contributions from many in the ranks completed the exquisite experience.

 

By the time of 1963's "Colors of the Celestial City," Messiaen's musical language had increased in rhythmic and harmonic complexity, yet the composer's personality is quite as recognizable as in his earliest pieces.

 

Scored for a small wind ensemble, a vast array of tuned and semi-tuned percussion and solo piano, "Colors" finds Messiaen at a highly advanced stage of expression. His profound Catholic faith, as usual, is strongly present, but his ornithological interests are also there in the form of transcribed bird-song, a startling and striking feature even after decades of familiarity.

 

The orchestra's principal keyboardist, Joela Jones, played the fiendishly difficult solo part with energy, precision and flair, while the half-dozen percussionists acquitted themselves admirably, especially the trio of xylophone players, whose electrifying sounds merged beautifully with the piano.

 

Welser-Most led an intense performance, with sharp attacks and a good sense of this music's unusual language, in which extreme dissonance and rhythmic complexity becomes a thing both logical and inevitable.

 

Strauss's "Also sprach Zarathustra" found Severance Hall's stage fielding a gargantuan orchestra for the composer's famous tone poem inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche's great philosophical meditation.

 

The introduction, of course, is the part everyone knows best, thanks to over-exposure from Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and regrettable commercials. Welser-Most and his players delivered a knockout rendition, with Joela Jones driving the Norton Memorial Organ to its limits.

 

What followed was even more impressive, as Welser-Most led a strong and vigorous performance of Strauss's dense score, with all its hyperactive counterpoint clearly rendered and its dramatic progress sharply focused. Concertmaster William Preucil earned a measure of applause for his solo in the penultimate section "Das Tanzlied" ("The Dance-Song"), leading the meta-waltz rhythms with plummy tone and plenty of well-applied rubato.

 

Unexpectedly, there was a substantial encore, Igor Stravinsky's early showpiece "Fireworks," a four-minute exercise in Impressionistic pointillism, Russian-style. The orchestra played it with high spirits, and the audience seemed more than a little pleased to receive it.

 

Subscription Week 3a

 

                        RICHARD STRAUSS          Also sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30

                                       MESSIAEN          Couleurs de la cite céleste

                                              VERDI          Stabat Mater and Te Deum from Four Sacred Pieces

 

Franz Welser-Möst, conductor

Joella Jones, piano

Cleveland Orchestra Chorus

 

                                       MESSIAEN          Chronochromie

                                       MESSIAEN          Couleurs de la cite céleste

                                              VERDI          Stabat Mater and Te Deum from Four Sacred Pieces

 

Franz Welser-Möst, conductor

Joella Jones, piano

Cleveland Orchestra Chorus

 

It is rare that a reviewer has the opportunity to hear two performances of the same repertoire in a single series of performances, but I had that opportunity this weekend in The Cleveland Orchestra’s lead-up to its October European tour. In three concerts, Thursday through Saturday, five works by Olivier Messiaen, Richard Strauss and Giuseppe Verdi were selected and rearranged each night in slightly different order, with only one work repeated on all three concerts. That was Olivier Messiaen’s colorful Couleurs de la cité céleste.

 

I reviewed the orchestra’s first-ever performance of Couleurs de la cité céleste on Thursday. At that concert, Cleveland Orchestra pianist and principal keyboard player Joela Jones gave a polished performance of the jagged birdsong solos incorporated throughout the 20-minute work. The Friday performance was even more cohesive, alternately lively and menacing. The work is a compendium of Messiaen’s mature style and religious devotion, with not just virtuosic percussion birdcalls, but glorious, massive brass harmonizations of Gregorian chants in complicated Indian rhythms precisely rendered. Apocalyptic grandeur was always present. The blend of the brass and three clarinets was more precise. This, and the performance of Messiaen’s Chronochromie that opened the concert, were perfect examples of The Cleveland Orchestra’s legendary skill at making the most thorny contemporary music sound easy.

 

Messiaen’s Chronochromie, which opened this program, had its first complete American performance in 1967 with The Cleveland Orchestra, and has recently become something of a “calling card” piece for the orchestra, with performances conducted by Franz Welser-Möst in May and July 2015. Couleurs de la cité céleste is religious in its context; Chronochromie is more abstract, although birdsong abounds in it as well. The form of the work is modeled on Greek poetry and mathematical formulas, with the interplay of time (chronos) and color (chroma). It is not necessary to understand Messiaen’s theoretical elements, which are unrecognizable to the ears of most listeners. It is better to just listen for the variety of musical colors and textures as the work proceeds. Quite striking was the view of Welser-Möst calmly conducting measures of four beats, while there was very well-organized chaos coming from the performers. The percussion section was astonishing in several solo passages of birdsong. (As on Thursday night, Joela Jones showed her versatility in Chronochromie playing as a member of the percussion section on the important keyed glockenspiel part.) The most remarkable achievement in Chronochromie was the penultimate section, the “Épôde,” for 18 solo strings (violins, violas, cellos) each playing its own birdsong. The episode continues with unvarying texture for four minutes. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of all the notes, but it was breathtakingly impressive. The work closes with a “Coda” including both moments of tension and repose, ultimately with massive fortissimo chords in the full orchestra.

 

After intermission, traditional tonality reigned for the rest of the program, two movements from Giuseppe Verdi’s Quattro pezzi sacri (Four Sacred Pieces) for mixed chorus and orchestra. They are very late works, begun in 1889, after Otello and completed in 1897, after Falstaff. The sacred text aside, the music of the Stabat Mater and Te Deum performed here is reminiscent of Verdi’s Requiem, with majestic melodies and dramatic orchestrations. The Stabat Mater, depicting Mary, the mother of Jesus at the Cross, has many sudden, vivid contrasts of dynamics, from the softest phrases to huge climaxes in the space of a few notes. The choral music moves between lamentation and sweetness. The text is set syllabically, with almost no text repetition. The Te Deum opens a cappella with the first phrase of the Gregorian Te Deum chant, softly. As in the Stabat Mater, the text is mostly word by word, until the exultant Sanctus for full orchestra and chorus. The work ends with a feeling of quiet uncertainty, despite the reassurance of the Latin text, “O Lord, I have trusted you; never let me be confused”.

 

The Cleveland Orchestra Chorus sang with well-blended sound and precise diction, and, for the most part, with security, although there were a few entrances in the Te Deum that seemed a little ragged, and several times the upper reaches of the sopranos sagged slightly in pitch. An unnamed soprano soloist from the chorus sang effectively in the closing passage. The Cleveland Orchestra and Welser-Möst captured all the theatrical grandeur of Verdi’s accompaniment and were attuned to the many musical contrasts along the way.

 

Subscription Week 4

 

                                        PETRASSI          Partita for orchestra

                            SHOSTAKOVICH          Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor, Op. 77

                             RACHMANINOV          Symphonic Dances, Op. 45

 

Gianandrea Noseda, conductor

Leonidas Kavakos, violin

 

Cleveland Orchestra, Les Delices concerts make for 'indulgent,' animated musical weekend

 

Violinist Leonidas Kavakos performed Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No. 1 with the Cleveland Orchestra and guest conductor Gianandrea Noseda last weekend at Severance Hall.

 

Widely distant in terms of repertoire, the Cleveland Orchestra and Les Delices had at least one striking trait in common in their performances last week: animation.

 

No matter that one group presented masterworks from 20th-century Russia while the other explored chamber music from 18th-century France. Both ensembles last weekend evinced the same affecting penchant and talent for conveying all that was most vital in the works they'd selected.

 

At Severance Hall Friday morning, Gianandrea Noseda could not have been feistier or more fully engaged. Presiding over Rachmaninoff's "Symphonic Dances" and Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No. 1, the conductor was a veritable live wire, transmitting every measure in blazing high fidelity.

 

If the orchestra was still tired from its just-completed tour of Europe, it didn't show in the Rachmaninoff. Under Noseda, the artists tore through the work with gusto, taking the title at its word and offering music of exceptional rhythmic and melodic boldness.

 

Mere baton-waving was not enough for Noseda. No, he made his wishes known Friday with body language, using his knees, shoulders and hips to model the vigor, sensuality and playful teasing he sought. How the orchestra followed Noseda is anyone's guess. Whether or not his methods were effective, however, was beyond question.

 

Had his stellar reputation not preceded him, violinist Leonidas Kavakos might have been predicted by his shy mien to be a meek, introspective performer. In fact, he was just the opposite.

 

Like Noseda, Kavakos, last heard here in 2011, amplified everything he touched. Coming from him, the angst-filled Nocturne was almost more than one could bear, an icy stream of melody.

 

Similarly, both the Scherzo and Burlesca overflowed their emotional banks. The former progressed like a fever, brewing steadily and rising to a fast, almost violent boil, while in the latter, Kavakos struggled not with technical matters but to contain his own virtuosity. Matinee crowds don't always hear concertos. Thus was Kavakos a double treat.

