As if to offer a case study, the Cleveland Orchestra opened Carnegie Hall’s season on Thursday and Friday with two contrasting programs. In both, the players were virtually flawless under the reliably commanding baton of their music director, Franz Welser-Möst. Yet one concert never quite took flight, while the other soared in a showcase of the Clevelanders at their most magnificent.
Linking the two evenings was a sense of place: Vienna. It’s where Beethoven made his career, and in the 250 years since his birth — an anniversary Carnegie is observing by devoting roughly a fifth of its season to his already over-programmed works — the city is also where many other musical luminaries have done the same, including Strauss, Mahler and, for a time, Welser-Möst.
The first concert — which was often impressively dull and featured two pieces by, yes, Beethoven — started with fare by a less-famous contributor to Vienna’s rich music history: Otto Nicolai, who, before dying in his 30s, co-founded the Vienna Philharmonic and composed, in 1849, an operatic adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”
That opera’s fizzy and festive overture has an easy-listening friendliness befitting a season-opening gala. But, as played by the Clevelanders, with the discipline and clarity that make them one of the finest ensembles in the country (if not the world), the piece was more dignified than light. Welser-Möst carefully traced the progression from pastoral calm to rollicking merriment, and teased out the comedy in moments like boisterous lower strings answered by mischievous higher voices.
But although Welser-Möst lifted the Nicolai score, little could be done to help the two works that followed: Beethoven’s Romance for Violin and Orchestra in G, and his Triple Concerto in C. Neither is often performed; neither really deserves to be, either.
You would be hard-pressed to find fault with the Cleveland Orchestra’s performance. Not a note was dropped; not a single interpretive choice seemed misguided. All the same, it remained lukewarm, never even approaching a simmer, much less a boil. Not even the concert-closing suite from Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” — arranged by Robert Mandell with edits by Welser-Möst — could waltz the evening out of its slump.
In the Romance, violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter was as warmly expressive as always, with precise articulation that didn’t waver even in passages of precarious double-stops. But her earnestness was almost sadly out of place in music that wouldn’t be challenging for a young student. She was, however, the star of the sedate Triple Concerto, effortless and authoritative among her fellow soloists: Yefim Bronfman, making the most of an unremarkable piano part, and the veteran cellist Lynn Harrell, whose technique repeatedly slipped with crunching bow strokes, imprecise intonation and a tired legato.
Bronfman returned Friday for the second Cleveland Orchestra concert, which was far better for its focused programming: Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, preceded by Jörg Widmann’s 2014 piano concerto “Trauermarsch” (technically not a Viennese piece or composer, but inspired by the first movement of the Mahler).
The Widmann echoes the atmosphere of the funeral music that opens Mahler’s Fifth, but not necessarily its rhythms and melodies. Indeed, where the symphony offers an elegy, the concerto is pulled constantly downward as if by gravity. Bronfman played the breathless solo part, which was written for him, with unpretentious wisdom and mastery, like a noble march to the grave.
Mahler’s symphony was the capstone on a long crescendo that began with the modest Nicolai overture the evening before and swelled to a magisterial finale — a trajectory Welser-Möst followed within the Fifth’s five movements as well. He maintained the opening march’s solemn steadiness, which never sank into ponderousness and occasionally shocked with whooping brasses that flared and receded like fireworks.
Welser-Möst resisted histrionics in the stormy second movement; and while his insistence on control and restraint sometimes robbed the symphony of its power, it also achieved a remarkable transparency where many conductors would be content with translucence. Few orchestras could better render the score’s architecture so clear, the dense layers of sound so balanced. Which is not to say Welser-Möst’s reading was without character. In this movement, the hopeful, major-key passage that arrives unexpectedly near the end was hurried, if crazed, almost like a mad scene for plunging, again, to gloomy melodrama.
When that happy melody returned — at the close of the symphony, after the contented warmth of the Adagietto and the brazen triumph of the finale — Welser-Möst and the Clevelanders slowed it down with relish, as if there were no shame in such unbridled joy.
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Cleveland Orchestra
Performed Oct. 3-4 at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan; carnegiehall.org.
This article originally appeared in
.