The Cleveland Orchestra excels in unfamiliar music

This Cleveland Orchestra season will feature more unfamiliar music than any other in its 103-year history.  Last night’s concert, which consisted of works from the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st Centuries, demonstrated that unfamiliar isn’t necessarily “new”, and that there are numerous worthy works that are not met with immediate success.

Josef Strauss

Josef Strauss was the son of Johan Strauss I and the brother of Johan Strauss II and Edward Strauss.  In some ways, he could be considered the Jan Brady of the Strauss family.  His brother Johan II considered Josef the more gifted of the two, but Josef initially trained as an engineer and even invented a horse drawn street sweeping machine – the ancestor of today’s street sweepers.  He demonstrated talent in other areas but eventually gravitated to the family business: composition.    

Josef’s struggle with mental illness, likely brought on by traumatic brain injuries, and his early death meant that his success was overshadowed by that of his family members.  Dead before he was 43, he never received the recognition in life his father or brothers did.  

Strauss’ Heldengedichte (Heroic Poem), Op. 87, is a waltz inspired work with noble moments that reminded me of Schubert’s Landler – numerous themes are presented but not developed. Although not as memorable as his father’s “Radetsky March” or his brother Johan II’s “Blue Danube Waltz”, it deserves to be better known.

George Walker

The Sinfonia No. 5 by American composer George Walker, completed in 2018, represented the contemporary work on the program.  Walker, a musical prodigy, was educated at Oberlin Conservatory and the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Rudolf Serkin.  Walker should have become the United States’ first prominent African-American classical pianist – a recording of Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto with Walker attests to his technique and musicality.  But the segregated country was not ready, and he turned to composition – America would have to wait until the 1960s when André Watts burst upon the scene for a Black pianist to be fully recognized. 

What in some ways could be seen as misfortune turned out to be fortuitous for music lovers – because there has never been a shortage of good pianists since the instrument was invented.  As a composer, Walker amassed a considerable output that is becoming increasingly known (the Cleveland Orchestra will present two more works by Walker this season). 

The Sinfonia No. 5 is tightly constructed, highly dramatic, and cannily orchestrated – picturesque moments abound during its 20-minute length.  There are motifs and thematic elements which could only be referred to as “American”.  Yet it is not a folksy work like some of Copland’s music, rather it is acerbic and challenging.  The compelling Sinfonia includes spoken narrative, given a stirring rendition last night by Karamu House president Tony F. Sias.

 

Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Erich Wolfgang Korngold was born in Austria to a musical family in 1897.  He was as much as a prodigy as Mozart and Saint-Saëns, but today he is primarily known for his film scores, which earned him two Academy Awards.  As someone who came to Classical music through the “back door” of film scores by the likes of John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith, I have always felt that good music is good music, and genre is secondary.  But while Williams is known as a film composer who has written some concert music (including a fine Cello concerto championed by Yo-Yo Ma), Korngold was primarily a concert composer who, for a decade, also composed film music.

The Symphony in F-sharp major, premiered in Vienna in 1954, is beautifully structured, spectacularly orchestrated, and contains numerous memorable tunes.  The fact that some of these themes were used in Korngold’s film scores is irrelevant – and they may have well been composed long before the films were made and stored in the composer’s “icebox” for a rainy day.  Further, the Symphony is emotionally moving, at least to me.  Last night’s concert was one of only three times I’ve been moved to tears by music, in the work’s majestic and heartfelt Adagio.

The Cleveland Orchestra rehearsing Korngold's Symphony.

It’s clear the Symphony’s critical failure was for non-musical reasons, as there were numerous factors stacked against Korngold.  The composer was the son of Julius Korngold, a Viennese critic known for his blistering reviews and his championing of the music of Gustav Mahler – who was of Jewish ancestry and whose music would not be revived in Vienna until the 1960s.  Korngold, himself a Jew, was presenting his Symphony in a city which was historically and continued to be a hotbed of anti-Semitism long after the war.  Further, the composer, who went into self-exile from Europe in 1938 due to the Nazi regime, chose to premiere a symphony dedicated to the memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Vienna, which had been bombed by the Allies a decade before and was then occupied by the Americans – and the symphony had American based themes (including the World War I song “Over There”).  Doubtless critics felt Korngold, who had even taken American citizenship, was thumbing his nose at Austria and sharpened their knives accordingly.

