Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra are stunning in an unlikely pairing of Mozart and Shostakovich

United States Mozart, Shostakovich: Cleveland Orchestra / Franz Welser-Möst (conductor). Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center, Cleveland, 8.1.2026. (MSJ)

Mozart – Symphony No.41 in C major, K.551, ‘Jupiter’
Shostakovich – Symphony No.11 in G minor, Op.103, ‘The Year 1905’

The briefest way I could summarize the impact of this concert is to say that when it was over, I felt like I could run home instead of driving. Not a big deal, you think? I live eighty miles south of Cleveland. Suffice it to say that the perfect meeting of an orchestra’s skill, a conductor’s patience and current events made for a stunning event.

The marketing-speak title for the evening was ‘Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony’, a piece that made up, in fact, just over a third of the music on the program. And what an unlikely pairing: Mozart’s sunny and Apollonian final symphony with Shostakovich’s gritty symphonic tone poem about the 1905 government massacre of protesters outside the Russian czar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. This was not one of music director Welser-Möst’s challenging programs seeking rarely-noticed connections between works, for these two masterpieces are close to being polar opposites. Rather, the Cleveland Orchestra wanted to go on tour to Carnegie Hall, but Carnegie Hall wanted a sure-sell like the Mozart to fill out the bill. So, there it is.

But the remarkable thing is that total contrast is a legitimate programming strategy, and it worked to electrifying ends in this concert where conductor and orchestra pushed both works to their fullest realizations. And, in the end, the two symphonies do have one thing in common: a pause near the end of the finale in each work seems to look back emotionally over the ground that has been covered, before an exhilarating push to the closing.

This performance of Mozart’s ‘Jupiter Symphony’ was the single best classical-era performance I have heard Welser-Möst lead, and I have heard quite a few. The complement of strings was slightly reduced from full strength but not depleted to chamber scale. The symphony can take that depth of sound, particularly when the Cleveland woodwinds have the boldness and authority to cut through the string textures without need for doubling the winds nor restraining the strings. From the outset, textures were light but not timid. Welser-Möst immediately demonstrated how far he has come in his tenure by contrasting his brisk opening gesture with a subtle easing of the pulse for the lyrical response. This approach continued throughout the movement, avoiding metronomic pacing yet never falling into mannerism: every tweak was different and alive. One particularly fine detail was the grand pause that comes near the end of the opening exposition. It is followed by a forte for the full orchestra that in almost every performance bulges in led by the violins, followed by lower strings a fraction of a second before the winds and followed finally by the timpani. Welser-Möst allowed no such sogginess and made sure that the forte – following a grand pause that was ever so slightly extended for dramatic effect – was crisp and alert. That is conducting of the highest caliber.

I was initially worried about the slow movement, which took off at a flowing tempo. Marked Andante cantabile, the indication suggests a songlike flow. Most conductors have trouble finding lyricism at the tempo Welser-Möst took, but here the emphasis was so decidedly concentrated on the feel of an operatic aria that it forced me to reconsider my assumption about the ideal tempo for the movement. Further developing the interpretation, the conductor chose to make the low string chords in the early measures of the movement crisply articulated, whereas the deep, dark chords the double basses and cellos play when the music later slips into the minor were attenuated in attack, delaying the full weight of tone for a fraction of a second and giving those chords a chilling weight. Finding the shadows under Mozart’s brightness made this music speak, fully human.

The third-movement Menuetto was gracefully light, not the usual sagging slog. For the Trio, Welser-Möst eased back the tempo and even tweaked the phrases to play up the humor of the sly call-and-response to delightful effect. The finale was brisk without being hectic, allowing just enough time for the strings to articulate their thrilling flourishes as the music effloresced in one of the greatest passages in music. This performance was an exceedingly rare one in that it was as great as the symphony deserves but so rarely receives.

With such fastidious accomplishment in place in the Mozart, one might wonder if the Shostakovich could possibly be on the same level. The truth is, it wasn’t on the same level – it was on an even higher one, and an often terrifying one at that. It is a little disappointing that by the end of his tenure next year, Welser-Möst will probably not have finished a full Shostakovich cycle in Cleveland. That is a shame because he is a fine Shostakovich conductor. His greatest strength in this composer’s music is patience: Welser-Möst is a master of the slow burn. For instance, some bright young conductors have come to Cleveland in recent years to lead Shostakovich’s Symphony No.10, but they were unable to make it the neuron-frazzling event Welser-Möst makes of that piece because they push too much into the smaller, passing climaxes. Welser-Möst knows how to sustain tension over the long haul, and he deployed that skill to devastating effect in Shostakovich’s Symphony No.11.

The work begins with some stark, queasy, open fifths in the strings. This performance immediately carved out a different approach from most, for the conductor had the strings play these barren chords – designed to depict the frozen Winter Palace Square the morning of the massacre – without any vibrato, ice-cold and chillingly in tune. When those chords returned throughout the piece, the cold manner never flinched. Against that, the timpani’s nervous tapping just barely rose above the hushed string textures, soon accompanied by desolate trumpet fragments from section principal Michael Sachs. From there, the performance gradually but relentlessly ratcheted up tension, never letting the nervous energy sag, which is something that cannot be said for many other performances and recordings of this work that I have heard.

The entire first movement is one of Shostakovich’s most audacious gambles because, on a programmatic basis, little if anything happens. But psychologically, it builds enormous tension that finally erupts in the second movement, which pictures the moment Russian guards fired into the crowd in 1905. On this occasion, few in the audience could have been without thoughts of current events in the United States where a US citizen had been shot and killed by an immigration agent on 7 January in Minneapolis. In the aftermath of the crushing second-movement climax, in the horripilation of the hushed string trills which followed, I am sure I was not the only audience member with a remembered video of the shooting obsessively looping through my thoughts.

The following lament was played plainly, with absolutely no attempt to emote, giving it the dignity it needed to hit home. The finale followed with a furious upwelling of righteous anger, pausing only for Robert Walters’s mournful English horn lament before the onrush of the closing pages. And those closing pages brought an interesting point to mind. Cleveland has now had the luck to witness a staggeringly great performance of the work twice: in 2019, Russian conductor Michael Jurowski made his first (and, alas, final) US appearance directing the symphony. The most pronounced difference between Jurowski and Welser-Möst in the piece was in the treatment of the tolling alarm bell at the end: Jurowski clearly wanted the sound of the bell to pierce through every other sound on the stage, and it did, which provided catharsis at the end of a hair-raising performance. Welser-Möst, however, noticed the fact that Shostakovich has the rest of the orchestra roaring at triple-forte in the score but only marked the bells as double forte, which is very loud but not as loud as possible. This key detail meant that Welser-Möst’s rendition surged the level of tension but refused to release it in catharsis which is, I suspect, precisely what Shostakovich had in mind.

It is remarkable that Shostakovich was able to get away with the work – written in the wake of the Soviet smackdown of Hungarian protestors in 1956 – by ostensibly picturing an earlier failed revolution. This program’s collision with current US events speaks volumes about the kind of tensions that continue to plague the world, now in places where all too many naïvely thought totalitarianism would never arise.

Mark Sebastian Jordan

Featured Image: Franz Welser-Möst conducts the Cleveland Orchestra in Shostakovich’s Symphony No.11 © Yevhen Gulenko/TCO