Cleveland Orchestra plays Mozart and Shostakovich

While our lollygagging local orchestra disports itself in the Azores and points east— about as strange a mid-season tour as any I've ever heard of, and with the Orchestra's administrative leadership gone missing as well— a couple of visitors are trying to take up some of Philadelphia's midwinter slack.

Franz Welser-Most was canvassed a while back as a successor to Wolfgang Sawallisch but didn't make the cut and took the post at Cleveland instead. There he ran afoul of a local critic for whom he could do nothing right, a story that might sound familiar, although in Cleveland's case it was the critic who walked the plank.

Cleveland has been one of the Big Five American orchestras since George Szell whipped it into shape in the 1960s; and given the city's modest size and parlous economy, it is a feat to have maintained its status. The Cleveland string tone is decidedly leaner than Philadelphia audiences are accustomed to, though eloquent when required. An exceptional wind section was also on display in Sunday's concert, and the percussion was in good form.

Of course, Verizon Hall is hardly the place to judge quality, and the odd placement of the horns and brass in the program's big work, Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony— the horns on the left apron of the stage, the brass on the right, both blaring toward each other— made for some serious imbalances. The problem was crowding, something that crops up with any large-scale work on the hall's skimpy work space.

The anti-Eschenbach

Welser-Most opened the program with a rather perfunctory performance of Mozart's Symphony #25, one of only two minor key symphonies in the canon. As the earliest of Mozart's mature symphonies, it takes a page from Haydn's Sturm und Drang essays in the form, but with a characteristic quick-spiritedness the elder master could never match.

Welser-Most's baton technique had this listener puzzled, for he seemed at times to be tracing frenetic arabesques that had little to do with tempo, cueing or expressiveness. Nonetheless, the music had a plodding, foursquare quality. Welser-Most also displayed a penchant for cutting phrases short that tended to chop the music up. Fast sections got played very fast, with a firm pulse but little rhythmic nuance. Here, in short, was the anti-Eschenbach, a conductor determined to keep his music-making orderly at all costs.

A city besieged by Hitler

The Leningrad Symphony— the seventh and longest among Shostakovich's 15— does require a guiding hand, an overarching conception, and commitment to a score that takes some very wayward turns. Its inspiration was, of course, the siege of Leningrad in the wake of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, and most of the music was written in the besieged city itself.

The half-hour first movement, originally conceived as a symphonic poem, begins conventionally enough, with a striding main theme, a pastoral secondary one, and a brief exposition. The music then fades to a silence revived by the faintest of drum-taps. A grotesque new theme emerges, generally held to represent the tread of the Nazi conqueror, and it returns, growing louder and more densely garbed, in eleven variations, until it erupts in a near-cacophonic fortissimo climax.

He's no Bernstein

The music requires utter conviction here, so that the Bolero-like repetitions don't lose their tension before the climax arrives, which is the dramatic fulcrum on which the entire score must rest. Leonard Bernstein did bring that conviction, resulting in what for me has always been one of his finest recordings. Welser-Most, after flattening the movement's introductory pages with his haste, seemed to find this middle section more congenial, perhaps because of its metronomic regularity, although the climax was again forced and cramped, a blare of sound that blended the music's searing dissonances into a harsh meld.

The middle movements of the score, an A-B-A Scherzo (whose 31-bar principal theme may be the longest melody in the symphonic repertory) and a great elegiac Adagio (also in clearly marked sections) are less structurally problematic, but pose formidable enough expressive challenges. The Cleveland strings rose exceptionally well to the demands of the Adagio, and principal flautist Joshua Smith was all one could wish in his solo role.

The Finale, which followed without a break, has a tripartite structure with affinities to the finale of the Shostakovich Fifth, but it takes some deeply enigmatic pathways before a final peroration— tragic or triumphant, according to one's interpretive taste— that culminates in a great C major chord.

What's the hurry?

Welser-Most had his moments with the score, but his tendency to rush critical moments robbed it of the amplitude it needs and the cumulative impact it can make. The Leningrad Symphony was a political testament before a note of it was ever heard; it was circuitously routed in microform from the embattled Soviet Union to waiting American audiences in 1942, as if it were a serum or a vital formula in the war effort. In some sense, it was. We hear it now differently, just as we hear the Eroica without necessarily relating it to Napoleon, to whom Beethoven first dedicated it.

Even in a far from ideal performance, however, the Leningrad resonated deeply with the Kimmel Center audience. The last chord was greeted with something I don't think I've ever heard from a concert audience, not a roar of release but a deep collective groan. Then it rose for something more conventional, a standing ovation. But that first response was the true measure of the score's effect. Shostakovich may have written symphonies objectively better— more integrated, more structurally coherent— than the Seventh. He wrote none, however, that seems more capable of viscerally moving an audience.



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