Thomas Guggeis blazes in an auspicious debut with the Cleveland Orchestra

United States R. Strauss, Dutilleux, Ravel: Mark Kosower (cello), Cleveland Orchestra / Thomas Guggeis (conductor). Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center, Cleveland, 6.2.2025. (MSJ)

R. Strauss – Also sprach Zarathustra, Op.30
Dutilleux – Tout un monde lointain…
Ravel – La valse

Take note: Thomas Guggeis made a brilliant debut in this Cleveland Orchestra concert with a towering performance of Also sprach Zarathustra, but what this means in the long run remains to be seen. While the young conductor brings an intensity which demands, against all odds, that his name be thrown into the bag of potential successors to current music director Franz Welser-Möst, Guggeis is nearly the polar opposite in style. Is he too young, too interventionist, too intense for a patrician orchestra like Cleveland? Perhaps. But he may also be too good to let pass without building some kind of relationship.

The German conductor first made waves seven years ago with a substitution at the Berlin Staatsoper on just a few hours’ notice. Since then, he has been in demand in both operatic and symphonic spheres and now holds the titles of general music director/chief conductor of the Frankfurt Opera and music director of the Frankfurt Museum Concerts. Based on the intensity of the present concert, it is likely we will be hearing a lot more of Guggeis in coming years. This was his US symphonic debut – he had already appeared at the Met Opera.

One thing that Guggeis does have in common with Welser-Möst is a refusal to bow to tradition. The opening sunrise fanfare of Richard Strauss’s Nietzschean tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) is iconic and has been featured everywhere, from movies such as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey to concert walk-on music for Elvis Presley in the 1970s. The received tradition is that this opening can be played in one of two ways: either you take it slow and milk it for maximum effect, making the remaining thirty-two minutes of the work sound anticlimactic, or you press the tempo forward, underplaying the dynamics as if you are a bit embarrassed by it, hoping it will somehow make the rest of the piece not be disappointing. Guggeis refused that choice and charted his own path: slow enough and true enough to the original dynamics of the score to make it imposing yet sternly refusing to hype it up for cheap thrills.

It was by no means the obvious choice. Guggeis cuts a very theatrical, even Mephistophelean figure on the podium: he is tall and thin and was wearing a tailcoat and red socks with a red handkerchief in his vest pocket. His movements are sweeping and vigorous but, as the music moved on from the opening and grew in layers of complexity, it became evident that Guggeis’s gestures were not mere showbiz. He embodied the music. At one point, he was beating time with his right hand, shaping a phrase with his left hand, indicating a passing layer of triplets with his right elbow and accenting cues with his left shoulder. He might give a grand flourish here or there, but his wide range of movements all meant something, and got results.

Zarathustra is a notoriously tricky work to bring off, offering ample opportunities to fall apart into episodic fits or have one section spark to life while another wilts on the vine. That, combined with the sheer spectacle of Strauss’s complex orchestration, makes the work treacherous. I have struggled with it on and off over the years, loving its potential but usually disappointed by the realization of it. Even after hearing all the famous recordings, I still had some doubts. This performance is frankly the first I have heard that I thought brought the work to its full potential, combining the clarity and drive of a Fritz Reiner with a stellar level of poise and elan from the Clevelanders that Reiner’s orchestra could only have envied.

Strauss illustrated musically ideas from the book of the same name by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who posited the future ascent of the Übermensch, a superhuman capable of rising above humankind’s flaws. The widespread impact of the book can be seen in how Nietzsche’s ideas were later infamously coopted by the Nazis, as well as how, conversely, the Übermensch was the inspiration in 1938 for Superman, the American comic-strip character. Strauss had illustrated Nietzsche’s work long before any of that and did it in an intriguing manner, casting nature in C major/minor, and fraught humanity in the adjacent but harmonically distant keys of B major/minor. After portraying numerous scenes from the book and representing the rise of humanity’s new level through an epic dance, Strauss then quietly undercuts Nietzsche’s entire premise by giving the last word not to the Übermensch but to nature, with three quietly plucked C naturals in the basses at the very end of the piece.

