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      A Young Horn Player Could Become ‘a Real Legend’

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      At 21, Nathaniel Silberschlag landed a principal seat with the storied Cleveland Orchestra. Now tenured, he doesn’t ever want to leave.When the Cleveland Orchestra brought Mahler’s Fifth Symphony to Carnegie Hall in 2019, its conductor, Franz Welser-Möst, lowered his baton and paused before the Scherzo.An unassuming young man walked from the horn section to the front of the stage, where he stood as if he were a concerto soloist. He lifted his instrument, and let out a call: a buoyant, warm herald of a bright new day. When the movement ended, he simply took his seat again.It was an unexpected interlude. Few orchestras follow the practice — dating back to Mahler’s lifetime — of placing the horn so prominently, near the conductor’s podium, in the symphony’s Scherzo. More surprising, though, was the sound that came from that player, whom barely anyone in the audience had heard before. His solo turn, delivered with a clarity even veterans struggle to achieve, had the makings of a major artist’s arrival. But who was he?A quick flip through the program provided the answer: Nathaniel Silberschlag, who, at just 21, had recently taken the seat of principal horn with Cleveland, one of the most skilled and storied orchestras in the country. And the concert was among his first with the ensemble.But because of the pandemic, it was also his last at Carnegie for a long time. The Clevelanders didn’t return there until June 1 — when Silberschlag’s horn resounded again, in the soft yet dignified opening theme of Schubert’s “Great” Symphony. Now 23, and following a two-year probationary period, Silberschlag is an official, tenured member of the orchestra, with a long career ahead of him there if he wants it.“It’s not a joke when I say that when I was practicing in my basement while growing up, my parents, out of encouragement, would yell, ‘It sounds like the Cleveland Orchestra down there!’” Silberschlag said in an interview before last week’s concert. “The tradition of this orchestra, the tradition of this brass section — it is as cliché as it gets, but it is a dream come true that I made it here.”SILBERSCHLAG WAS BORN into what he called a “very, very musical family.” That might be an understatement. There are well over a dozen professional musicians, and plenty of Juilliard School degrees, among his relatives. His grandfather was Sol Greitzer, a violist who played under Toscanini and held the principal seat at the New York Philharmonic for over a decade (appointed by Pierre Boulez). His parents met as members of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. And his older brother, Zachary Silberschlag, is the principal trumpet of the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra.An offer to teach at St. Mary’s College of Maryland brought Nathaniel’s father and mother to that state, where he grew up in Leonardtown. The rural Chesapeake Bay location belied a well-traveled life; he followed his parents on work trips, most often to Italy. Because of that he became, he said, “a second-grade dropout” and was home-schooled — at a rapid pace that had him attending college classes when many teenagers would be starting trigonometry.Silberschlag started piano at 3, then horn at 4. His first teacher was his father, but when he was about 12, he met Julie Landsman, the longtime principal horn at the Metropolitan Opera and a member of the Juilliard faculty. “His parents were very solicitous of my skills as a teacher,” she said. “But I found him to be brilliant, motivated, personable and talented beyond belief.”“When I was practicing in my basement while growing up,” Silberschlag said, “my parents, out of encouragement, would yell, ‘It sounds like the Cleveland Orchestra down there!’”Ross Mantle for The New York TimesWith Landsman, he learned extra-musical practices that have been crucial to his youthful success: meditation and visualization. “You train your brain and wire it for this goal, and you at some time put yourself in a meditative state,” Silberschlag said. “You are training your brain to keep the negative thoughts out and positive thoughts in, and goal oriented.”He visualized auditions so that when he did them, they would feel familiar and nonthreatening. And he had a goal in mind: a job with the Cleveland Orchestra, whose recordings were the first he reached for throughout childhood.A major step came when he was accepted into Juilliard. That was right before a Passover Seder, which with Silberschlag’s extended family can involve impromptu performances or name-that-tune games. A relative joked: “OK, you got in. Let’s hear what was so good.” So, without a warm-up, he played from his audition — a virtuosic concerto — on the spot.At 19, near the end of his third year at Juilliard, he won the assistant principal horn seat with the Kennedy Center Opera House orchestra. As a congratulations, he was offered a drink. “And of course,” Silberschlag said, “I had to fess up and tell them, ‘Well, I’m not 21 yet, and unfortunately my father is, like, in the car waiting to take me home.’”During his senior year, he said, “I lived on Amtrak.” He commuted between Juilliard and the Kennedy Center a few times a week. At one point he was playing in a run of “Tosca” at the Washington National Opera while preparing a studio recital, orchestra concerts, papers and graduation at school.He was also busy with auditioning for Cleveland. The orchestra’s principal horn position had been empty for several years. Welser-Möst invited guests, including the principal horn from the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, who turned down an offer because of the move it would entail. Gifted players didn’t seem like good fits for the group. “When you hire someone, don’t make it a compromise,” Welser-Möst said, “because it will always remain a compromise.”When Silberschlag, here at Severance, plays, “every note has meaning,” said Franz Welser-Möst, the Cleveland Orchestra’s music director.Ross Mantle for The New York TimesWelser-Möst sought advice from Landsman, who told him that she had this guy, “the biggest talent I’ve ever seen.” So Silberschlag was invited to play — first for the conductor, then for the audition committee. He breezed through Mozart and Strauss, and ended with the Long Call solo from Wagner’s “Siegfried.”