Sat 9/24
Saturday’s Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra concert was celebratory on many accounts. The lavish performance was the second public performance of the 2022-2023 season; the first of an unprecedented seven expected at Severance Music Center this coming season. CIM wasn’t able to properly celebrate its centennial in the autumn of 2020, due to pandemic restrictions.
Saturday’s performance and after party paid tribute to centennial observances as well as to the intimate and profound relationship between the Institute and Cleveland’s globally renowned orchestra. Thirty-five members of the Cleveland Orchestra currently serve on CIM’s faculty and thirty-one members of the orchestra are CIM alumni.
“The Cleveland Orchestra has been committed to education in this community since its beginnings in 1918 and throughout the course of our 105-year history,” said André Gremillet, the Cleveland Orchestra’s president and CEO. “That dedication continues with today’s announcement of an extended partnership with our University Circle neighbor: the Cleveland Institute of Music.”
Conductor Carlos Kalmar opened Saturday’s performance with Symphony 92, called the “Oxford”, because Haydn reportedly conducted it at a ceremony in 1791 in which he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Oxford University.
Maestro Kalmar’s conducting is contagiously exuberant. He gleans every ounce of youthful energy from the school’s orchestra to display all the wit and joie de vivre that bubbles out of Haydn’s greatest works. It was a performance worthy of Haydn’ wit and glee.
Mexican composer/conductor Julián Fueyo is a 2020 CIM graduate. He studied composition with CIM’s Keith Fitch and now studies with David Lang and Aaron Jay Kernis at Yale. Fueyo is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2020 BMI Student Composer award and both the 2020 and 2021 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award. This summer he was invited as a composition fellow to the Aspen Music Festival.
The world premiere of Fueyo’s “The Eleventh Heaven” (2019) was a highlight of the evening. Julián Fueyo spent a week rehearsing with the CIM orchestra and Maestro Kalmar, who described the work as vibrant; and indeed it was.
Fueyo’s composition explores Mexican ancient aesthetics, specifically the Eleventh Heaven, where resides the God of the fire of creation. The influences from Mexican epic literature which inspired Fueyo include the aspect of pre-Hispanic ritual and prayer. Along with images of the pictograms included in the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, Fueyo uses all of these inspirations to great evocative power in his piece. The percussive power in the writing was combined with long “vectorial” phrases to realize a true compositional fire. Fueyo used shimmering strings to convey sparks of cascading energy that develop into flames. Layering different rhythms over each other, the piece blazes into a cosmic tempest until it has no more room to grow and is finally consumed in an explosion of silence — a noiselessness which did not last long due to the roar of the enthusiastic crowd which leapt to its feet for ovation after ovation.
The second half of the program started out with a work by American composer, Jessie Montgomery, “Records from a Vanishing City” (2016), a short tone poem based on Montgomery’s recollections of her childhood growing up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
The concert ended with Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloe Suite #2,” the final scene of his ballet arranged for orchestra alone.
Based on a pastoral drama by the Greek poet Longus, the first two scenes portray the courtship of Daphnis and Chloe. Suite No. 2, takes place in a grove sacred to the god Pan. Shimmering figures in the winds, harps and strings portray the sound of a brook at dawn; birdcalls are sounded by piccolo and solo violins. As dawn fades away, a luxuriant melody rises from the orchestra. Daphnis awakes. Looking for Chloe, they throw themselves into each other’s arms, the melody reaching a soaring climax.
The performance was riveting, with a luxurious string sound layered with competent brass and woodwinds. The flute solo in Daphnis is infamous for its difficulty. The CIM Orchestra’s solo flautist rose to the occasion beautifully, as did the rest of the orchestra. The whole program was momentous and lived up to the expectations of a one-hundred-year anniversary celebration.
One Response to “MUSIC REVIEW: CIM Orchestra @ Severance Hall by Lisa DeBenedictis”
LAURA MARIA
Fantastic Concert! Happy Birthday, CIM!!