This well-integrated, brilliantly executed program led by Franz Welser-Möst got Carnegie Hall’s four-month festival, Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice, off to a blazing start. Centering on music of the 1920s, the concert opened with an energetic account of Ernst Krenek’s beguiling Kleine Symphonie, the composer’s last symphonic work before fleeing his native Austria and the Anschluss of 1938. The brief (16 minutes) highly spirited work strives to reconcile past and present by introducing features of early 20th-century music – tense harmonic dissonances, bold instrumental colors, spiky rhythmic distortions – into the three-movement fast-slow-fast symphonic structure common to the Classical era.
The Cleveland Orchestra – minus violas, cellos, oboes and horns but supplemented by a chorus of banjos, mandolins and a guitar – luxuriated in the gentle moments of the central Andantino with its glittering passages for woodwinds, harp and the plucked strings of the guest musicians, and absolutely reveled in the jazzy, tongue-in-cheek gestures of the outer movements.
A highly contrasting piece followed: the radiant Adagio from Gustav Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony, as completed in 1924 by Krenek, 13 years after the composer’s death. Entirely at ease with the music’s long-form architecture, Welser-Möst shaped a perfectly paced rendition, fusing the seemingly disconnected elements of the astoundingly beautiful score into a completely logical whole. The orchestra, long steeped in the Mahler’s musical language after turning out (and recording) remarkable performances with Welser-Möst for over two decades, was superbly effective in conveying the Viennese master’s special sense of drama and expression.
After intermission came Béla Bartók’s dense and contrapuntally complex String Quartet no. 3, judiciously arranged for double string orchestra by the Cleveland Orchestra’s assistant principal violist, Stanley Konopka. Written almost a century ago (1927) the uncompromising work, marked by extremes of dissonance and grating string sounds – is still shocking to some listeners. The shortest and most forward-looking of Bartók’s six forays into the genre, the quartet is cast in a single 15-minute movement divided into four parts with easily identifiable boundaries. The Clevelanders’ interpretation of this orchestral version was unerringly skillful and passionate, delivered with breathtaking intensity and fury. As led by Welser-Möst, the ensemble served up a rich, fiery sonority, unified and beautifully blended. The strings, divided in half and seated antiphonally on stage, handled the unusual instrumental effects – col legno bow tapping, sul ponticello bowing, and snap pizzicato (aka “Bartók” pizzicato) among others – with great precision and fluency, creating sounds rarely produced by bowed and plucked instruments. This urgent and energetic rendering was at once both faithful to, and more impassioned than the original.
The program finale was the orchestral suite from Bartók’s lurid one-act pantomime, The Miraculous Mandarin. Composed between 1918 and 1924, and banned shortly after its 1928 premiere in Cologne, the scintillating, violent and furiously expressive score was one of the composer’s favorites. Welser-Möst’s unpretentious but highly effective conducting style elicited an astoundingly atmospheric reading, making it easy to envision the characters and lurid events in the ballet’s gruesome scenario: the appearance of the three ruffians depicted by the jerky theme in the violas, the girl’s seductive motions associated with the languorous clarinet, the shy young man represented by the dreamy oboe, the entrance of the Mandarin announced by the blaring brass, and – most vivid of all – the moment when the thugs leap out and chase the Mandarin and the orchestra rises to an utterly shattering climax, bringing the suite and an evening of splendid music making to electrifying end.
