Seen and Heard International
Concert Review
The Cleveland Orchestra in New York
(I): Beethoven and Shostakovich, Radu Lupu (piano),
The Cleveland Orchestra, Franz Welser-Möst, conductor, Carnegie
Hall, New York City, February 1 2005 (BH)
Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major,
Op. 15 (ca. 1795)
Shostakovich: Symphony No. 11 in G Minor,
Op. 103, “The Year 1905” (1956-57)
At the conclusion of the mammoth Shostakovich Eleventh, one could
hear young guys in the back balcony of Carnegie Hall bellowing,
“Cleve-land! Cleve-land!” as if it were Fan Appreciation
Night at a sporting event. This much-admired orchestra is in town
with the intent to dazzle, and in this first concert showed that
it still has the ability to amaze.
The link in these four concerts is all five Beethoven piano concerti,
performed with Radu Lupu, who on the first night turned out to
be a superb match with Welser-Möst and the orchestra. Preferring
a chair to a piano bench, and then slightly slouching back, Lupu
has a performance posture that would probably have piano teachers
rushing to admonish their charges never to play
like this. (One friend suggested that Lupu looked like he could
use a cigar and a brandy snifter.) Opening and closing my eyes
periodically, I couldn’t quite reconcile Lupu’s vaguely
slacker image with his super clean playing – but who the
hell cares, in any case, given the delightful results. With a
light but completely resonant tone, Lupu was completely synchronized
with the conductor and the Cleveland musicians. All parties assembled
had reached the same conclusions about tempi and phrasing, without
any of the tug-of-wars that sometimes result between pianists
and orchestras. (Consider Martha Argerich, whom I adore, despite
the feeling that sometimes she seems to be flying off hurriedly
in a “catch me if you can” sort of test with her partners.)
But this fleet Beethoven First has been rippling through
my brain, despite the fact that I’ve never really warmed
up to any of these concerti.
One of the composer’s most dramatic and powerful works,
the programmatic Shostakovich Eleventh depicts a brutal
1905 massacre in front of the Czar’s Winter Palace in St.
Petersburg, where guards opened fire on hundreds of peaceful protesters.
Using themes from workers’ movement songs that were familiar
to ordinary citizens, Shostakovich welded them together in a dramatic
and horrifying depiction of the tragedy, using a stirring mixture
of tension, violence and sorrow, with the symphony ultimately
lifting itself up to deliver a message of overwhelming strength.
The two criticisms that are often leveled at this work (and at
others in the composer’s oeuvre) are “too bombastic”
and “too little material spread too thinly,” and even
while I can empathize, I still love the work. My first exposure
was through Haitink’s recording with the Concertgebouw Orchestra
in his 1980s cycle, and his slower tempi, to my ears, give the
often crushingly weighty passages even more power. But most newcomers
would probably prefer Welser-Möst’s swifter vision
as heard here, which imparts more turbulence in the faster sections,
and more tension in the slower ones. In the opening, misty string
chords create a startlingly effective evocation of a “motionless
Palace Square on an ice-cold January day,” and seemed to
hover in the air as launched by the Clevelanders. Throughout the
four movements, played without pause, the motif keeps reoccurring
like a poignant sentinel. The second section, The Ninth of
January, is a chilling depiction of the actual event, and
I can’t say enough for the shrieking woodwinds, the brass
section depicting the nightmare that the day must have been, and
the entire orchestra locked in bone-chilling precision. A later
highlight was the hauntingly well-done passage in the third section,
called In Memoriam, with the violas enclosing the hall
in a sorrowful aftermath. I was just knocked out by the fourth
and final Tocsin, in which sweeping winds seemed to envelop
the hall, gathering force with the ensemble in blistering form,
with some gut-punching percussion effects. Near the end, a lonely
solo for English horn appears like a defeated question mark, until
a veritable torrent of gongs, bass drum, and rising strings converge
in a relentless river of sound that leads to the symphony’s
searing conclusion.
I came to this concert with a bit of anxiety about the state of
this great orchestra, since shortly after the Welser-Möst
marriage, the union seemed not to have quite gelled. It is a pleasure
to report that now things seem to be off and running, although
the sound of the orchestra is perhaps even more creamy and refined
(OK, “Viennese” if you will) than it was under Dohnányi,
and certainly under Szell. But this perhaps gradual stylistic
change is not necessarily a bad thing. In the first few measures
of the Shostakovich, I feared that the ghost of Johann Strauss,
Jr. was going to somehow nudge the spirit of the indomitable Russian
out of the queue, but only minutes later it was abundantly, thrillingly
clear that this was not going to happen.
Bruce Hodges
