United States Blossom Festival 2024 [5]: Víkingur Ólafsson (piano), Cleveland Orchestra / Franz Welser-Möst (conductor). Blossom Music Center, Cuyahoga Falls, 17.8.2024. (MSJ)
R. Schumann – Piano Concerto in A minor, Op.54
Tchaikovsky – Symphony No.5 in D minor, Op.64
The Cleveland Orchestra’s concerts this week have been warmups for an upcoming European tour (details here) featuring Bruckner’s Symphony No.4 and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, and guest appearances by pianist Víkingur Ólafsson in Robert Schumann’s A minor concerto. The concerts promise classic Cleveland Orchestra performances: poised and Apollonian.
Ólafsson’s approach to Schumann here was passionate yet thoughtful, inner voices of the piano part weighted to clarify what is going on in the mid-range which Schumann fills with many notes. There is a danger of becoming fussy and overly reserved in the process of sorting and clarifying, but Ólafsson didn’t forget what fuels this ardent concerto: Schumann wrote it for the love of his life, his wife Clara. Ólafsson never lost focus on the emotional fantasy that animates the music, ruminating in discursive explorations without ever losing the main thread. Cleveland Orchestra music director Franz Welser-Möst was skillful in balancing forward momentum while leaving room for Ólafsson’s subtle discursions.
The slow movement of the concerto was, unfortunately, marred by the late arrival of dozens of patrons, who had evidently stayed too long in the parking lot awaiting the end of a torrential rain that delayed the concert’s start. I would rather the performance would have paused to seat the latecomers or repeated the slow movement, but it soldiered on. After this distraction, Ólafsson was still able to pull the focus back to Schumann’s dreamy world in time to set up the warm surge of the finale which he clearly savored. At one point, he even swung around on the bench so he could listen to the orchestra, and who could blame him – he had the ultimate seat for listening. Returning to the solo part, Ólafsson displayed some remarkably intricate pedaling to get just the right sound of resonance and attack going into the exultant closing pages. The performance was received rapturously. Notable were orchestral solos from Jeffrey Rathbun (oboe), and Afendi Yusuf (clarinet).
Welser-Möst’s refreshingly Apollonian take on Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.5 came after the intermission. A long-standing pillar of the classical repertory, the Tchaikovsky is a great piece that has often been distorted by indulgent conductors exaggerating the work’s emotional content. Welser-Möst understands that with content so clearly emotional, it harms the work if it is exaggerated. Instead of the usual awkward gear-shifting of performances that speed up and down throughout the first movement, Welser-Möst has bucked tradition and gone back to the source: Tchaikovsky’s score. What Tchaikovsky wrote shows some flexibility of tempo but not the wild shifts that have become traditional. Many start the piece far under the indicated tempos, turning the main Allegro into a trudge until they later speed up wildly. Others overemphasize the emphasis of the main theme, immediately turning it into a rigid march. Welser-Möst made the distinction of a brisk tempo, without a martial emphasis until the closing pages of the movement where, for the first time, he marked the beats fiercely and let his gleaming brass section blaze with full force. Before that, he had kept the second theme ardent instead of sagging, proving that Tchaikovsky’s symphonic writing is structurally effective if you actually play what the composer wrote instead of mugging like a bad actor.
The second movement can likewise sag if mishandled, but Welser-Möst kept it moving, not with impatience but with urgency, which makes its emotion very real. Nathaniel Silberschlag did the opening horn solo with sweet tenderness, answered by voluptuous solos from Frank Rosenwein (oboe) and Afendi Yusuf (clarinet). The scherzo brought a nice balance of elegance from the strings and expression from the woodwinds, including the anxious bassoon solos from John Clouser.
The finale was taken broadly enough for the strings to dig into the main theme’s battles instead of skating over them. The conductor skillfully managed that tricky pause just before the coda, where audiences so often break into applause prematurely: Welser-Möst gave the cutoff before the pause vaguely, instead of a crisp cutoff, provoking the orchestra to slightly trail off the big chord. It made it clear, even to people who did not know the work, that although it was exciting, it was not yet the end. The coda proved triumphant and richly played, with the right change of tempo at the trumpet and horn fanfares (again, a rarity). It was the kind of performance that proved the true greatness of Tchaikovsky’s score, and all the more moving because of its honest delivery.
Europe will soon savor the sophistication of Cleveland at its formidable best.
Mark Sebastian Jordan