 

Subscription Week 5

 

                                       SMETANA          Overture to The Bartered Bride

                                    SORTOMME          Concerto for two violas and orchestra on themes from

                                                                   Smetana String Quartet No. 1, ‘From My Life’

                                      SCHUBERT          Symphony No. 9 in C major, D944, 'Great'

 

Christoph von Dohnányi, conductor

Robert Vernon, viola

Lynne Ramsey, viola

 

Cleveland Orchestra shines across the board in premiere, Schubert's 'Great' Symphony

 

Cleveland Orchestra music director laureate Christoph von Dohnanyi presided over the world premiere of Richard Sortomme's Concerto for Two Violas Thursday night at Severance Hall, with principal and first assistant principal violists Robert Vernon and Lynne Ramsey as soloists.

 

Enough with the viola stereotypes. As the Cleveland Orchestra and its chief violists proved once again with Christoph von Dohnanyi Thursday night at Severance Hall, the instrument is no joke.

 

Just the opposite, actually. Presenting the world premiere of Richard Sortomme's Concerto for Two Violas, principal and first assistant principal violists Robert Vernon and Lynne Ramsey revealed just how capacious the orchestra's supporting voice can be.

 

Lyrical, playful and hard-driving by turns, the violas in their hands were nothing if not deeply riveting.

 

Much the same can be said of the score itself. Based on Smetana's "From My Life" Quartet, Sortomme's readily approachable second gift to Cleveland emerged as both a touching ode to the composer's friendship with Vernon (who retires at the end of this season) and a gripping, vigorously colorful re-imagining of the original.

 

Despite its audible roots in an existing piece, the concerto was relentlessly unpredictable. Even as it showcased the expressive potential of the viola and the flawless partnership between Vernon and Ramsey, the piece also kept listeners on their toes, shifting unexpectedly from the ponderous and melodious to the frenzied and rhythmic.

 

For once, too, Sortomme's work obliged the orchestra to accompany the viola, and so it did evocatively. Under Dohnanyi Thursday, the large ensemble rearranged from Welser-Most's usual layout surrounded the soloists in a prismatic array of sounds, courtesy of the percussionists and such instruments as the piccolo, trombone, piano and accordion. Indeed, Sortomme knows how to write for orchestra, and must be permitted to do so again.

 

Another welcome guest Thursday was Dohnanyi himself. Back before the orchestra he led for 18 years, the esteemed music director laureate turned in an eloquent, brilliantly polished account of Schubert's "Great" Symphony in C Major that must go down as a highlight of the season so far.

 

A vast work comparable in scale to the epics of Mahler and Bruckner, Schubert's "Great" Symphony can easily grow tedious or bombastic. In Dohnanyi's hands, however, it was as galvanizing and convincing as any performance by a virtuoso.

 

Despite its great length, not one of its measures passed without notice, without consideration. Conducting from memory, Dohnanyi displayed remarkable attention to detail, sustaining drama and interest through dynamics, phrasing and articulation.

 

Softness and clarity were equal priorities, and the result was a performance of exquisite refinement. Schubert's largest work for orchestra sang, lilted and pulsed with life the way his chamber music does when rendered by a master vocalist or pianist. A bevy of luminous solos only served as icing on a balanced, tightly knit cake.

 

By way of an opener, the orchestra could not have done better than Smetana's Overture to "The Bartered Bride." In addition to thematic links to the concerto, the work also offered a foretaste of the Schubert to come.

 

With the violin sections separated, textures and attacks remained thrillingly crisp, and the antiphonal element of Smetana's music resonated vibrantly. A piquant clarinet topped off the experience, sparking the fire that ended up burning the rest of the evening.

 

Subscription Week 6

 

                                         DEBUSSY          Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, for orchestra, L. 86

                                            RANDS          Concerto for English Horn and Orchestra (world premiere)

                                         BERLIOZ          Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14

 

Lionel Bringuier, conductor

Robert Walters, cor anglais

 

Bringuier extract visual essence of great French and new music

 

A word of advice to Cleveland Orchestra conductors: Before taking the stage, take in some art.

 

That, in any case, is what Lionel Bringuier did last week, and it worked well for him. Audible in his lush performance Friday of French masterpieces was time spent earlier viewing the Monet-Matisse exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

 

Not every musical choice of Bringuier's resonated with listeners at Severance Hall. Most, however, had the effect of letting in the sun, of illuminating the scores from all conceivable angles. Even a new work, a freshly-penned concerto by Bernard Rands, benefited from that spirit of Impressionism.

 

Art wasn't Bringuier's only advantage, of course. In addition, his guided tour of Monet's painted gardens, the conductor - music director of Zurich's Tonhalle Orchestra - also enjoyed an exceptionally cohesive program, a near-perfect collection of French and French-inspired music that only might have been more effective had it been organized chronologically.

 

Most clearly linked to the paintings was Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun," the program opener. Evoking almost the entire exhibit at once, the conductor conjured a bright, dappled scene, endowing it with ample space and voluptuous phrasing. Ravishing solos by principal flutist Joshua Smith and associate concertmaster Jung-Min Amy Lee completed the spell.

 

Debussy, in turn, bore heavily on Rands' Concerto for English Horn, a commission by the Oberlin Conservatory of Music for Cleveland Orchestra and Oberlin faculty member Robert Walters. Like "Faun" but writ large and in a modern voice, the new score boasted a compelling drama rendered with an ever-shifting palette of musical colors and emotions.

 

Let it be said first that the English horn, like the viola featured earlier this fall, is vastly underrated. Widely regarded as a kind of accessory, the instrument is in fact capable of holding its own. In the hands of Walters, especially, it was a vehicle for both thrilling displays of agility and soulful, plaintive expression.

 

Change, in this score, was relentless. Rands took his soloist on a panoramic journey, one that veered continually and unpredictably through realms of brooding, melancholic lyricism and playful animation. The orchestra, too, was a prismatic, varied thing, thorny at times but also shimmering and suave, particularly in terms of percussion.

 

Through it all, Walters was a riveting protagonist, modeling not only the woodwind essential virtue of flawless breath control but also sheer, impassioned musicality. Neither the composer nor the audience could have asked for better.

 

Extra-musical imagery is of course the foundation of Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique," the third and final entry on the program. Happily, too, with Bringuier, most of those images came across in vivid, kaleidoscopic color.

 

Tempos in "Reveries" and "In the Country" were ponderously slow, depriving those scenes of some of their vitality. But that spaciousness also afforded Bringuier and the orchestra time for exquisite articulation, resonant off-stage effects, and the unearthing of lines in the middle and low strings.

 

All else was the sweaty fever one seeks in Berlioz. To the "Ball" scene, Bringuier brought elfin lightness and truly dance-like flexibility, while the "March to the Scaffold" and "Dream of a Witches' Sabbath" were terrifying and gratifying in equal measure. Consider those the exceptions to the rule, music with no roots in a cheerful garden.

 

Subscription Week 7

 

                                          HANDEL          Messiah

 

Robert Porco, conductor

Yulia Van Doren, soprano

Jennifer Johnson Cano, mezzo-soprano

John Tessier, tenor

Timothy Jones, bass-baritone

Cleveland Orchestra Chamber Chorus

 

Cleveland Orchestra Christmas Concert

 

The workhorse in every "Messiah" is the chorus, and the roughly 60-member assembled Thursday made its yoke sound easy. The burden of deciding which holiday concert to attend just got a lot lighter. Make it the Cleveland Orchestra's "Messiah."

 

A treat in multiple respects, the rendition of Handel's beloved oratorio now being presented at Severance Hall deftly draws on the best of competing interpretive viewpoints, reaching out to both purists and traditionalists alike.

 

To those who prefer their Handel historically informed, director of choruses Robert Porco Thursday offered a lean, meticulous orchestra and a Cleveland Orchestra Chamber Chorus at its lightest and most nimble.

 

And yet the conductor also followed his nose when it came to expression, welcoming guest vocalists from outside the early-music realm and shaping the famous music with flexible, modern sensibilities and an ear for the dramatic.

 

The workhorse in every "Messiah" is the chorus, and the roughly 60-member group assembled Thursday made its yoke sound easy. Whether the mood of the moment was joyous or enraged, solemn or anguished, the singers conveyed it with resonant, iridescent gusto. "All We Like Sheep" and the final "Amen" registered every bit as deeply as the majestic "Hallelujah" Chorus.

 

Great was this company on the technical front as well. No matter that Handel's writing for chorus in "Messiah" is notoriously florid and often highly complex contrapuntally. The group prepared by Porco negotiated it all with poise, sustaining buoyancy, luminous textures, and a sense of theatricality. None who heard "And He shall purify" or "He trusted in God" Thursday will soon forget the experience.

 

The orchestra, too, played its part beautifully. The small force led by Porco proved a deft, articulate ensemble, offering a lovely overture and interlude and supplying the chorus and guest vocalists with gentle, nuanced support. Principal keyboardist Joela Jones was an animated presence at the harpsichord and principal trumpet Michael Sachs joined bass-baritone Timothy Jones in a vivid (though somewhat unbalanced) evocation of the resurrection.

 

The guest vocalists were perfectly satisfactory. All four were attractive and equal to the music in technical matters, but only one, mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano, was truly stellar. She, in fact, was the complete package, a voice agile and forceful, spacious and laden with emotion. Whether proclaiming "good tidings to Zion" or distilling the anguish of Christ's rejection, she was a poignant medium.

