The Cleveland Orchestra – Franz Welser-Most, conductor. September 24, 2015.

Severance Hall, Cleveland, Ohio.  Dress Circle (Seat CC606, $89.)

Program

Symphony No. 41 (“Jupiter”) in C major, K551 (1788) by Mozart (1756-1791).

An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64 (1915) by Richard Strauss (1864-1949).

Anne and I are on a 3-day 3-concert trip, visiting Cleveland, Pittsburg, and Cincinnati.  We have heard Louis Langree conduct the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra quite a few times over the past few summers, and would like to see how he does with his own orchestra on his own turf (Cincinnati).  A couple of months ago I heard Welser-Most and the Cleveland Orchestra perform two concerts at Lincoln Center, and like them very much, so again I wanted to see how they do at home.  Pittsburg turns out to be nearby, and it is where the last conductor of New York Philharmonic, the late Lorin Maazel, spent time in his early music career; that Honeck is the conductor also adds to the attractiveness.

The Cleveland Orchestra is the fifth oldest orchestra in the United States, and has always enjoyed a great reputation.  The conductors before Welser-Most were von Dohnanyi, Maazel, Boulez, and Szell, quite a list.  Severance Hall was constructed for the Cleveland Orchestra and opened in 1931.  According to the Wikipedia entry on the building, it has one of America’s greatest Art Deco interiors, the auditorium itself “glistens with Art Deco motifs in aluminum leaf,” which makes for a very bright stage; the stage, however, is modernist because of renovations for acoustics improvement.  It seats about 2,000.

We picked up the tickets at around 6:30 pm, and were told there was a pre-concert event in the Reinberger Chamber Hall.  It turns out to be an “interview” of Welser-Most about aspects of the new season.  A couple of interesting remarks.  Welser-Most said he kind of outgrew Wagner (except Parsifal and Meistersingers) but enjoys Strauss’s straightforwardness and simplicity.  He also mentioned that this season they will be doing two Bartok ballets: The Miraculous Mandarin and Bluebeard Castle that should drive the listener either to suicide or a large bottle of vodka.  A review of the year’s concerts shows a program on excerpts from Wagner’s Gotterdammerung; and Anne and I are somewhat interested in this ballet program.

Back to tonight’s concert.  The works were the last of the respective composer’s genre.  Mozart would die in about three years, and Strauss had another three decades to go.  Mozart’s is a “pure” music composition, while Strauss’s is a tone poem describing a day in the Alpines.  Someone who can translate this “book knowledge” into actual perception would probably appreciate the programming a lot; for me, the two work well individually.  Of course I don’t know what I missed.

Per the Program Notes, this symphony is known in Germany as “with the final fugue.”  There is a long description of each movement and how they transcend the traditional movement types from which they come.  The four movements are Allegro vivace, Andante cantabile, Menuetto: Allegro – Trio, and Molto allegro.  I really enjoyed the first and last movements, but had some trouble staying up for the middle two.

In my defense, we caught an early flight from Newark this morning, which necessitated our getting up at 5 am.  Being the night owl that I am, I got four hours of sleep last night.  I did nap for about 30 minutes this afternoon.

While the music is characteristically light and crisp, it also has a lot more “Sturm und Drang” than usual, so much so that I thought some passages were Beethoven-like.  The final movement does contain some fugue constructions (one particularly familiar passage comes to mind) that would explain the German description.  There is no accepted reason why it is called “Jupiter,” a possible explanation is Jupiter is the chief of gods in Roman mythology.

Musicologists debated the structure of this Mozart Symphony at length, and apparently they still do.  There is no doubt about what story Strauss was trying to tell in his Alpine Symphony.  The idea to write music about a hike in the Alps dated to Strauss’s childhood, and he did write some music to describe his own (mis)adventure hike where he got lost and was drenched by rain.  Most probably none of the original found its way into this work, completed some forty years later.  In any case, the tone poem begins and ends with night, with some interesting intervening events happening in between.  Strauss labeled the varying sections thus: Night, Sunrise, The Ascent Begins, Entering the Woods, Walking Along the Brook, At the Waterfall, Apparition, On Flowery Meadows, In the Mountain Pasture, Wrong Path through the Thicket, On the Glacier, Dangerous Moments, At the Summit, Vision, The Fog Rises, The Sun is Gradually Obscured, Elegy, Calm before the Storm, Thunder and Storm/Descent, Sunset, Journey’s End/Quieting, and Night; 22 in all.

I heard this work once before, some nine years ago, and I am sure I was lost then.  Today, the Cleveland Orchestra is considerate enough to project each of the label briefly so the audience could follow the story.  While the sections make sense, it is quite understandable why anyone who is not a Strauss expert may get hopelessly lost.  Strauss’s sunrise is spectacular, think Also Sprach Zarathustra, but my sunrise is quiet and slowly warms the day, so it would be natural for me to think I missed the sunrise when I hear this loud noise, and it will be impossible to recover.  Some of the sections are very short, I think “The Fog Rises” was not even 30 seconds in length, and thus easily missed.  By projecting 22 short phrases onto the stage, the appreciation of the music increases multifold – I wonder why this is the first time it has ever happened in my experience.  I remember spending a lot of time correlating the story behind the Rite of Spring to the music; it tool multiple listenings before I began to map the music to the description.

Most of the preceding paragraph was lifted from the Program Notes, which also talks about the orchestra being 120-strong.  Here is my attempt to count the musicians on stage: 35 violins, 11 violas, 12 cellos, 9 basses, 35 woodwind/brass, 5 percussion, 1 keyboard, 2 harps, and 5 percussions.  This is a fun piece to watch as it calls for a wind machine and a thunder machine (the latter being a shaken large metal sheet.)  I must say it is impressive how this large group managed to hang together and produce a coherent piece of music.

The orchestra played an encore, appropriately called “Moonlight.”

This was opening night for the season, and there was some excitement in the air.  Not as much as I expected, perhaps a reflection of the more reserved nature of Midwest folds.  And certainly not the black-tie event of the New York Philharmonic opening night.  Anne and I felt comfortable in our “business casual” attire.  There were a few empty seats, somewhat to my surprise.

We only had a quick meal beforehand at a nearby Qdoba, and I was hoping to catch a snack at the University Center food court.  The Center is open till 2 am, but the shops were all closed; it was before 10 pm.  And they call themselves a university?

Pittsburg next!