United States Summers at Severance 2025 [3]: Cleveland Orchestra / Christoph Koncz (conductor). Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center, Cleveland, 31.7.2025. (MSJ)
Liszt – Les Préludes (Symphonic Poem No.3)
Ernst von Dohnányi – Symphonic Minutes, Op.36
Bartók – Concerto for Orchestra
The Cleveland Orchestra continues to have a strong crop of young guest conductors this summer with a debut appearance by Austrian conductor Christoph Koncz. Appearing in the third of four concerts in the ‘Summers at Severance’ series, Koncz led an all-Hungarian concert that included an incisive performance of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and a rare but delightful visit with Ernő von Dohnányi’s Symphonic Minutes.
The concert opened with Liszt’s Les Préludes, an old chestnut that used to be a staple but has deservedly been put out to pasture in recent years. Billed as a symphonic poem, Liszt never filled in any details about what might be depicted in the work except to quote the poet Lamartine’s line about how life is nothing but an endless series of preludes to the afterlife. Starting from a dolorous quote of a motif from Beethoven’s final string quartet, the piece charges around energetically, eventually building up a head of steam that makes it a crowd-pleaser. Koncz kept tempos crisp though without a great deal of forward impetus. Liszt in grand entertainment mode needs carnival-barker energy to make the music pop, and this performance only began to approach that level as it approached the closing bars.
The rest of the concert was on a different level, in terms both of writing and delivery. In his many years as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, Christoph von Dohnányi avoided using his position to promote the music of his grandfather, Hungarian composer Ernő von Dohnányi. In his entire time in Cleveland, Christoph only conducted the famous Variations on a Nursery Theme, with then-orchestral pianist Joela Jones as soloist, in an utterly delightful performance in 1999. Otherwise, there was nothing else that I am aware of. Part of that reticence may have had something to do with the fact that the grandfather was a fairly conservative composer, while the grandson aligned himself with the Second Viennese School and later avant-garde composers who which were likely anathema to Ernő (who later styled his first name as Ernst after living in German-speaking lands and, finally, in the US). Maybe Christoph did us a disservice by not sharing more. The Cleveland premiere of Symphonic Minutes didn’t come until 2007 under Iván Fischer.
The piece is a rhapsodic suite (a quasi-symphony in a way) in five contrasting movements. The opening Capriccio quickly establishes Dohnányi’s skill with colorful, layered orchestration, a refreshing change from Liszt’s sectional blocks (now it’s all strings! now it’s all winds!). The work’s piquant dissonances were spice to the ears as well. The Rapsodia opened with an English horn solo by Robert Walters that featured moody, Mahlerian harmonic sideslips, and the Scherzo was equal parts adventure, mischief, malice and dropped beats sure to trick any toe-tappers. Thema con variazioni brought the English horn back for a bow as well as tenderly dropping the strings at one point to just the front players. The closing Rondo took off at a dizzying clip, with the strings challenged to keep up with the exhilarating pace. What a delightful piece of music, and surely one that needs to show up more often. Koncz seemed very much at home in the deft, witty work.
After the intermission, Koncz led a sharply characterized performance of Bartók’s vital but volatile Concerto for Orchestra, written in the shadow of the composer’s final illness although it blazes with defiance. Koncz kept the piece highly focused and fleet, quickly building to powerful heights in the first movement. His ear for detail was excellent, and he made sure that the rasping harp chords marked to be played with the fingernails poked through the textures. The second movement, Game of Pairs, brought woodwinds and trumpets in with boldly-drawn phrasing, capturing the music’s sense of humor. Koncz was particularly attentive to Bartók’s pauses and made sure that they weren’t smudged in passing.
The Elegia was suitably lugubrious without lingering in the shadows, and the following Interrupted Interlude balanced grace and comedy, with a rollicking send-up of the invasion theme from Shostakovich’s Symphony No.7, complete with raucous trombone raspberries. The Finale was swift and strongly characterized in its contrasting episodes. While the performance was excellent, I have to take exception to program commentator Peter Laki’s gloss over the penultimate section of this movement as ‘a brief lyrical episode’. This passage has elsewhere, and for good reason, been called the ‘Angel of Death’: it suddenly pulls all the wind from the music’s sails and turns it into a dark, heaving, seething passage that threatens to destroy the vitality of the entire piece. Bartók proceeds to vertiginously claw his way out of that sudden black hole to the blazing defiance of the closing pages, as dramatic a picture of a human fighting for his very life as has ever been captured in art.
Fortunately, Koncz understood this and brought it home as so much more than ‘a brief lyrical episode’. Considering the darkness seething all over the planet right now, we need to know where we can find music that will give us the inspiration to continue our own defiant climbs. The Bartók did this, thanks to bold leadership and dazzling playing.
Mark Sebastian Jordan