Cleveland Orchestra @ Severance Hall 1/6/2011
Watching Christoph von Dohnanyi conduct Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 (better known as the super-romantic “Pathetique”) beat watching a film. Seats only five rows away from the podium allowed a good glimpse of the maestro’s face as he turned to the first violins, often to remind them to stay soft, to let other lines in the music emerge. This isn’t noted to review the conductor’s expressions (which I guess I’m doing here), but to applaud the synchronicity between the emotions on his face and the emotions the orchestra drew from the piece under his guidance. Tchaikovsky’s melody in this work sings so completely on its own (it was a radio soap opera theme back in the day), that the work can seem sing-song, near-trite. Not so when the former Cleveland Orchestra conductor joined in partnership with this astonishingly talented band of musicians. What was heard was no pop version of “oh isn’t life awful and tragic,” but instead a fully-rounded and subtle blending of velvet tone and silky harmony that breathed fresh life into the oft-played classic.
The program opened with Jorg Widmann’s new work, “Con brio.” This lively concert overture for orchestra mixed traditional classical music phrases (nearly recognizable fragments, but not, of Beethoven’s Seventh and Eighth Symphonies) with non-traditional sound-making, for example, woodwinds taking off their reeds and blowing directly into their instruments. The effect was similar to that when one opens a box of Cracker Jacks and rustles through it trying to find the prize (in this case, Beethoven). Ten minutes of good fun was had by all.
After “Con brio,” the orchestra’s principal horn, Richard King, moved to the front of the stage to play Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 2 in E-flat major, K417, another work with “brio.” King’s articulate performance made this virtuosic work seem an easy piece to play: which it isn’t — especially at the end when it shows what “con brio” can mean as it speeds up more and then more again.
This evening of music with the Cleveland Orchestra and its former conductor was worth the white-knuckled ride in the Thursday-night snowstorm home.
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.