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Felicities abounded in the programming. The first concert paired Ernst Krenek\u2019s \u201cLittle Symphony,\u201d a Neo-Classical mishmash of Mozart and jazz, with the Adagio from Mahler\u2019s unfinished 10th Symphony, whose score Krenek completed at the request of Mahler\u2019s widow, Alma. The second concert juxtaposed two symphonies that utilize a theme-and-variations form, Prokofiev\u2019s Second and Webern\u2019s Op. 21. Both concerts ended with some drama, with the suite from Bartok\u2019s ballet \u201cThe Miraculous Mandarin\u201d and Prokofiev\u2019s Fifth, which incorporates music from his stage works.<\/p>\n
The concerts gestured at the historical context on either side of the Weimar era. Prokofiev\u2019s Fifth represented a time when the composer was writing under Stalin\u2019s totalitarian regime; the Mahler, the work of a turn-of-the-century <\/strong>composer whose legacy the Nazis tried to tarnish. As programming it felt subtly clever, cogent and complete, despite the tight focus.<\/p>\n The flip side of the Clevelanders\u2019 general unflappability, which served them so well in Prokofiev\u2019s ardent, piquant musical language, was a tendency to smooth out a work\u2019s individuality. In the Mahler, Welser-M\u00f6st charted an unbroken, long-breathed line from the violas\u2019 mysterious sadness and the violins\u2019 soaring romanticism to the dissonant climax, in which the piece seems to implode with its own emotional cataclysm. But Mahler\u2019s music is too multifaceted, too spiked with peculiar about-faces, for lyrical sameness.<\/p>\n A similar problem bedeviled the Bartok. Welser-M\u00f6st sanitized the sordid street scene that brings the curtain up, and the piece\u2019s strong episodic structure, its constant lurching between sexuality and violence, weakened as vignettes blurred together. Trombone glissandos and trumpet blares were downright polite. As in the Mahler, the playing was tasteful to a fault.<\/p>\n The clarinetist Afendi Yusuf beautifully rendered the solos that represent <\/strong>a woman who lures men off the street to be robbed; Yusuf\u2019s playing was reluctantly beckoning at first and then more fluid, confident and complicit.<\/p>\n An arrangement of Bartok\u2019s Third String Quartet by Stanley Konopka, the orchestra\u2019s assistant principal viola, worked better as a vehicle for theatrical expression. Konopka divided the ensemble into a double string orchestra and had them seated antiphonally on the stage. Some balance issues aside, it worked brilliantly well, teasing out the piece\u2019s delicacy and aggression with an exciting, fruitful tension.<\/p>\n At both performances, there were no encores. Perhaps Welser-M\u00f6st and the Cleveland musicians had already said everything they wanted to say.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n