Guggeis tore into the work’s complexities fearlessly, sifting textures and pulling out the details that shape and propel the piece. He brought out details that I had never heard without ever pulling them out of their proper perspective. This was a kind of fanatical attention to detail that is another world from the traditional Cleveland approach of shaping the big picture more than passing events, but it helped this piece come to life, and the orchestra made the most of the opportunity. Guggeis, conducting from memory, clearly knew every note of the score, and he knew where to seize on important points and where to release tension and let texture be nothing more than atmosphere.

In addition to nailing the tricky sunrise intro, Guggeis also succeeded in two pitfall passages. The dense, bass-heavy fugue in ‘Von der Wissenschaft’ (‘Of Science’) proceeded without sagging in energy but also without uncertainty in its bewildering layers, for once making perfect sense and building inexorable tension. Then, most remarkably of all, the conductor propelled the piece to a stirring climax in ‘Das Tanzlied’, the dance song that can come close to risibility if the conductor shows the slightest trace of being embarrassed by Strauss’s decision to show humanity’s rise via a Viennese waltz. Instead of fearing ridicule, the conductor must understand that what Strauss wrote was inspired by the traditional waltz, but it is most certainly not one. It is a kind of waltz-cubed phenomenon, with much of it not in 3/4 time but in the triple threes of 9/8 time, a sort of cosmic expansion in every direction. Guggeis balanced this sense of titanic gesture with graceful charm, and he brought the piece to a thrilling climax that suitably answered the excitement of the work’s opening. First associate concertmaster Liyuan Xie overcame a couple of initial bow skips to animate the dance’s expansive violin solo. At the roaring peak, Guggeis made sure that the midnight bell was struck strongly, allowing it to cut through the massive textures and signal the dissipation of the piece into the shining coda. The orchestra was in spectacular form.

After intermission came another visionary work inspired by a literary source: French composer Henri Dutilleux’s cello concerto, Tout un monde lointain… (A Whole Faraway World…). The 1970 work takes its title from a line in a Charles Baudelaire poem. It was a brilliant bit of programming opposite Zarathustra, countering the discursive musical sketch of Nietzsche’s larger-than-life concepts with an introspective piece that reflected Baudelaire’s sense-drenched poetry. While essentially atonal, the work makes use of modal phrases, repetition and triadic chords in a way that makes it approachable and evocative. Cleveland Orchestra principal cellist Mark Kosower is always a deep joy to encounter in solos, and he was compelling here, living the sinks and swells of Dutilleux’s meditative music which finally breaks free in a jubilant dance at the end. As ever, his rich sound and probing thoughtfulness are a treasurable asset to the ensemble, and Guggeis matched him in every step, as did his colleagues. For an encore, Kosower danced in a different way with the Gigue from Bach’s Suite No.3

Guggeis’s leadership of Ravel’s La valse for the close of the concert was no less energetic and pointed, phrases shaped and tempos bent as the French composer’s waltz-nightmare built to its frenetic close. It was a very different approach from the sleek, streamlined performance Welser-Möst did with the orchestra a few years back. Indeed, one could imagine proponents of that approach might find Guggeis maddening with his pointing of details, yet the sheer conviction of his intensity made it work. Will he be able to conduct this way, with such a physical embodiment of the music, in fifty years’ time? Of course not. But it will be interesting to see if he is able to transform from the status of brilliant youth into the kind of mature musician who can accomplish interpretive ends with a flick of the wrist and a lift of the eyebrow. Rest assured, he is off to a strong start, bringing an imperious intensity and conviction that make other hot young stars of recent years look like mere pretenders. Media hype machines have pushed others, but this conductor shows impressive evidence of being the real thing. Only time, further visits and examples of other repertoire will tell whether or not he can dance into the stars as convincingly as he did on this occasion. But he did it here, and that makes him one to watch.

Mark Sebastian Jordan