Berg, Rihm, and Schubert at Severance

The Cleveland Orchestra under Franz Welser-Möst continued its recent tradition of including a mix of the familiar and unfamiliar at last night’s concert at Severance Hall, with works from the 19^th, 20th, and 21^st Centuries.  This is the last concert of the 2021-2022 season at Severance I plan to attend, although there are a few concerts at Blossom Music Center that have caught my interest. 

The concert began with three selections for strings from Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite, completed in 1926.  The work was first presented by the orchestra under Pierre Boulez in 1971, and was recently performed at the height of the pandemic on the orchestra’s Adella app.  As Shostakovich would a few decades later, Berg uses musical notation tied to people’s names as part of the thematic material: in this case, his own initials as well as those of a woman he was having an affair with at the time of composition.  While the work uses twelve-tone methods, it is not atonal.  The dissonance is neither grating nor unpleasant, particularly when presented with the tonal beauty that was heard last night.

The Berg was followed by Wolfgang Rihm’s Verwandlung II, composed in 2005.  This work was totally unfamiliar to me, and I will need to further digest the piece when the concert is broadcast to fully comprehend it.  The performance was marked by the feathery lightness of certain string passages and Welser-Möst’s keen attention to dynamics.

The most well-known work followed intermission (and I’ve no doubt it was placed after intermission to keep butts in seats for the entire concert): Schubert’s Symphony in C major, D. 944. This is a work I’ve been in love with for over 40 years, since my father bought me a cassette tape of the work as played by the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell.  Although I’ve heard recordings of the work in recordings and broadcasts of various quality – including by Toscanini, Walter, Böhm, von Dohnányi, and many others, this was the first time I’d heard it in concert.  As with every familiar piece I encounter in concert, I am reminded of the inadequacy of even the finest recordings to truly convey the concert experience.  Welser-Möst’s pacing of the Symphony, Schubert’s largest, tended toward the lively, dismissing the phony Gemütlichkeit which has marred too many performances of this work.  The conductor favored a large dynamic range, mixed with transparent textures, along with a minimum of interpretive fuss.  There was one exception, in the Scherzo, where a rhythmic “hiccup” was slightly exaggerated.  As with the orchestra’s 2020 live recording, Welser-Möst observed every repeat, bringing the heavenly length of the work to just under an hour, but it never seemed excessive.