 

Soprano Yulia Van Doren was a close second. Musically, one couldn't have asked for an instrument of greater purity or suppleness, or a more tasteful flair for ornamentation. This listener, however, wished at times for a bolder, more emphatic interpretation.

 

That opinion applied to Jones and tenor John Tessier as well. To the score's lyrical and plaintive dimensions, both were uniquely well suited, and both soared smoothly and decisively through even the most intricate of passages. Neither, though, succeeded in mustering ferocity or conjuring the mystery their music often calls for.

 

But these are quibbles. On the whole, this is a worthy performance no lover of Handel or great choral music will want to miss. "Messiah," in terms of subject matter, may align best with Easter, but in terms of Christmas music offered this year by the Cleveland Orchestra, this is surely the program to behold.

 

Subscription Week 8

 

                                   BEETHOVEN          String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132 (string orchestra

                                                                  version)

                                   BEETHOVEN          Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37

                                   BEETHOVEN          Fantasia in C minor, ‘Choral Fantasy’, Op. 80

 

Franz Welser-Möst, conductor

Yefim Bronfman, piano

Cleveland Orchestra Chorus

 

Cleveland Orchestra transforms rich all-Beethoven program into warm tribute to Boulez

 

The Cleveland Orchestra apparently isn't familiar with the concept of growing rusty.

 

Back at Severance Hall for its first classical evening in over a month, the group Thursday sounded as if it had taken no break at all. Out of a populist all-Beethoven lineup, the ensemble with director Franz Welser-Most crafted a profound, rewarding, and surprisingly meaningful experience.

 

Not that the orchestra can take all the credit. That 2016 got off to such an excellent start was also thanks to regular guest pianist Yefim Bronfman, and to the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, who joined Welser-Most Thursday in steering familiar and often-played scores far clear of the mundane. Even the night's architect deserves a nod. As well-conceived as it was well-executed, the program traced a compelling arc from brooding and introspective to joyous and unreserved. Never mind that it flipped traditional concert format on its head.

 

Welser-Most, certainly, was in a thoughtful mood. Eager to honor Pierre Boulez, who died Tuesday, he spoke at length from the stage, weaving a poetic tribute to the legendary composer-conductor into commentary on Beethoven's String Quartet No. 15. Later, by way of an encore, he led a singing of "Happy Birthday" to benefactor Norma Lerner, honorary chair of the Musical Arts Association.

 

Indeed, the orchestra hardly could have chosen a better work for the occasion. If any score reflects the genius and warm heart of Boulez, surely it is Beethoven's String Quartet No. 15, heard here in an adaptation for string orchestra.

 

Neither could one have asked for a more satisfying performance. Enriched by Welser-Most with a bass line, the ensemble distilled the chamber-music essence of the original while amplifying its emotional and lyrical dimensions.

 

It was remarkable, in fact, how nimble the orchestra proved. Like a close-knit string quartet, the large ensemble acted as one, charging and retreating freely and leaping precipitously up and down the dynamic spectrum. It also remained perfectly balanced; At no point did one section overpower another.

 

The greatest glory, though, was the "Holy Song of Thanksgiving," the lengthy adagio at the quartet's heart. With so many strings at his fingertips, united in phrasing and pulse, Welser-Most was able to deliver a performance of uncommon depth and continuity, in which momentum never flagged.

 

About Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3, little needs to be written. Bronfman's artistry in this territory practically speaks for itself, and the pianist Thursday was at his lucid, virtuoso best.

 

Suffice to say his approach was welcome. Instead of fire and brimstone, Bronfman proffered chipper, mellifluous grace, and a Largo too tender for words.

 

No one, by contrast, can accuse Beethoven's "Choral Fantasy" of depth. A freeform piano concerto culminating in a vocal ode to music and beauty, the piece is among the composer's airiest and most effusive creations.

 

Still, on Thursday, it was just the thing. Between the angelic, rousing performance by the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, Bronfman's glistening work at the piano, and the martial zeal evinced by the orchestra under Welser-Most, the Fantasy released all the night's built-up tension and feted Boulez with joy. As musical beginnings go, this one can only be considered auspicious.

 

Subscription Concert 9

 

                               ABRAHAMSEN          let me tell you, for soprano and orchestra

                            SHOSTAKOVICH          Symphony No. 4 in C minor, Op. 43

 

Franz Welser-Möst, conductor

Barbara Hannigan, soprano

 

Cleveland Orchestra rallies around thrilling matchup of Shostakovich and Abrahamsen

 

Singing Hans Abrahamsen's "Let Me Tell You" with the Cleveland Orchestra and music director Franz Welser-Most Thursday, soprano Barbara Hannigan brought to life a haunting and mysterious version of Shakespeare's Ophelia.

 

Planning is all well and good. Often, though, in music, the finest moments are those that couldn't possibly have been manufactured.

 

Take this week's Cleveland Orchestra program. Originally conceived around a different piece, the evening as it was ended up coalescing powerfully, growing tighter on both thematic and musical fronts with every passing bar. Indeed, a more cohesive musical presentation is difficult to imagine.

 

On top of that, it sounded amazing. This part anyone might have seen coming: Led by director Franz Welser-Most, the orchestra Thursday night at Severance Hall thoroughly devoured Shostakovich's Symphony No. 4, and soprano Barbara Hannigan held a full house in her grasp with the U.S. premiere of a new work by Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen.

 

Examining the two works individually represents something of a daunting task. So close-knit did they become Thursday, it now seems almost irresponsible to separate them, to consider either one alone, out of context with the other. Oh, well. One does what one must.

 

Hannigan set the scene magically. With "Let Me Tell You," a seven-part song cycle re-imagining Shakespeare's Ophelia, the Canadian soprano on her Cleveland debut brought to life a character of haunting beauty and mystery. She intoned the carefully-selected words by Paul Griffiths with the solemnity of a Greek oracle and unfurled her prismatic, free-flowing music with bewitching elegance.

 

Though written for large orchestra, "Let Me Tell You" remained an intimate affair. The music, never more than sheer and rendered by the orchestra with crystal clarity, readily evoked shards of glass, shimmering light, and falling snow. The mercury seemed to drop as Hannigan sang of night, owls, and snowflakes; About her voice, supremely agile and robust, there was something immediate, something piercing.

 

What emerged was a character radically different from the typical portrayal. Far from fragile and delusional, Hannigan's Ophelia was fiercely strong-willed and secure in herself. Staring down loss, she marched forward and endured. After "Let Me Tell You," listeners, like Hannigan's Ophelia, easily could have gone on home, wholly satisfied.

 

How phenomenal, though, in the wake of the Abrahamsen, to then receive another dispatch from the edge of sanity: Shostakovich's rarely-heard Symphony No. 4, an hour-long wrestling match between forces of darkness and light, freedom and oppression, optimism and despair.

 

How perfect, too, to hear another score dealing in extremes and contrasts, more music straddling the lowest and highest registers and the limits of the ear. On Abrahamsen Thursday, Shostakovich sounded like a direct, key influence.

 

After the "Fate and Freedom" programs of recent years, Welser-Most's knack for Shostakovich is now well-known, and was again in evidence in Symphony No. 4. Under his baton Thursday, the orchestra gave an aggressive, full-throttled performance, one that never let up or spared anything in terms of emotion or technical gusto. For every display of raw, overwhelming force, there was a corresponding passage of chilling stasis, not unlike the substance of "Let Me Tell You."

 

The results, simply put, were hair-raising. Time flew as both the group and individuals galore proved thrillingly single-minded on a quest for dramatic and expressive intensity. Clearly, planning does have its value. Into both performances Thursday went a great deal of care, effort, and consideration, and all of it paid off gloriously.

 

Subscription Week 10

 

                                       DALBAVIE          La Source d’un Regard

                                             RAVEL          Piano Concerto in G major

                                         DEBUSSY          Images for orchestra

 

Vladimir Jurowski, conductor

Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, piano

 

Cleveland Orchestra offers respite from winter in colorful, warm French program

 

Conductor Vladimir Jurowski led the Cleveland Orchestra Thursday in a colorful all-French program of works by Ravel, Debussy and Dalbavie.  All the color missing from the drab Northeast Ohio landscape these days seems to have concentrated this week at Severance Hall, under the aegis of conductor Vladimir Jurowski.

 

More than that, the Cleveland Orchestra's current program suits this challenging season perfectly, posing listeners not with technicalities or deep messages but only with shimmering, sensuous music meant and easy to be enjoyed for its own sake.

 

Thank goodness for the French. Were it not for their unique genius, their knack for brilliant exploitation of an orchestra, Cleveland patrons now might be facing another dose of Teutonic heaviness. Instead, it's all lightness and charm.

 

Thank the performers, too, of course. Ravel's G-Major Piano Concerto, for one, wouldn't have been the delight it was Thursday had it not been for the spunky, animated work of the orchestra or the firecracker at the keyboard.

 

Pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, first heard here playing Prokofiev, mirrored his caffeinated 2010 debut with Ravel of the most vibrant, eye-opening sort.

 

In the outer movements, Bavouzet wielded touches both hard-edged and feathery, imbuing Ravel's ceaselessly active music with the strongest doses of whatever character it demanded. Yet never did he fail as a collaborator; Throughout, the pianist mimicked and engaged the harp, woodwinds and strings in pointed conversation.

