United States Blossom Festival 2024 [3] – Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Beethoven: Véronique Gens (soprano), Cleveland Orchestra / Antonello Manacorda (conductor). Blossom Music Center, Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, 20.7.2024. (MSJ)
Mendelssohn – Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op.21
Berlioz – Les nuits d’été, Op.7
Beethoven – Symphony No.7 in A major, Op.92
The Blossom Music Festival is the Cleveland Orchestra’s traditional testing ground for talents which they have not had a chance to encounter before. Some visitors pass through without making much of an impression, but occasionally one makes the listener sit up and take notice. Antonello Manacorda, a German-based Italian conductor, was the latter. While he may not yet be well-known stateside, the quality of his work suggests he would be worth knowing.
Perhaps the surge on the final introductory woodwind chord of Felix Mendelssohn’s quicksilver overture for Shakespeare’s mischievous comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream was a little aggressively shaped, but it was notice that this would not be a generic run-through. Happily, Manacorda achieved his points without further exaggerations, but rather by deftly searching out inner details without losing the main line of activity. He never let the woodwinds get lost, instead terracing dynamics so that teeming details surfaced momentarily, then slipped back into the blend. Tempos were lively, which can sometimes be a problem in the reverberant acoustic of the Blossom pavilion, but Manacorda made sure the bass lines were firmly anchored in the tuba (replacing Mendelssohn’s original antiquated instrument, the serpent). He picked good points to make details pop out, and let busy figurations blur radiantly in other spots. The orchestra was alert, and the conductor’s points were made without a lot of grandstanding.
For some years, my favorite recording of the Hector Berlioz song cycle Les nuits d’été has been the one recorded over two decades ago by Véronique Gens. What a delight, then, to encounter her in this music so many years later, in her debut with the Cleveland Orchestra. If her voice is older, it is remarkably still very much the beautiful instrument it had been, and today she sings these moody songs with even greater wisdom and subtlety. The intensity of her emotion in the second and third songs, ‘Les spectre de la rose’ and ‘Sur les lagunes’, was electrifying. Contributing to that sense was Manacorda’s attentive and responsive wrapping of the orchestral parts around Gens’s voice. Rarely do conductors seem as involved in soloists’ pieces as here, and it made for a deeply satisfying conclusion to the first half.
Sometimes a concert that starts great goes awry in the second half, but that did not happen. If anything, Manacorda was even more in his element for Beethoven’s Seventh, standing on the podium with remarkable assurance. Observing him on the large video screens to the sides of the seating area, I was struck that Manacorda was so caught up in the moment of creating this music and too happily involved in his work to remember that most conductors suffer terribly from fright when first confronting this formidable ensemble. Instead, Manacorda lived the music, joyfully exchanging smiles with orchestra members, giving deft leadership through transitions, and getting out of the way and letting the orchestra run like the thoroughbreds they are in many passages.
The first movement was alert, the introduction for once feeling like it was going somewhere. Particularly effective was the way Manacorda tightened the sprung rhythms at the very end of the intro, leading seamlessly into the main Allegro vivace. The second movement balanced somber lyricism with steady but unhurried momentum. The scherzo – likened by Sir Thomas Beecham to ‘a lot of yaks leaping about’ – is a movement that can wear out its welcome, but Manacorda kept tempos lively and lithe, with orchestral textures so fresh and aerated that, for once, it did not feel too long. The finale was shrewdly started slightly under tempo, so that a tightening of pace could gradually take place.
Once he showed the way he liked to terrace dynamics to bring out details, he did not have to keep flogging it with heavy-handed beats. The orchestra did it. That kind of synchronization between conductor and players simply doesn’t happen that often. At one spot, he did not sort the textures the way I usually prefer, letting the French horns’ harmony cover the melodic line. But in the next phrase, he revealed detail in the winds I have never heard in any performance, so I can only welcome this kind of thoughtful exploration of detail. The orchestra was in star form, with attractive solos from the woodwinds.
I have heard Beethoven’s Seventh on four previous occasions in Cleveland, conducted by Jahja Ling, Christoph von Dohnányi, Herbert Blomstedt and Franz Welser-Möst, the current music director. This was by some distance the best performance of them all. It would be very interesting to have Manacorda return and show what he can do in music from other time periods.
Mark Sebastian Jordan