Guest conductor Herbert Blomstedt joined with the Cleveland Orchestra to create one impressive, music-breathing entity that filled Severance Hall with the richness created when musical hearts and spirits play in concert.

Blomstedt, conducting without a score, a baton and, sometimes, not even on a podium, was able to focus all his attention on the music and the people who played it. Brahms’ “Academic Festival Overture” (1881) opened things with a bounce. Brahms deliberately incorporated student drinking songs into the overture (according to Michael Strasser who gave the pre-concert talk). It would be, he said, as if we suddenly heard Ohio State Buckeye fight songs in the middle of a classical work. Funny.

The overture certainly pleased the very-dressed up young concert-goer sitting near me who sat on the edge of her seat, transfixed. Next came Hindemith’s “Symphony: Mathis der Maler,” a piece which turns from two soothing and angelic movements (in honor of Matthias the Painter’s evocation of angels) to an angry third movement. This movement portrays “Temptation of St. Anthony”–a painting which might as well have been called “The Torment” or “Maurice [Where the Wild Things Are] Sendak gets ugly.” (Figures pecking at the poor saint looked a lot like those monsters Max saw on his trip to the island of wild things.) To show the torment lots of cool buzzing hornet sounds were passed from one orchestra section to another.

Beauty returned when Garrick Ohlsson performed as soloist in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 (“Emperor”) to conclude the evening. Ohlsson, the orchestra and Blomstedt worked as a chamber ensemble, dwelling on the meditative sections with quiet elegance and turning the concluding Rondo into a happy, concluding romp. By this time, the elegant young concert-goer mentioned above was half-asleep, but with luck she will have enough musical memories to keep a love of classical music alive. Sure hope so.

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.