Music of Unsuk Chin and Richard Strauss at Severance

As befits the shortest month of the year, this evening’s Cleveland Orchestra program at Severance Hall, which featured guest conductor  Alain Altinoglu and cellist Alisa Weilerstein, was about the briefest I’ve ever encountered at a Classical music concert – just about an hour’s worth of music.  Whatever the program lacked in length was made up for in variety and substance. 

The program opened with Unsuk Chin’s Cello Concerto, composed in 2009, featuring Weilerstein in the solo part.  The work is scored for a large orchestra, supplemented with piano and celeste.  As with subito con forza, which was performed by the orchestra two years ago, Chin seems more interested in orchestration and sonic textures than with thematic development.  Totally atonal, the work shows the continuing influence of Chin’s teacher György Ligeti.  Weilerstein, a frequent and welcome guest in Cleveland, made the most of Chin’s unorthodox writing, which included rasping and scraping – as well as delivering some haunting lyricism in the third movement.  Weilerstein played a short Bach work in a major key as an encore.

The Richard Strauss works followed intermission.  Let’s put one matter front and center: The Cleveland Orchestra has been considered one of the world’s great orchestras for the music of Richard Strauss for nearly 70 years – going back to the George Szell era.  In fact, the first recordings I ever heard of the tone poems featured in this evening’s concert were with this orchestra led by Lorin Maazel – way back when I was a teenager.  The recording also featured Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration which, even then, struck me as the greatest of the three.

Altinoglu started with Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, based on the 16^th Century German folk hero.  As the story goes, Till Eulenspiegel, who may or may not have been a real person, was a prankster whose targets were often those in power, including clergy and academics.  Eventually, the authorities caught up with the naughty prankster and, as reflected in the music, he paid the ultimate price with a one-way trip to the gallows.  The 16^th Century was definitely a “tough on crime” era.  But the work’s coda, where the merry theme returns, assures the audience that his spirit lives on.  This is the kind of work which, if played “straight,” will die.  Altinoglu caught the work’s humor and shifted moods effortlessly, helped by pin-point turns by the orchestra.     

The character of Don Juan is more familiar: a rebellious Spanish libertine or, in modern psychobabble, a sex addict.  He also has a gambling problem and kills the father of one of his conquests.  Dude’s got issues.  As with Till Eulenspiegel, Don Juan dies for his sins – but in this case the death is self-inflicted.  Dark stuff indeed.  But the tone poem starts off with a brash major key fanfare, because pursuing and obtaining sex is fun – at least in moderation.  The fact that Don Juan is rebelling against an overly strict father is icing on the cake.  Just don’t fall in love or things will get complicated.  Again, Altinoglu’s conception was a model of phrasing, pacing, and clarity.  The Cleveland Orchestra proved once again that it retains its crown as a great orchestra for this kind of repertoire, and special mention must be made of Nathaniel Silberschlag’s horn solo which featured the most unearthly legato I’ve ever heard from that instrument. 

 

A reminder that Severance Hall's acoustics were 

once far less appealing than they are today.