 

The pinnacle was the Adagio. Out of its touching solo theme, Bavouzet and orchestra crafted a lavish and ultimately hugely impassioned episode, one that developed naturally and boasted limpid contributions from soloists all over the ensemble. Their music contained not just all the color absent from the region but also the warmth.

 

More in this vein awaited in Debussy's "Images." Indeed, under Jurowski's watch, the orchestra in this suite amounted to a veritable artist's palette, a bountiful array of musical hues.

 

Jurowski, principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, treated the score like a cross-stitch, crafting its three movements with great intricacy and simultaneous regard for the bigger picture. All its shifting dance meters flowed together smoothly even as textures remained pristinely crisp, allowing exposed lines for clarinet, oboe, harp and percussion to come across in scintillating definition.

 

The "Iberia" movement was a particular delight. Between the zesty swagger of the "Streets," the gentle throb of "Fragrances," and the evocative strumming and collective vitality of the "Festival Day," the finale of "Images" Thursday contained more than enough musical sunshine to tide us through winter.

 

Both of these works paved the way and linked smartly to the first work on the program: "La Source d'un Regard," by Marc-Andre Dalbavie, Cleveland's first Young Composer Fellow. Completed in 2007 and influenced heavily by Messiaen and Boulez, it stood here as the latest in French musical thinking.

 

It also fit the sonic bill perfectly. Where the Ravel and Debussy works followed logical paths of development, Dalbavie's score unfurled organically, holding listeners in a state of highly charged expectation, wondering where and how each combination of instruments, dynamics and harmonies would transform.

 

That the transformations were as seamless as they were is a tribute to the orchestra, and to Jurowski. Far from just another sterile new piece, "La Source" was warmth and color incarnate.

 

Subscription Week 11

 

                                         MOZART          Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major, K. 453

                                         MOZART          Symphony No. 34 in C major, K. 338

                                         MOZART          Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K. 503

 

Mitsuko Uchida, piano and conductor

 

Mitsuko Uchida leads the Cleveland Orchestra in insightful readings of two Mozart piano concertos

 

The latest in the ongoing series of Mozart piano concertos at Severance Hall debuted last Thursday, with members of the Cleveland Orchestra conducted from the keyboard by piano soloist Mitsuko Uchida. It's part of a project to record all the major piano concertos by Mozart for eventual release on CD.

 

The series has become one of the orchestra's most successful endeavors, as evidenced by a capacity crowd that from the first moment was primed for a transcendent experience.

 

The format of the concerts was set years ago - two concertos, separated by a shorter symphony or serenade, played without conductor (though led discreetly by concertmaster William Preucil).

 

On Thursday, the concertos were the slender and subtle Concerto No. 17 in G major and the magisterial Concerto No. 25 in C major. Between the two, a chamber-sized ensemble gave a vigorous performance of the Symphony No. 34 in C major.

 

Uchida's approach to Mozart is well-known in Cleveland. She shapes the orchestral accompaniment with exquisite care (its very shape reflected in her idiosyncratic conducting style), and her rendering of the solo part is colorful, crisply articulated and governed by a natural sympathy for the innermost thoughts of the composer.

 

The 17th Piano Concerto was written for the pianist Barbara Ployer, the daughter of a wealthy Salzburg official resident in Vienna. Ployer was a frequent collaborator with Mozart, and his understanding of her own style is evident throughout this lyrical work.

 

Uchida emphasized the Apollonian elements of this concerto and its pleasing contrapuntal interplay among the instruments, particularly in the Andante, where the piano and solo winds engaged in a dialogue that was profound in its simplicity. The contributions of principal flutist Joshua Smith and principal oboist Frank Rosenwein were outstanding here.

 

The hijinks of the finale, in which a series of witty variations are interrupted by a truly inventive concluding coda, were especially well-managed, with Uchida in sparkling dialogue with the small ensemble (about 30 strings and seven winds).

 

Mozart's Symphony No. 34 is something of a hit for the Cleveland Orchestra, and it's played with more frequency than its divertissement nature might justify.

 

It bears the hallmarks of Mozart's "eureka" reaction to the style of the innovative Mannheim orchestra, right down to his own inventive expansion of the simple but effective "Mannheim rocket," an upward rush of notes that Mozart turns into a musical game that invigorates the three-movement score.

 

The orchestra gave the piece a lively, if sometimes clamorous, reading. In the outer movements, the players allowed the festive nature of the music to have free rein, while the middle Andante di molto was nicely paced. Would that the rather short-breathed thematic material of this early-ish symphony, with its concern for sonic effects, had more substance.

 

More substance is what Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 25 delivers. Like the symphony, written in 1780, there are trumpets and timpani adding a festive sound, but what a difference the six ensuing years between the two works made.

 

Uchida brought a grand approach to the solo part, which Mozart wrote for his own considerable keyboard talents. She emphasized the full-blooded writing for the piano, and managed the very rich and complex orchestral parts with considerable skill.

 

The Rondo finale was a fast-paced delight, and Uchida and her players brought its extended, "wait for it" coda to a brilliantly managed conclusion.

 

Subscription Week 12

 

                                       BERWALD          Symphony No. 3 in C major, ‘Sinfonie singulière’

                                         DVOŘÁK          Symphony No. 7 in D minor, Op. 70

 

Herbert Blomstedt, conductor

 

Cleveland Orchestra offers quality over quantity on program with maestro Herbert Blomstedt

 

Herbert Blomstedt is back on the podium at Severance Hall this week, leading the Cleveland Orchestra in symphonies by Dvorak and Berwald.

 

Exemplifying the maxim of quality over quantity, conductor Herbert Blomstedt Thursday led the Cleveland Orchestra in a performance short enough to have served as a "Fridays@7" show but rich enough to echo in the mind for ages.

 

Out of two symphonic works (plus an encore: Dvorak's Slavonic Dance in G Minor, Op. 46 No. 8), including one Swedish rarity, the esteemed maestro and regular Cleveland guest distilled a wholly satisfying evening, a concentrated, eye-opening dose of his artistry. A concerto on this occasion would have been superfluous.

 

Never mind that Blomstedt has grown visibly frailer since his last appearance here in 2014. The man, now 88, is a member of a dwindling, great generation, and remains a vital presence on the podium. On this occasion, conducting without scores, he even struck this longtime listener as a bit more eccentric than usual.

 

Certainly, in every way that counted, Blomstedt was still his typical self. Present Thursday were all the precision, clarity, sweetness and layered nuance that have been hallmarks of the conductor's work for years, to the point where an attentive listener could have named Blomstedt without looking.

 

He even managed an homage. In presenting the Symphony No. 3 of Franz Berwald, Blomstedt honored the late Louis Lane, the renowned former resident conductor who led the work's only prior performance here, in 1972.

 

The work's obscurity is undeserved. Composed in 1845 but not played until 1910, the symphony is well ahead of its time and fully lives up to its "Singular" nickname, blending the structures and musical building blocks of the late-Classical period with the harmonic and emotional language of the Romantics.

 

Blomstedt and the orchestra made the case for Berwald even stronger. Their performance Thursday cast the work in the warmest possible light, illuminating its every lovely facet and drawing forth all its color and passion.

 

The ensemble tip-toed daintily through the first movement, while flutist Marisela Sager and clarinetist Daniel McKelway offered pleasantries aplenty. Out of the Adagio Blomstedt then crafted a philosophical crescendo, shaping its thematic phrases as questions and allowing them to simmer and eventually boil. This he proceeded to cap with a decisive Presto, an episode highly heated but still perfectly refined.

 

The drama ran even higher in Dvorak's Symphony No. 7. There, in addition to galvanization, Blomstedt was a force for musical revelation, digging beneath the surface of the score to unveil its inner turmoil and lesser-known beauty.

 

Almost never did Blomstedt choose the easy path of yielding to Dvorak's bountiful melody. Rather, he tended to complement the lyricism by raising the profile of material often kept in the background. The resultant complexity was both edifying and thrilling.

 

Most gripping, though, was his angle on the Finale. Treating the Allegro like one grand operatic aria, Blomstedt allowed the music to rise and fall, like breathing, and for emotion to accrue organically.

 

Acting principal clarinetist Benjamin Lulich also laced the scene with slinky threads and the brass hammered home a cataclysmic finish. After such a performance, an encore came as a welcome but exorbitant pleasure.

 

Subscription Week 13

 

                                   SCHUMANN          Overture to Byron’s Manfred, Op. 115

                                         DVOŘÁK          Piano Concerto in G minor, Op. 33

                                          NIELSEN          Symphony No. 4, Op. 29, ‘The Inextinguishable’

 

Alan Gilbert, conductor

Stephen Hough, piano

 

Cleveland Orchestra thrives in eclectic program under former assistant Alan Gilbert

 

Former Cleveland Orchestra assistant conductor Alan Gilbert, now music director of the New York Philharmonic, collaborated with pianist Stephen Hough Thursday in a rare performance of the Dvorak Piano Concerto.

 

One can take the man out of the Cleveland Orchestra but not the Cleveland Orchestra out of the man. Such, at least, seems to be true in the case of Alan Gilbert, guest conductor this week at Severance Hall.

