Slow and fast. It wasn’t my original intention to compare and contrast the two most recent Cleveland Orchestra concerts I was lucky enough to hear, but now there’s no resisting the impulse. The Thu 5/13 concert, conducted by Tito Munoz, provided a relaxed and pleasant evening of classical music. Munoz led a leisurely exploration of “The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind,” Osvaldo Golijov’s intricately blended mash up of string orchestra and klezmer clarinet. Franklin Cohen, the orchestra’s principal clarinet, played four different clarinets as soloist–and he did a fine job. The night I heard him, however, I was reminded more of his considerable skill with works both lyric and classical in the old Romantic school (19th-century) than with the keening wails klezmer can delve into. Other works on the program, Johann Strauss, Jr.’s Overture to “Die Fledermaus” and the ever-bouncy “Symphonie fantastique” by Hector Berlioz were finely played (as ever), but lacked intensity.
On the other hand, for the Wed 5/19 concert, Cleveland Orchestra music director and principal conductor Franz Welser-Most was back at the helm and things orchestral moved along quite briskly. It’s always fun to see just how fast the Cleveland Orchestra can play (very very fast–everyone is in great shape). Certain passages (especially the Finale) of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”) were breathless, even reckless. The Finale of this musical journey of a symphony played so quickly, even at the sacrifice of potentially significant spaces to meditate, brought uplift and excitement to one of classical music’s greatest hits. It was especially welcome heard in contrast to the program’s immediately preceding works, Beethoven’s Overture to “Coriolan” (marred by sounds of horns warming up elsewhere drifting into the concert hall) and the feast of music that is “going” nowhere, namely Alban Berg’s brooding and atmospheric Symphonic Suite for “Lulu.”
By the way, there’s a free concert in Severance Hall on Sat 6/5. It starts at 6PM with a conversation with contemporary composers and includes two concerts (one at 7PM and another at 9PM). Between the concerts, there’s an hour interlude party and performance (of Louis Andriessen’s 1975 work scored for “any group of loud-sounding instruments”). Now how could that not be fun? http://www.ClevelandOrchestra.com
Laura Kennelly is a freelance arts journalist, a member of the Music Critics Association of North America, and an associate editor of BACH, a scholarly journal devoted to J. S. Bach and his circle.
Listening to and learning more about music has been a life-long passion. She knows there’s no better place to do that than the Cleveland area.