With challenge comes reward seemed to be the mantra of last weekend’s Cleveland Orchestra program, helmed by composer-conductor Thomas Adès. None of the four works performed have found a place in the standard repertoire, and each conveyed their respective composers’ remarkably individual way of writing for orchestra. Though a demanding selection for performers and audience alike, it proved as captivating and illuminating as any program I’ve heard.
Gentle but ominous rumbles began Sibelius’ tone poem The Oceanides, named after the nymphs of Greek mythology. Fluttering flutes captured the titular figures, and Adès’ expressive conducting seemed to mirror the contours of the roiling waves. A wide range of color was achieved, sustaining a rarefied atmosphere that crested to a powerful climax.
Charles Ives’ Orchestral Set no. 2 was jaw-dropping in its stark originality. Unusual textures and a funereal soundscape were drawn in the opening elegy. The orchestra was astutely attentive to subtleties of rhythm and inflection – a glance at the score reveals its delirious complexities, which surely must have necessitated an intense rehearsal schedule. The central movement was marked by the lively syncopations of a rambunctious ragtime, conveyed through a substantial piano part and a sheen of orchestral brilliance.
The closing movement was a reflection on the tragic sinking of the Lusitania. Situated in the back of the hall, the chorus sang a hymn, and a band of offstage orchestral players further blanketed the audience in surround sound. It was an aural overload with so much happening simultaneously, yet somehow it all fit together like an interlocking jigsaw puzzle. Near the end, the lonely bellows of an accordion made a striking effect, in recollection of the organ grinder Ives encountered on the somber day the news broke.
In late 1999, Kurt Masur led a New York Philharmonic program titled Messages for the Millennium, in which five composers were engaged to make a statement at the precipice of a new era. It was for that event the remaining two works on Saturday’s program were first born. Kaija Saariaho’s Oltra Mar (Across the Sea) is cast in seven movements wherein the odd-numbered feature a wordless chorus, operating in the fabric of the orchestra, and the even-numbered set various texts – including a poem by Amin Maalouf, who would serve as librettist for Saariaho’s watershed opera L’Amour de loin.
A powerful blast began, and one could sense an epic, oceanic scale, with dense, cacophonous waves of sound washing over the hall. The Maalouf setting at the work’s midpoint was a haunting meditation on time itself, and the well-prepared chorus continued to shine in a powerful delivery of an African death song that followed. At the close, matters slowly faded away, as if still lost in thought.
Adès himself had the final word as composer, presenting the US premiere of an expanded version of America: A Prophecy. Like Ives, Adès made use of a vast multitude of ideas, in both contention and cohesion with one another. The work confronted the grim realities of the colonization of Central and South America. Singing texts of Mayan origin, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke delivered a powerful appeal, contrasted by the more populist idioms given to the chorus whose texts glorified territorial greed.
Cooke’s repeated invocation of “burn” in the central movement was of chilling effect. A quarter of a century after its initial performance, Adès appended the closing “In Every Birth a Death”, capping the work off with arresting power – and perhaps a glimmer of hope.
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