 

Leading the group he once served as assistant Thursday, the music director of the New York Philharmonic fell right back into place, evincing levels of comfort and mutual understanding enjoyed only by the initiated. His history here doesn't explain the successes he had with Schumann, Dvorak and Nielsen, but it certainly contributed.

 

To pronounce another official-sounding rule: one doesn't simply show up at Severance Hall and deliver the kind of searing, well-paced, and deeply organic performance of Nielsen's "Inextinguishable" Symphony No. 4 Gilbert gave Thursday. Such a feat demands a cultivated relationship.

 

The three years since Gilbert's last visit were as naught. Where many fail to convey a structure or narrative in "The Inextinguishable," the obviously reconnected Gilbert offered all that and more in a performance defined by relentless yearning and a refusal to settle into anything predictable.

 

Half the performance amounted to a display of the orchestra's power and discipline. No one could have sat unmoved by the collective brutal gnashing in the first movement or the ferocious timpani and sizzling tightness of the strings in the fourth.

 

The other revealed the orchestra's magnificent softer side, its capacity for long, continuous lyricism, sparkling pizzicato, and ability to hover at the gleaming edge of audibility. Along with that stood out dulcet solos by principal cellist Mark Kosower and nearly every Cleveland woodwind on stage.

 

Another welcome guest Thursday was pianist Stephen Hough, last heard here in 2014. This time, too, his vehicle was also a kind of novelty: Dvorak's little-known Piano Concerto, his recording of which is about to hit the market.

 

The score virtually demands a champion like Hough. Something less than the composer's finest work, the concerto still ranks as a technical tour-de-force, packed with showy, virtuoso figures, tricky exchanges with the orchestra, and torrential, syncopated streams.

 

Hough made it sound like a masterpiece. His steely, muscular style suited the outer movements perfectly, masking their thin substance with incredible showmanship. Similarly, aided by Gilbert, he made of the wandering Andante an absorbing, expressive conversation. The encore later demanded by the audience, a fluttering, pearly account of Dvorak's "Humoresque" Op. 101 No. 7, was virtually a foregone conclusion.

 

A glimpse of Gilbert's flair for the dramatic, of his bond with the orchestra and the delights in store in Dvorak and Nielsen, came first, in Schumann's Overture to Byron's "Manfred."

 

Conducting without a score, Gilbert at the outset of the program gave an excited, highly physical performance, one defined by punchy articulation, swooping phrases, and a liberal use of silence. He also previewed the inner movements of the Nielsen, plying the work's gloomier waters with a delicate, nuanced paddle.

 

That the ending sounded so bittersweet, so dark and yet so mellow, is to Gilbert's great credit. May it also be an overture to many Cleveland visits ahead.

 

Subscription Week 14

 

                                          KURTÁG          Petite musique solennelle Homage to Pierre Boulez at 90

                                   SCHUMANN          Cello Concerto in A minor, Op. 129

                                     BRUCKNER          Symphony No. 6 in A major, WAB 106

 

Franz Welser-Möst, conductor

Truls Mørk, cello

 

Cleveland Orchestra turns in brilliant, varied and weighty performance only it could give

 

Cellist Truls Mork returned to Severance Hall Thursday to perform the Schumann Cello Concerto with the Cleveland Orchestra and music director Franz Welser-Most.

 

Every Cleveland Orchestra concert belongs, in some way, to Northeast Ohio. This week's program, however, distinctly rooted in the musical history of Cleveland, is almost unimaginable anywhere else.

 

But it wasn't just the lineup that made Thursday night at Severance Hall such a vivid reflection of this region. The performance, too, led by Franz Welser-Most, contributed greatly; Few other orchestras could have given one so brilliant, varied and substantial.

 

Start where the program did, with the U.S. premiere of Kurtag's "Petite Musique Solennelle." An homage to Pierre Boulez on his 90th birthday, the 2015 work easily could have been a local commission, so widely and deeply was the late maestro beloved here.

 

The performance certainly did him justice. Though little like Boulez's own music, the brief, dirge-like piece as played by the orchestra and Welser-Most stood nonetheless on his high level. To the extent there were resemblances, they were in the spare textures and piquant combinations of instruments, which together formed a kind of spectral, otherworldly march. Boulez, had he been present, would have smiled.

 

Any Cleveland Orchestra fan who hasn't been living under a rock the last decade recognizes the significant role the music of Bruckner has played here of late. Little wonder, then, that Thursday's performance of Symphony No. 6, felt so much like a homecoming.

 

Never mind that Thursday marked the symphony's first performance in a quarter-century, or that the Sixth, fitful and disjointed, is not the composer's finest work. Through Welser-Most, a Bruckner champion, the hour-long symphony emerged a thing of gleaming, occasionally transcendent glory.

 

Large spans of the Sixth can be hard to follow, so frequently does Bruckner shift his trains of musical thought. Welser-Most, though, provided clear through-lines, fashioning the first and fourth movements as gradual but steady ascents, interrupted at times by soaring reveries and blazing pronouncements by the brass at full throttle. If, at times, these performances sounded unblended, rough around the edges, they lacked for nothing in terms of gripping power.

 

Where everything clicked was the Adagio. Out of this movement, Welser-Most distilled enormous emotional substance. Some might have wallowed. He, though, kept the heat on, pushing, blurring, and twisting the line between light and dark. Thus, when tenderness won out, its peace was well earned.

 

That wasn't the only victory Thursday. Cellist Truls Mork, a Cleveland favorite nearly 20 years, also triumphed, with an intimate, deeply personal account of the Schumann Cello Concerto and, later, a spellbinding encore: the Sarabande from Bach's Suite No 2 for solo cello.

 

Not that there was much of a struggle. Playing an instrument from 1723, and aided by Welser-Most, Mork treated the piece less like a Romantic concerto than Baroque chamber music. Even at his most impassioned, the cellist's sound was soft and mellow, his engagement with the orchestra complete.

 

This listener won't soon forget the haunting, resonant tone Mork applied to the first movement, with all its sweeping lyricism, or the molten emotion and incredible display of technical agility that defined the finale.

 

The slow movement, though, is what will linger longest. Subdued, laden with feeling, and illuminated by a nuanced conversation with principal cellist Mark Kosower, it was the perfect example of what Mork, and this orchestra, does best.

 

Subscription Week 15

 

                                         CHEUNG          Lyra

                                               ADÈS          Violin Concerto, ‘Concentric Paths

                                        WAGNER          Götterdämmerung, orchestral excerpts (Dawn and Siegfried’s

                                                                  Rhine Journey; Siegfried’s Death and Funeral Music;

                                                                  Brünnhilde’s Immolation

 

Franz Welser-Möst, conductor

Leila Josefowicz, violin

 

If planning an orchestral season is like assembling a vast jigsaw puzzle, The Cleveland Orchestra’s program on Saturday, April 2 felt as though it might have been put together from the leftover pieces after everything else had fallen neatly into place.

 

Anthony Cheung’s Lyra, Thomas Adès’s violin concerto Concentric Paths (with Leila Josefowicz), and orchestral excerpts from Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung are all fine and interesting pieces in their own right. But like uncomfortable cocktail party guests who have never met before, they didn’t seem to share many common topics for conversation.

 

Cheung, the ninth Daniel R. Lewis Young Composer Fellow, is at work on his first Cleveland Orchestra piece, to debut on May 18 and 20 of 2017. His Lyra on Saturday’s program was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, who premiered it under Alan Gilbert in June of 2014.

 

The piece is Cheung’s orchestral meditation on the Orpheus legend, and its point of departure is Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto, a work some think is based on Orpheus’s musical conversation with the Furies. Subscribing to that theory, Cheung tips his hat to Beethoven at the outset of Lyra by having the harp strum the opening chord of the concerto. (Pianists wanting to make the connection with Orpheus’s lyre could begin the concerto by arpeggiating that chord.)

 

Cheung draws on a large orchestra with a vast complement of percussion. Some winds (one oboe, one clarinet, and one bassoon) are required to tune a quarter-tone below normal, and pre-recorded tracks of non-Western strummed instruments — as well as what Cheung calls a “mash-up” of half a dozen electronically manipulated recordings of Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo — add an eerie haze to the live orchestral texture.

 

That texture glistens with imaginative writing. Alternating dreamy, amorphous music with rhythmic episodes, Lyra is both spellbinding and about five minutes too long in its middle section. The ending is particularly haunting with its halo of tangled electronic voices and woozy violin and horn solos.

 

Though Adès wrote his Concentric Paths for another soloist, Leila Josefowicz has made the piece her own. On Saturday evening, she scaled the heights and plumbed the depths of the violin — Adès avoids using the middle range of the instrument — in a completely riveting performance.

 

Josefowicz chatted back and forth rhythmically with the percussion in the first movement, sang recitative-like lines against trumpets in the second — which soon turns sinister and dark — and disarmingly fiddled her way through the burlesque, dancelike tunes of the finale. Her impressive playing was matched by the Orchestra. Welser-Möst led a tight performance of Adès’s brilliantly-scored concerto, and among the many who contributed importantly to its textures was tubist Yasuhito Sugiyama.