Criticism of Korngold’s post World War II works was nothing new.  His later works were criticized for their supposed “Hollywood” sound.  But that raises the question: since he helped to create that sound, would it not be more apropos to refer to the “Hollywood” sound as the “Korngold” sound?  His Violin Concerto, premiered by Jascha Heifetz, was panned as “more corn than gold”.  But the work’s posthumous revival is a demonstration that critics in search of a memorable phrase are not the ultimate arbiters of a composition’s merit.  Korngold’s misfortune was that he composed broadly emotive music into an era which was rejecting that aesthetic.  This was the same mentality that led to the replacement of much attractive but “old fashioned” architecture with anonymous “modern” buildings – many of which have not stood the test of time.  Unlike Stravinsky, Korngold’s style didn’t change over time.  While one can criticize Korngold’s lack of “evolution”, it can also be argued that some of Stravinsky’s later works were gimmicky attempts to cash in on the latest fad – and none of his post 1930 works have achieved the renown of the ballet scores he composed prior to World War I.  Sadly, unlike Stravinsky, Korngold didn’t have the benefit of a long life – he died at 60 with no idea that a posthumous revival of his concert music would come to pass.

The orchestra under Franz Welser-Möst performed last night’s program with their usual polish, as if they’d been playing these works for decades, and not for the first time.

 

The Cleveland Orchestra at Severance – a return and a farewell

 

The Cleveland Orchestra returned to Severance this weekend for the first concerts of the 2021-2022 season – as well as its first concerts there since March of 2020.  

In a pre-concert talk with orchestra manager André Gremillet, conductor Franz Welser-Möst spoke of the season in general, including the emphasis on newer and lesser-known music, as well as upcoming concerts he’s especially anticipating, including a January concert with pianist Igor Levit.  Welser-Möst also delved into the importance of the audition process in shaping the orchestra, noting that musicians he appoints may well serve in the orchestra for decades to come. 

The orchestra warming up before the concert

The lesser-known music in last night’s program was Richard Strauss’s Tone Poem Macbeth, Op. 23, a work so rarely performed that The Cleveland Orchestra never played it before this weekend.  Composed in the late-1880s, it’s one of many compositions inspired by the works of Shakespeare – along with Tchaikovsky’s Romeo & Juliet Overture, Beethoven’s Overture to Coriolanus, Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and a host of operas. Strauss’s work is probably the least developed, compositionally – not a slam on the composer, merely an acknowledgement that he was in 20s and still developing his style.  The work justifiably leans toward the dramatic and is skillfully orchestrated.  The clean ensemble playing and sonority – balanced even at fortissimo – were apt demonstrations that the orchestra was back where it belonged and still in stellar form.

Joan Tower’s 2021 composition, A New Day, premiered this past summer at the Colorado Music Festival, here received its first Cleveland performances.  The work, for cello and orchestra, is in some ways reminiscent of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony in that it’s not strictly programmatic but more an exploration of feelings awakened by specific events, in this case Daybreak, Working Out, Mostly Alone, and Into the Night.  The inventively orchestrated work cannily exploits both the orchestra and cello.  Soloist Alisa Weilerstein proved herself easily up to the job – at least she made it look easy, which is the sign of a virtuoso performer, and Welser-Möst’s accompaniment anticipated her every move.  The performance received a sustained ovation, which the composer was welcomed on stage to share.

The second half of the concert was dedicated to Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony.  This is a work familiar to Cleveland audiences, not least from the fine recordings made under the direction of George Szell and Lorin Maazel.  The orchestra last performed it at Blossom Music Center in 2018, a concert at which Daniel and I were joined by his niece and nephew.  Before the concert, Welser-Möst mentioned that his interpretation was a bit different than the standard, but I sensed little that was unusual here.  The main differences were a keener sense of orchestral balance in the second movement, Allegro marcato, than is usually heard – with some remarkably feathery playing from the first violins.  Also, the finale went at a very brisk tempo that left even Szell and Maazel in the dust, yet everything was kept in proportion and clarity was never sacrificed.  The finale was brought to a stunning climax which brought the audience to its feet.    

Joela Jones takes a final bow as principal keyboardist.

Last night’s concert also marked Joela Jones’ final appearance as the orchestra’s principal keyboardist – a position she has held since she was appointed by George Szell in 1968.  One Szell appointee, Assistant Principal Second Violinist Emilio Llinás, remains with the orchestra.   

My review of Scriabin's solo piano works

 After several months of hiatus during which I concentrated on self-care (more on that in a later post), I have returned to writing reviews.  The latest is of a nine CD set of Scriabin's complete solo works as played by Maria Lettberg, which also includes a DVD of debatable merit.  Click here to read my review. 

Franz Welser-Möst’s “From Silence: Finding Calm in a Dissonant World”

I recently finished reading Franz Welser-Möst’s new book “From Silence: Finding Calm in a Dissonant World.”  The book is a curious mix of practical advice for maintaining the physical and mental health necessary for a career as a performing musician, sprinkled with a bit of musical analysis, liberally seasoned with Welser-Möst’s justifable concerns about how the social media age has led to a degradation of Classical performance.  

The book makes for interesting reading, not just for those considering a career in Classical music, but those for whom Classical music is an avocation.   That said, I wish Welser-Möst would not contribute to the myths that the Cleveland Orchestra is an anomalous gem within a social wasteland and that the orchestra was not noteworthy before George Szell took it over.