United States Summers at Severance 2024 [1]: Inon Barnatan (piano), Cleveland Orchestra / Oksana Lyniv (conductor). Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center, Cleveland, 11.7.2024. (MSJ)
Janáček – Suite from The Cunning Little Vixen (compiled by Sir Charles Mackerras)
Rachmaninoff – Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
Liatoshynsky – Grazhyna, Op.58
Stravinsky – Suite from The Firebird (1919 version)
Encore: Silvestrov, ‘Serenade’, Op.305, No.6
Running parallel to the Cleveland Orchestra’s Blossom Music Festival during the summer season are a handful of concerts that take place downtown at the orchestra’s main home, Severance Music Center. This series kicked off with an admirable program conducted by Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv in her Cleveland Orchestra debut, with a blazing guest soloist in Inon Barnatan. The program combined vivid performances in a mix of old favorites, something familiar in a new arrangement and something completely new to Cleveland.
One of the familiar things was Rachmaninoff’s ‘Paganini Rhapsody’, but it came in a performance so full of wicked wit and harmonic insight that it felt freshly minted. To do the score justice, a performance needs sharp reflexes, daredevil virtuosity and unstoppable nervous energy. Israel-born pianist Barnatan had these elements and then some, but what took this performance to a new level was the way he has clearly examined Rachmaninoff’s twisted piano part and harmonically untangled it, often exposing inner lines that helped shape where the music was going. This is a hugely important element that is all too often missed in the teeming blur of activity of twenty-four variations obsessed with both Paganini’s twenty-fourth caprice and the medieval ‘Dies Irae’ death chant. Barnatan explored the piece’s range from the most mischievous snaps to the melting release of tension in the eighteenth variation to the near-oblivion of the closing pages, and he made it all feel inevitable.
That eighteenth variation achieved true distinction because, first, Barnatan set it up with an unearthly crawl through the harmonically unstable preceding variation, but then he and Lyniv resisted the urge to go for over-the-top lushness in the eighteenth. Instead, they gave it a personal, even hesitant tenderness. Even once the full bank of strings came in, Lyniv shaped it to sing instead of just wallowing in it. It gave the variation fulfillment without ever quite letting go of the trauma lurking just beyond its borders, so soon to return with a thrilling vengeance.
In a wonderful nod to both the conductor and current events, Barnatan responded to the audience’s rapturous ovation with a very different encore, a tremulous ‘Serenade’ by Valentyn Silvestrov, the distinguished Ukrainian composer who had to flee the Russian invasion and is currently sheltering in Berlin. Tender and pensive, the piece ended irresolutely, as devastating a metaphor for this world right now as could be imagined.
Oksana Lyniv brought something completely new as part of her efforts to promote worldwide the music of her Ukrainian compatriots. Borys Liatoshynsky was a slightly older contemporary of Dmitri Shostakovich, and his moody Grazhyna felt similar to some of the later warscapes of Shostakovich’s Symphonies Nos.11, 12 and 13, except that this work came first. Thus, some of Liatoshynsky’s influences must be thought to include the tone poems of Liszt and Tchaikovsky, perhaps Janáček’s Taras Bulba and Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky. It recounts the historical tale of Ukrainian princess Grazhyna, who is furious when her brother invites Teutonic knights to confer about joining forces to attack other lands. She steals her brother’s armor and leads a surprise attack against the Teutons. Too late, her brother realizes his error and joins the fight, but not soon enough to prevent Grazhyna’s death. After a procession to Grazhyna’s funeral pyre, her brother flings himself into the flames.
The piece started with a quietly writhing line in the violas and built tension from there until erupting in a scene of battle. The following funeral march treaded ominously, with a moving lament played eloquently on the English horn. The end of the piece collapsed back down to the disconsolate viola line, reminiscent of the close of the first movement of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, but even more bleak here. Lyniv led with a sure hand through the work’s twenty-minute unfolding, and the orchestra savored the opportunity to play such a good but little-known piece. It was received warmly.
More familiar but in unfamiliar form was the suite arranged by Sir Charles Mackerras from the first act of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen. We happen to know that work well here in Cleveland, thanks to a spectacular production that the orchestra did with music director Franz Welser-Möst in 2014 and again in 2017 (and I hope that it will return at least once more before Welser-Möst departs Cleveland in 2027!). In his note in the program, commentator Tanner Cassidy wryly poses the question about the opera: ‘[I]s it optimistic and comic or pessimistic and tragic?’ The best answer is ‘yes’, and Lyniv didn’t hesitate to explore the constantly shifting moods of the piece, like dapples of shade in a sunlit forest. One could argue that Mackerras’s arrangement is a little rambling, running from one favorite moment to the next, but the moments are sweet, and it is good to hear them again, even outside the context of the full work.
Last, but not least, was Lyniv’s balletic handling of the 1919 suite from Stravinsky’s The Firebird. She started with a daringly slow tempo, but sustained it until the music turned brighter, buoyed along the way by outstanding solos, including Frank Rosenwein on oboe. King Katschei’s dance was punchy and fierce, with the brass given a little more room to roar than they are usually allowed around here, followed by a spellbound Berceuse. The Finale was dispatched briskly, with a grand slowing for the final peroration.
Mark Sebastian Jordan