 

The second half of Saturday’s program, featuring opera without singers, might have pleased Rossini in his more disillusioned moments. Here, Welser-Möst and a vast orchestra bolstered by eight horns treated the Severance crowd to an engrossing, 40-minute, fast-forward digest of Götterdämmerung, including “Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey,” “Siegfried’s Death and Funeral Music,” and “Brünnhilde’s Immolation.”

 

It’s difficult to imagine a more thrilling sonic experience. The brass were 24-carat Rheingold, especially when four of the hornists added the sonority of Wagner tubas to the mix. Brass, winds, and strings combined in a long, flawless good-bye as Siegfried’s body was put out to sea and Valhalla went up in flames.

 

Subscription Week 16

 

                                          BARTÓK          The Miraculous Mandarin, pantomime in 1 act, Sz. 73, BB 82

                                          BARTÓK          Bluebeard's Castle, Sz 48

 

Franz Welser-Möst, conductor

Mikhail Petrenko, bass

Katarina Dalayman, soprano

 

Cleveland Orchestra, Joffrey Ballet have gloomy gem in 'Bartok on Stage' collaboration

 

Nights at Severance Hall don't get any bleaker. Neither, though, do they get much more gripping, or more darkly beautiful.

 

Yes, "Bartok on Stage," the latest collaboration between the Cleveland Orchestra and Chicago's Joffrey Ballet, is a gloomy gem. For every shocking or illicit deed depicted on stage Thursday, there was a redemptive lovely gesture by a musician, dancer, or singer.

 

Rarely does tension, in a concert, run so high or so long. Then again, rarely are "The Miraculous Mandarin" and "Bluebeard's Castle," two of Bartok's most emotionally demanding works, presented back-to-back on the same evening. Often superfluous, intermission Thursday was truly indispensable, a much-needed break from the edge of one's seat.

 

Only in one sense did the works not benefit from their treatment by Joffrey and the orchestra. In squeezing the productions into Severance Hall, with the orchestra at the back of the stage, the companies lost their abilities to interact in the moment, and so the performances under Franz Welser-Most, while vivid and dynamic, lacked the supple, responsive quality that defined their earlier collaborations.

 

Joffrey's role and presence were most vital in "Mandarin," a pantomime ballet best known as an orchestral score. Here, the grim tale of a swindling gone awry received not the royal treatment but an effective minimalist staging and crystal-clear adaptation. The production by Yuri Possokhov was gritty, athletic, and deeply alluring, his choreography a poignant blend of traditional and modern, an earthy mingling of the sacred and profane.

 

A large glass-and-metal cage (designed by Alexander V. Nichols) served as both peep-show window and a frame on which to hang the Mandarin, performed with dynamic zeal by Yoshihisa Arai. From his high-flying leaps and daring spins to meaningful facial expressions and body language, Arai embodied every fantastic element of a character who until Thursday lived only in the shadows of the imagination.

 

Inside and out this frame, dancer Victoria Jaiani was a sultry, commanding presence, ordering around her thugs (ably danced by Raul Casasola, Paulo Rodrigues, and Joan Sebastian Zamora) and twining her long limbs around her victims in elegant false embraces. Chairs did striking triple duty as seats, blades, and restraining devices, and chanting by concealed singers from the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus ratcheted up the already spooky atmosphere.

 

No less electric was "Bluebeard's Castle." Though staged more frequently, the opera as rendered here Thursday still boasted all the shocking dramatic power and visual appeal of its predecessor on the program.

 

The main attractions, of course, were the singers. Not just any artists will do in "Bluebeard," but bass Mikhail Petrenko and soprano Katarina Dalayman were every bit up to the task, boasting not only the requisite fluency in Hungarian but also ample, mellifluous voices, chemistry, and comfort in choreography that had them crawling, jogging and even dancing lightly around the stage.

 

The set and lighting design by Nichols used digital projections to turn long cloth drapes into the castle's seven secret doors. Onto them were shown huge, striking images of the skulls, flowers, and rivers of tears they conceal. Bluebeard's three ex-wives emerged from the three archways over the hall's organ loft, and tasteful lighting cast the singers in silhouette and vibrant shades of blue and blood-red.

 

By way of the orchestra, this listener couldn't help but miss the lustrous, spine-tingling work of conductor Pierre Boulez. Still, under the circumstances, the ensemble led by Welser-Most was more than adequate as a dramatic prod and source of musical color. Indeed, on this one night, both "Bluebeard" and "Mandarin" came fully to life.

 

Subscription Week 17

 

                                           HAYDN          Symphony No. 9 in D major, ‘Le matin’

                                         MOZART          Concerto for Flute and Harp in C major, K. 299

                                         MOZART          Symphony No. 39 in E flat major, K. 543

 

Jane Glover, conductor

Joshua Smith, flute

Yolanda Kondonassis, harp

 

Cleveland Orchestra, soloists sparkle during return visit by conductor Jane Glover

 

The estimable Jane Glover returned to Severance Hall Thursday for a weekend of Cleveland Orchestra concerts with music by Haydn and Mozart, including Mozart's Concerto for Flute and Harp with Cleveland Orchestra principal flutist Joshua Smith and guest harpist Yolanda Kondonassis.

 

But that bald statement of fact doesn't begin to convey the great pleasure in once again encountering Glover's matchless podium artistry and her welcome, no-nonsense approach to these masters of the late 18th century.

 

Glover and a chamber-sized ensemble of players (the rest of the orchestra was downtown at the Allen Theatre, taking part in a Cleveland Play House performance) opened the evening with Haydn's Symphony No. 6, "Morning," one of the earliest Haydn symphonies in regular repertoire.

 

A slew of adjectives comes to mind when considering Glover's approach to this well-crafted and often witty music: precise, clear, communicative, incisive; but also sensitive, balanced and profound. All these qualities were immediately on display from the work's adagio "sunrise" introduction and subsequent allegro.

 

When this symphony was written, in 1761, Haydn was new at the court of Prince Eszterhazy, and whether he was expressing delight in the excellence of the Prince's orchestra, or seeking to curry favor with the ensemble's principals, the result was a symphony with unusually prominent parts for solo instruments, including flute, violin, cello, bassoon and double bass.

 

Flutist Saeran St. Christopher was delightful as she led a prominent group of players that also included first associate concertmaster Peter Otto, principal cellist Mark Kosower, principal bassoonist John Clouser, and first assistant principal bass Scott Haigh.

 

The Mozart Concerto in C major for Flute and Harp is an unusual work in which the composer explores the felicitous combination of the two solo instruments. One hesitates to employ such overworked adjectives as "heavenly" and "celestial," but they are almost unavoidable in this context.

 

Flutist Smith and harpist Kondonassis played with a fine sense of communication, sensitive to each other's nuances and balances. They were especially powerful and dramatic in the three cadenzas Mozart provides.

 

Glover proved the perfect accompanist, ensuring that the orchestra did not overwhelm the soft-voiced solo instruments and maintaining their own presence in the contrapuntal interplay.

 

Glover brought concentrated energy to Mozart's Symphony No. 39, the first in Mozart's valedictory trio of symphonies from 1788. Her tempos were forthright and quick, which took the symphony out of the realm of interpretive luxury that late Mozart is all too often placed in, and made of it a thing of great dramatic impact, forging the link between the late Classical era and the imminent revolution of Beethoven.

 

This is Mozart at his most dynamic, and in Glover's hands the music was brought to vivid life, thanks to her alert intelligence and incisive podium technique. She kept the energy at a crackling level throughout, even in the Andante, and brought the work to a splendid, sonorous conclusion.

 

Subscription Week 18

 

                                        WAGNER          Overture, Polonia

                                          CHOPIN          Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op. 21

                                   BEETHOVEN          Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, Op. 55, ‘Eroica’

 

Antoni Wit, conductor

Jan Lisiecki, piano

 

Poland was much in evidence at Severance Hall on Thursday evening, April 21, when Polish guest conductor Antoni Wit led The Cleveland Orchestra in Richard Wagner’s Polonia Overture and Frédéric Chopin’s f-minor piano concerto with Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki (the son of Polish parents). Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony may have been the outlier, thematically, but it ended the evening on similar notes of proud dignity.

 

While Poland may claim Chopin as its favorite musical son, France has almost an equal claim on the composer. Only a few weeks after the Warsaw premiere of this concerto in 1830, he decamped for Paris, never to return. Taking profit of the upward expansion of the piano keyboard and the technological innovations that made it possible to hear the instrument in large concert halls, Chopin wrote fantastically elaborate passages for the right hand that can contain more notes per square inch than the busiest moments of J.S. Bach.

 

Those gnat-like clouds of notes can be difficult to organize into lucid musical phrases. Under the fingers of some pianists, Chopin’s music can sound glib and insubstantial. Jan Lisiecki, only 21, isn’t one of those. His performance on Thursday was poetic and virile, full of health and vigor. Lisiecki has strong fingers. His passagework was brilliant, his melismas clear, and his trills scintillating. He displayed a fine sense of musical rhetoric in the slow movement, and his playing in the finale was rhythmic and stately.

