For Cleveland Orchestra, It’s Beethoven (and Freedom) to the Rescue

The Cleveland Orchestra showed up at Carnegie Hall this week without a star. When the music director Franz Welser-Möst planned the ensemble’s two-night visit to New York, the opening concert, on Tuesday, was to be headlined by the soprano Asmik Grigorian. A volcanic presence on European stages who rarely makes it to the United States, Grigorian would have been a major box-office draw. Then came news that she was pulling out for unspecified personal reasons.

Time to break out the emergency rations of Beethoven.

The remaining rump of the Clevelanders’ program for Tuesday, the Suite from Janacek’s “From the House of the Dead,” based on Dostoyevsky’s account of life in a Russian prison colony, was joined by Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and, for good measure, his “Leonore” Overture No. 3.

A crowd-pleasing solution to a marketing headache? A repertory staple musicians can shine in without too much rehearsal? Not at all. The new program was “a chance to say something important about our world today,” Welser-Möst wrote in a program statement that referred, smartly but vaguely, to people’s “fight for freedom everywhere.”

Without naming specifics, Welser-Möst explained that the Janacek was a testament to “human dignity” in “desolate circumstances.” Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 traced a progression “from darkness to light,” he added, while the overture, written for Beethoven’s political prison break opera “Fidelio,” represented the “greatest music about freedom ever written.” Far from being a stop gap, the new program created what Welser-Möst called “a profound statement” that was sure to “resonate deeply” with New Yorkers. (No similar claims were made for Wednesday’s program, which consisted of Stravinsky’s “Pétrouchka” and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5.)

The resulting concert on Tuesday was invigorating and full of ravishing playing, as was the performance the next night. But if there was any profound truth to be gleaned from the double helping of Beethoven served alongside Janacek’s dazzling suite, it was only that the Fifth and the “Leonore” overture provide ready-made templates for struggle narratives ending in triumph. Just whose struggle and what is being overcome — I’m guessing that Gaza, Ukraine and the state of American democracy are among them — remain open to interpretation.

In fairness, the Cleveland Orchestra has never relied on provocative or politically minded programming to earn its devoted fan base and superlative-studded reviews. In his 23 years at the helm, Welser-Möst has fine-tuned this storied ensemble into an elegant, cohesive and keenly responsive engine. Other American orchestras have struggled to define their role in society as they fret over accusations that their branch of the arts is reactionary and socially irrelevant. The Cleveland Orchestra’s image may be conservative — a guardian of a particular European tradition — but it’s a well-defined luxury brand that delivers outstanding value.