United States Mozart, Loggins-Hull, Prokofiev: Cleveland Orchestra / Franz Welser-Möst (conductor). Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center, Cleveland, 8.5.2025. (MSJ)
Mozart – Symphony No.40 in G minor, K.550
Allison Loggins-Hull – Grit. Grace. Glory
Prokofiev – Symphony No.4 in C major, Op.112
Allison Loggins-Hull has capped her three-year tenure as the Cleveland Orchestra’s Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow with an engaging piece, Grit. Grace. Glory. During her stay here, Loggins-Hull has spent a lot of time in community outreach projects, and she took inspiration from those encounters to create a work in four movements that is both a portrait of Cleveland and a piece of absolute music that would be engaging whether listeners know its backstory or not.
The piece is like Debussy’s La mer: it has programmatic elements but feels like a symphony in all but name. The first movement, ‘Steel’, refers to both Cleveland’s industrial past and its history as part of the ‘underground railroad’ network that helped escaped slaves escape to Canada, on the other side of Lake Erie, in the early 1800s. More than anything, though, it conveys a sense of intricate interaction between the sections of the orchestra, with an almost concerto grosso-like level of activity. It felt custom-made for the Cleveland Orchestra in Mandel Hall, a venue long noted for its unusual mixture of clarity and warmth. In a more reverberant hall, the movement’s intricacy might be challenged by the acoustics.
Instead of a full stop or a gradual transition from the first movement to the second, ‘Steel’ ended abruptly for a filmic jump-cut to ‘Shoreline Shadows’, evoking the omnipresence of Lake Erie in Cleveland’s life. From the bright sun of the first movement, we were immediately thrust into what sounded like an evocation of the Cleveland shoreline in fog. Low notes from tuba and contrabassoon carved through the mist like the whistles of ships approaching the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. I couldn’t see from my seat, but something in the percussion section or perhaps backstage was making a haunting, unearthly sound of indeterminate pitch, rising and falling. I don’t know if it was a bowed tam-tam or what, but that amazing sound was mysterious and chilling. I found myself wondering if maybe it was the voice of South Bay Bessie, Lake Erie’s legendary sea monster! I say that tongue-in-cheek, but it truly was a coup-de-théâtre of orchestral color. It gave a creepy dark hue to a movement built on themes created in student workshops that Loggins-Hull held in local middle and high schools, where students created pieces of music expressing elements of their lives in relation to their location on the shore of the inland sea. Students responded with evocations of the lake, explorations of gentrification and gun violence, and the challenges of coming to the city anew and becoming part of the resilience that defines modern Cleveland. Loggins-Hull captured it all in this constantly shifting, moody movement.
The third movement, ‘Quip’, saluted the self-deprecating humor of Cleveland in music that functioned as a scherzo, displaying the fun and wit all too rarely heard in modern orchestral music. The movement closed with a perfectly undercut pluck of the strings that drew a round of laughter from the audience. The finale, ‘Ode’, began with an epic gesture: rich counterpoint in the strings, a nod to the deep legacy of music and its traditions in the community and, specifically, in this orchestra, as well as to the broad history of the region. The music gradually picked up speed and momentum, moving toward an ending that nods to the city’s rock-and-roll connections as it drives to a percussion-driven conclusion. Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra gave vivid voice to the new piece, offering poise, virtuosity and polish. It might be rewarding, however, to hear the later pages of the piece performed by a conductor more willing to go for the glory of the title.
Welser-Möst was more in his element in Prokofiev’s Symphony No.4, a fascinating if flawed work. It started as an offshoot of the composer’s ballet The Prodigal Son in 1930, using shared and rejected material from the ballet to create a twenty-minute symphony assigned the opus number 47. Nearly two decades later, Prokofiev reworked and expanded the piece to nearly forty minutes, increasing the size of the orchestration as well. This expanded piece was so different, he ended up assigning it a new opus number, 112. It was the revision we heard here, as part of the conductor’s ongoing exploration of the Prokofiev symphonies.
Welser-Möst is an outstanding Prokofiev conductor, with a taste for the cool poise of the composer’s style. The Fourth remains one of Prokofiev’s most diffuse pieces, a succession of fascinating moments that never quite coalesce in the way his Fifth or Sixth Symphonies do. Welser-Möst made no attempt to force the sections to fit together: rather, he explored each episode for its own character, whether it was the motoric drive of parts of the first movement, the troubled lyricism of the slow movement, the uneasy mix of sly whimsy and ominous mutterings in the scherzo or the grand gestures of the finale. The orchestra sounded remarkably fresh throughout this demanding piece at the end of a demanding program, showing just how amazing the Cleveland Orchestra can be in intricate, virtuosic works.
The opening work was Mozart’s familiar Symphony No.40, given a typical Welser-Möst traversal, with mostly brisk tempos (except for an oddly plodding Andante), restricted dynamic range and underplayed accents. The work is of such greatness, though, that not even an understated performance can dim its genius. Impeccably played, the piece still managed to cast its considerable spell.
Mark Sebastian Jordan
Featured Image: Allison Loggins-Hull takes a bow after the premiere of her new work © Extraordinaire Photos/TCO