 

A year younger than Thursday’s soloist when he wrote the concerto, Chopin was clearly more interested in the piano part than in the orchestra, which doesn’t have much to do but introduce the proceedings and — like the symphonic backup to a rock group — provide some musical carpeting. Wit and the Orchestra played their secondary role admirably, meeting up precisely with Lisiecki at important junctures.

 

The concert began with a rarity: an overture Wagner wrote during the same decade as the Chopin concerto to celebrate the revolutionary movement in Poland — and long before he acquired his distinctive musical voice. Polonia calls for five percussionists, including a pair of field drums and other military hardware. Its prominent fanfares, noble melodies, and back-and-forth volleys between brass and woodwinds add up to twenty minutes of entertaining musical bluster. Toward the end, a suspenseful flurry of strings and drum rolls introduces the first of a number of non-endings. The Orchestra, performing Polonia for the first time, gave it a brilliant reading.

 

Beethoven’s third symphony made headlines at its first performance for its nearly hour-long duration. Antoni Wit’s dynamic reading of the “Eroica” on Thursday evening bested that record, lasting just over an hour. While it is frequently played with a grand, breezy sweep, Wit approached the symphony as an overly familiar work whose details needed to be brought out in high relief.

 

That was most evident in the second-movement funeral march, where Wit’s ultra-slow tempo gave him plenty of opportunity to massage the music, but became ponderous after a while. As he did elsewhere in the work, Wit pumped up the sound, producing a huge brass climax.

 

The Scherzo was cheerful, yet reined in, the finale fierce at the outset, then played full-throttle. Wit held nothing back at the end, concluding an “Eroica” of epic proportions — thrilling, but perhaps a picture too big for its frame.

 

Subscription Week 19

 

                                        WAGNER          Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde

                                    CHAUSSON          Poème de l’amour et de la mer

                        RICHARD STRAUSS          Ein Heldenleben, Op. 40

 

Antonio Pappano, conductor

Marie-Nicole Lemieux, mezzo-soprano

 

Cleveland Orchestra conjures vivid characters in performance with Antonio Pappano

 

Just how vivid and rich in personality are this week's program and performances by the Cleveland Orchestra?

 

Put it this way: Thursday evening at Severance Hall felt to this listener as much like a night at the opera as it did a subscription orchestra concert.

 

And no wonder. With conductor Antonio Pappano, music director of London's Royal Opera House, back on the podium for the first time since 2001, the orchestra was bound to have been filled with theatrical spirit.

 

But the analogy to opera holds more strongly than that. Under Pappano, beyond evoking dynamic characters, each of the three lush, late-Romantic works on the program also took shape as an operatic world unto itself, carrying listeners on a vast, complete journey.

 

One scintillating work, Chausson's rarely-heard "Poem of Love and the Sea," actually involved a flesh-and-blood singer: mezzo-soprano Marie-Nicole Lemieux. Performing these two rhapsodic scenes from 1893 based on poetry by Maurice Bouchor, the French-Canadian vocalist in her Cleveland debut handily embodied the English translation of her surname: the best.

 

Lemieux herself was ideally suited to Chausson. Possessed of an ample but agile voice, and a native speaker of French, the singer seized on both the music's sweeping lyricism and intimate, nuanced turns of phrase. Besides that, she also sang with palpable feeling. Listeners with closed eyes could have sensed the fundamental arc of emotion every bit as well as those who followed the gushing text closely.

 

The orchestra was no less captivating. Led by Pappano, the group hewed closely to Lemieux, matching her ebb and flow while surrounding her in the musical equivalent of a florid, ambrosial garden. In the latter scene, "The Death of Love," principal cellist Mark Kosower and bassoonist Jonathan Sherwin drove home senses of fading and loss with poignant solos.

 

Though much more familiar, Strauss's "A Hero's Life" sounded equally fresh and new in Pappano's hands. In addition to an epic, self-contained world, the demanding tone poem as presented by the orchestra also conjured its title character in three-dimensional glory.

 

Their version of the hero Thursday was unusually confident and boisterous, his opponents a prickly, cacophonous bunch. His battle, too, was unforgettable, a blazing display of the orchestra's brass power at its finest.

 

Still, this hero was most alluring in his quiet moments, in the renditions of his "Companion" and "Fulfillment of His Life." Guided by Pappano, the orchestra, and notably concertmaster William Preucil, turned in performances marked by abundant shimmer and transcendent tenderness. Their account magically mirrored the act of retreat, yielding gradually to calm and resolution like the night to a rising sun. No ritual ovations here. Every last plaudit was well earned.

 

Less convincing was Pappano's treatment of the Prelude and Love-Death from Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde." Much like his Strauss, Pappano's Wagner Thursday developed and peaked organically, in beautiful keeping with the characters' swooning emotions. However, to this listener, it also sounded overly tidy and mechanical, too neat for a depiction of sensual bliss.

 

Still, Pappano was an invigorating presence. Just as Tristan, Isolde, and the figures imagined by Strauss and Chausson never stray far from Severance Hall, so are the conductor and mezzo Lemieux welcome back anytime they wish.

 

Subscription Week 20

 

                                          KODALY          Dances of Galanta

                             RACHMANINOV          Piano Concerto No. 1 in F sharp minor, Op. 1

                                  STRAVINSKY          Suite from The Firebird (1945 version)

 

Andrés Orozco-Estrada, conductor

Kirill Gerstein, piano

 

The printed sheet music was the only thing black-and-white at Severance Hall Thursday night. The actual performances? They were fields of brilliant, saturated color.

 

Led for the first time by Colombian conductor Andres Orozco-Estrada, the Cleveland Orchestra Thursday ripped through pages of Russian and Hungarian classics without doing any damage. On the contrary. While certain effects could have been heard as disruptive, most served to inspire the orchestra and result in zesty, supercharged readings.

 

The conductor wasn't the lone galvanizer, either. Back at Severance after nearly three years, pianist Kirill Gerstein wielded an equally colorful brush, rekindling Cleveland's passion with a lavish account of Rachmaninoff's youthful Piano Concerto No. 1.

 

The headlining work was the 1945 edition of Stravinsky's Suite from "The Firebird," a version of the famous ballet played in Cleveland Thursday for only the second time. And what a showstopper it proved to be. Somehow, despite its great familiarity, the music ended up sounding newly minted.

 

Orozco-Estrada certainly can take some credit for that. Not by accident, judging by his taut, punchy leadership and deft ear for rhythmic vitality, is he music director of the Houston Symphony.

 

But the lion's share of the spoils belonged to the orchestra, to the many individuals who supplied all the vibrant hues in the highly concentrated panorama that was this "Firebird."

 

Oboe, bassoon, clarinet, cello, trombone. Members of nearly every section occupied the spotlight at some point, from the Introduction though the "Dance of the Princesses," "Lullaby," and "Infernal Dance," and the light in every case was flattering. One soloist in particular, a mellifluous guest in the horns, warrants a shout-out by name: Nicole Cash Saks, associate principal horn in the San Francisco Symphony.

 

Gerstein's name, by contrast, is well known here, a tested source of heat and virtuosity in a wide range of repertoire. Swiftly, he's entering the pantheon of this generation's top pianists.

 

He did not disappoint Thursday. Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 1 may not be the composer's finest or most memorable work but Gerstein here put its best foot forward, imbuing the piece with heart-on-sleeve emotion, Romantic sweep, and steely dynamism.

 

To the outer movements, the pianist applied enormous, whole-arm muscle, tempered always by clear concern for shape, nuance, and feeling. Here was showy Rachmaninoff without the banging that taints lesser performances.

 

In fact, it was Gerstein's softer side that prevailed. In his tensile hands, aided by a sensitive Orozco-Estrada, the Andante was more than just a silken reverie. It was a quiet whirlwind, a gentle but unstoppable spinning force. Had the pianist chosen to play an encore, anything along its lines would have been ideal.

 

While Orozco-Estrada ended Thursday on a high note, the first impression he left was mixed. Eager, perhaps, to make a grand entrance in Kodaly's "Dances of Galanta," he in fact came on too strong, inserting himself too boldly and impeding the music's natural flow.

 

Again, though, the orchestra put on a fantastic display. Orozco-Estrada may have exaggerated the rhythmic swagger but the strings remained spritely and cohesive, and woodwind soloists handled their roles with seductive elegance. Color this listener impressed.

 

Subscription Week 21

 

                                               LISZT          Orpheus, Symphonic Poem No. 4

                                           BARTÓK          Violin Concerto No. 2

                                           BARTÓK          Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta

 

Franz Welser-Möst, conductor

Frank Peter Zimmermannm violin

Cleveland Orchestra takes deeper, thrilling plunges into the realm of Bartok

 

Prepare for a challenge this week at Severance Hall. Prepare, too, to be impressed by how well the Cleveland Orchestra rises to it.

 

Picking up where he left off last month with "Bartok on Stage," music director Franz Welser-Most Thursday returned with two orchestral works by Bartok, demanding and receiving from his many players their virtuoso finest.

 

The orchestra hadn't exactly been taking it easy in his absence. With Welser-Most on the podium, however, and Bartok on its stands, the group Thursday turned in an especially broad and sustained effort that paid off in the form of remarkable performances.

 

A sterling guest rounded out the affair. Like his hosts in the orchestra, violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann met his Bartok, the wild Violin Concerto No. 2, head-on, and complemented them with a blazing, expertly-polished statement.

