The Cleveland Orchestra’s summer season at Blossom Music Center, in a heavily wooded area adjacent to the Cuyahoga National Park about a 45-minute drive south of Cleveland, is in full swing, and Mother Nature cooperated to give a large audience a perfect evening for a concert that was musically satisfying as well as a good example of the orchestra’s ongoing educational outreach, a cooperative performance that included the Kent/Blossom Chamber Orchestra. The orchestra’s assistant conductor Brett Mitchell was on the podium for the marathon concert.
The concert opened with Antonín Dvořák’s 1896 symphonic poem The Noon Witch, written after the composer returned to Europe from his American sojourn. It is based on a macabre tale of a mother who tells her rambunctious child that a witch will come and snatch him if he doesn’t behave. The witch does appear – at least in the mother’s mind – and the mother tries to save her child. As the clock strikes noon, the father returns to find that the mother has accidentally smothered the child while protecting him. The work is picturesque of the story, beginning with folksy pastoral music, then generating tension until a mighty minor chord, when the son is discovered dead. The Cleveland Orchestra brought out the various solo colors and mood changes in their performance, especially as the music picks up steam and in the background we hear the twelve chimes marking noontime. It was an unusual and interesting novelty for a concert opener. It would be interesting to hear as a set all four of Dvořák’s symphonic poems composed as the same time as The Noon Witch (the others being The Water Goblin, The Golden Spinning Wheel, and The Wild Dove) inspired by ballads by Czech folklorist Karel Jaromír Erben.
It was clear within a few moments of its beginning that this performance of Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto, with guest soloist James Ehnes, was going to be something special. Ehnes and Mitchell gave a reading that was uncommonly poetic, striking a balance between the concerto’s lyricism and drama, showing a thorough understanding of Barber’s brand of mid-century American romanticism. Ehnes played with purity of tone but also with yearning richness of the violin’s lower range required by the concerto’s second movement. For his part, Mitchell managed the orchestral textures with transparency, while not inhibiting occasional rapturous outpourings. Assistant principal oboist Jeffrey Rathbun played the main theme of the second movement with plaintive beauty.
Iso Briselli, child prodigy and scion of a wealthy American soap manufacturer, was the intended first performer of Barber's concerto, but he never played the work. There were complaints that the third movement was unplayable*, but a quickly arranged private performance by Herbert Baumel, a student at the Curtis Institute of Music, proved otherwise. However, the movement’s perpetual motion still provides a fearsome challenge to soloists 76 years later. Ehnes was up to the task, with endless streams of scales and arpeggios, and the orchestra providing rhythmic interjections along the way.