 

Crafting anything cohesive out of Bartok's second violin concerto is no minor feat. A work of staggering complexity and unpredictable temperament, the 1938 opus makes mincemeat of all but the most accomplished soloists.

 

Count Zimmermann in that class. From his hands, the concerto emerged the musical equivalent of a mysterious friend, a creature alluring and often rewarding, but ultimately unfathomable. Only in his encore, a spot-on account of the Allegro from Bach's Violin Sonata No. 2, could one take the full measure of his artistry.

 

His palette alone was marvelous. To the first and third movements of the Bartok, Zimmermann applied a dizzying array of emotional colors, playing it fiery and rambunctious one moment and then eerie, seductive or coy the next. One word, meanwhile, sums up the technique he displayed: impeccable.

 

Most beguiling of all, though, was his winsome way in the Theme and Variations. Here was a round of suspended animation, an entire movement given over to a probing search for resolution marked by sleek, minimal gestures and close collaboration with timpani and celesta.

 

The orchestra by itself was every bit as inspired in Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. Despite being split apart by the work's unusual seating arrangement, the ensemble sounded as taut and uniformly disciplined as this listener has ever heard it.

 

The opening Andante was a grand crescendo, a steady, flowing climb to contrapuntal madness expertly led by Welser-Most. Similarly, the Adagio Thursday began as a scintillating, aromatic dream, with principal keyboardist Joela Jones on piano and Carolyn Gadiel Warner on celesta, but led to an alarming, eye-opening surge.

 

Where the orchestra truly outdid itself, however, was in the two Allegro movements. Tasked with stringent extremes of articulation, dynamics, and rhythmic shape, the ensemble nailed every obstacle, bringing off performances ranging from delicate and sparkling to vehement and raucous. That this is Welser-Most's favorite work by Bartok was abundantly clear.

 

The role of Liszt on such a program, however, was not. Not initially. His sumptuous Symphonic Poem No. 4, last heard here in 1928, and the luminous, tender reading it received Thursday, seemed a world apart from the frenetic musings of Bartok.

 

Soon, through, it crystallized. A sonic portrait of Orpheus, the legendary Greek champion of music, the poem paved the way for the heated abstractions to come. Without the likes of Liszt and Orpheus, in short, nothing the rest of the night would have been possible.

 

Subscription Week 22

                                         DVOŘÁK          The Wood Dove, Op. 110

                                        JANÁČEK          Suite from the Opera, ‘From the House of the Dead (arr. Jilek)

                                   BEETHOVEN          Piano Concerto No. 5 in E flat major, Op. 73, ‘Emperor’

 

Franz Welser-Möst, conductor

Rudolf Buchbinder, piano

 

Cleveland Orchestra offers revelations on night of works by Czech masters

 

What looked on paper like a standard evening at Severance Hall turned out to be a concert of revelations, as music director Franz Welser-Most led Cleveland Orchestra in premieres of Dvorak's "The Wood Dove" and a suite from Janacek's last opera, "From the House of the Dead."

 

In addition, Austrian pianist Rudolf Buchbinder brought to vivid life Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5, the "Emperor," a work that is so well known and so often performed that it is often in danger of seeming routine.

 

Four of Dvorak's five tone poems, all written after he'd finished his run of nine symphonies, are based on some rather grisly folk ballads by Karl Jaromir Erben, whose verse trafficked in such eerie elements as inter-species marriage, dead infants, murder, and child abduction.

 

By comparison, "The Wood Dove" is a mild essay, with its simple tale of mariticide (a woman poisons her husband for reasons unexplained), dalliance with a new lover at his funeral, and her subsequent remorse and suicide by drowning.

 

Welser-Most led a brisk and thoroughly transparent reading, no mean feat given the score's full-blooded orchestration. Dvorak made sure the story was easy to follow, and the orchestra played the narrative elements with gusto -- the musical depiction of the widow's disingenuous graveside sobbing was appropriately comic.

 

The orchestral cataclysm signalling the widow's suicide was well-balanced, and the subsequent coda, as subtly shaped by Welser-Most, deeply moving.

 

Although the Cleveland Orchestra has played the Prelude to Janacek's "From the House of the Dead," Thursday night's performance of the suite from the opera marked the first time Severance Hall audiences have had the opportunity to hear some of the composer's most advanced musical thought, and it was a welcome event.

 

More than any other of Janacek's remarkable operas, "From the House of the Dead," with its eschewing of traditional operatic roles (it's a true ensemble effort, without any star characters) lends itself well to a suite.

 

Under Welser-Most, the Cleveland Orchestra is becoming collective specialists in Janacek's remarkable music, and in the suite the group showed a complete understanding of the composer's peculiar style, with its rhythmic source in Czech speech and its innovative deployment, contrapuntally and harmonically, throughout the orchestra.

 

Welser-Most kept the pointillism well under control, but not at the expense of expressiveness. In the second of the work's three sections, the depiction of the opera's "play-within-a-play" was lively and sharply defined, while the moving final section was given a fine sonic luster.

 

Buchbinder falls into the camp of the undemonstrative pianist who nevertheless possesses supreme artistic and technical ability. He's all business at the keyboard, with most of the physical activity in the hands and forearms, and nary a trace of affectation or posing for the audience..

 

But what results he gets: shimmering and beautifully balanced runs, crystalline octaves, chordal passages and expressive melodies that seem to emerge of their own volition from the instrument, all guided by Buchbinder's admirable taste and impressive interpretive intelligence.

 

Thursday night's "Emperor" was a brisk, no-nonsense affair with lively playing from the stripped-down ensemble and a swinging sense of rhythm from Welser-Most, who seemed to be in a kind of psychic communication with Buchbinder.

 

The real delight came at the outset of the finale. Up to that point the soloist had brought an Apollonian nobility to his reading, but his explosive rendering of the Rondo theme cast that sensibility aside, replacing it with a Dionysian abandon that reminded one of the revolutionary nature of this concerto, which in the artists' hands was revealed (as was once said of Liszt's late piano pieces) as a musical spear hurtled into the future.

 

Subscription Week 23

 

                                         DVOŘÁK          Stabat Mater, Op. 58

 

Franz Welser-Möst, conductor

Erin Wall, soprano

Jennifer Johnston, mezzo-soprano

Norbert Ernst, tenor

Eric Owens, bass-baritone

Cleveland Orchestra Chorus

 

Cleveland Orchestra registers sorrow on emotionally laden Severance season finale

 

The intent was clear and noble. With Dvorak's Stabat Mater as the season finale, Cleveland Orchestra music director Franz Welser-Most aimed to take us down then send us soaring.

 

Only it didn't quite work out that way. The performance Thursday night at Severance Hall was satisfying on all fronts, but the material itself, a dour liturgical work of 10 movements steeped in sadness, brought this listener closer to tears than to any form of summery exultation.

 

The fault was not the orchestra's. The players, in fact, infused the drab, homogeneous score with as much color as possible.

 

Neither can one blame the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, which performed magnificently, the four guest vocalists, nor even Welser-Most, who led a sleek and often moving account fueled by abundant momentum and drama.

 

No, the problem, in this instance, was Dvorak. There's a reason the Cleveland Orchestra had only presented his Stabat Mater three times before, most recently in 1989, and that it's rarely performed elsewhere. Despite its tragic origins (Dvorak began the work after the death of his young daughter) and dramatic subject matter, the work is simply dull, a far cry from the inspired Dvorak most music-lovers adore and the composer's great works for voice.

 

Here, the master sounds out of his element. Memorable passages are scarce to nonexistent, the mood is almost uniformly morose, text is repeated endlessly, and every tempo is slow. Even a little variety from Dvorak would have gone a long way.

 

This did not make for a joyous finale. The beauty of Dvorak's rapturous conclusion was undeniable, the image of a soul in paradise appealing. But the message Thursday wasn't celebratory. It was one of death and transfiguration.

 

All that said, the night was not without charm. On the contrary, in performance terms, the evening provided much of the uplift Welser-Most sought.

 

Ever the reliable workhouse, the Chorus Thursday fulfilled its mammoth duties exquisitely, enunciating its text with impeccable clarity and rendering its music with passion and grace. Even when divided in half, male and female, the ensemble sounded at peak strength.

 

Enunciation, by contrast, was not the strong suit of the soloists (soprano Erin Wall, mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnston, tenor Norbert Ernst, and bass-baritone Eric Owens). Rather, they shone as lyrical, expressive presences.

 

Whether singing alone or as a quartet, the vocalists shaped their lines tastefully and effectively conveyed the emotion at hand. Ernst, especially, evinced the power to touch. None, either, had trouble transcending the orchestra. All four voices proved ample instruments.

 

Instrument-wise, of course, the orchestra was the dominant force. The ensemble's deep experience with Dvorak and choral music in general paid off Thursday in the form of a nuanced, carefully wrought performance in which all efforts were at the service of the chorus and soloists.

 

The impact of Dvorak's Stabat Mater is impossible to argue. It's a weighty and meaningful work, and might be just the thing for a certain, specific occasion.

 

The end of a season, however, is not that moment. Now is not the time for grief. It's the time for looking forward, to Blossom and the summer.