“The last two measures of that, you always sit biting your nails thinking, ‘Is that person going to make it or not?’” Welser-Möst said. “This was the first time where it sounded like it was no problem. And I looked around at everyone there. They all sort of had an open mouth. They couldn’t believe it.”Hear Silberschlag perform, and you can quickly tell what won them over. Landsman described his sound as rich, creamy and colorful; it’s also tenderly human, with the singing quality of a cello. And, Welser-Möst said, “whenever he plays, every note has meaning, and is connected to the overall expression of a movement or entire piece.”But members of the Cleveland Orchestra, as Welser-Möst said, must be not only good instrumentalists, but also good musicians — invested in the ensemble as a whole, and able to navigate the dynamics of a team (something that Silberschlag had experience with, after years of playing baseball, his other passion, which could have become more serious if it weren’t derailed by an injury). Hence the probation period, which lasts two years.At no point was Welser-Möst worried about Silberschlag’s youth. “If someone has potential, then the experience comes by itself,” he said. “And it’s not about age; it’s about maturity.” Experience came fast. One of Silberschlag’s first appearances was in that Mahler symphony. Not completely sure how to respond when Welser-Möst asked whether he would be willing to play at the front of the orchestra, he simply replied, “Would you like me to sit or stand?”Welser-Möst conducing the Cleveland Orchestra at Carnegie Hall last week. Silberschlag played in the opening of Schubert’s “Great” Symphony.Chris LeeThe solo itself wasn’t stressful, but the trip to the front of the stage was — “a long time to be thinking about yourself in silence while everyone else is also silent,” Silberschlag said. He tapped into the walking meditations he had learned from Landsman, who was at the Carnegie concert and recognized what he was doing from her seat. At the end of the performance, he took the first solo bow. Next was Michael Sachs, the principal trumpet, who gave up his own bow to walk over to Silberschlag and raise his arm like a champion fighter.Probation was interrupted when the pandemic shut down performances in March 2020, and again when concerts resumed with almost exclusively string repertory, since those players could remain masked, while brasses and winds could not. Silberschlag had to take a long break from the orchestra. He ended up spending much of the time in Maryland, where he practiced in his parents’ basement.That’s where he logged onto a video call one day for his final tenure meeting. He was in. “When you play Mahler Five in your second week and you succeed like he did — sorry, it’s a no-brainer,” Welser-Möst said. But, he added, other players also follow Silberschlag’s sound with ease, which is a sign of natural leadership. He has a running joke with Silberschlag about checking in from time to time to ask, “Has your head gotten any bigger?” But the answer, as recently as last week, was still no.With the possibility of five more decades ahead in Cleveland, Silberschlag said, “I couldn’t be happier that I got to be in this orchestra as soon as I did so that I can spend as much time as I physically can in the orchestra.”Having once listened to the ensemble’s recordings obsessively, he is now on them himself. And he has begun to teach, sharing a studio at the Cleveland Institute of Music with Richard King, Silberschlag’s predecessor. He has, Welser-Möst said, everything it takes to be a role model, not just a great artist.“The potential with him,” Welser-Möst added, “is to become a real legend.” More

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      In Cleveland, Schubert Outsings Even the Mighty ‘Otello’

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      After playing Schubert’s Ninth Symphony just before the pandemic lockdown, the Cleveland Orchestra shone in its return to the sprawling work.CLEVELAND — On the morning of Friday, March 13, 2020, the Cleveland Orchestra played Schubert’s Ninth Symphony. The musicians were in concert dress, but just a handful of people were in the seats of Severance Hall. Pandemic bans on public gatherings were going into effect, and this would be the last concert here before the long lockdown.A section of the symphony was released a few weeks later, as part of the premiere episode of a new podcast from the ensemble. By way of introduction, its longtime music director, Franz Welser-Möst, spoke about what he’d felt as he led the second movement: “I thought, all of a sudden, this might be the last time I ever conduct this orchestra again.”Amid the anxiety and uncertainty of early April 2020 in New York, I remember listening to him say that, and bursting into tears. So I have rarely had a sweeter experience with music than returning to Severance on Friday morning and listening to the Clevelanders and Welser-Möst play, yes, Schubert’s Ninth.This is music of stark shifts between celebration and melancholy, ballroom grandeur and drawing-room wistfulness, between forcefulness and expansiveness. It is a sprawling work that nevertheless, when done well, unfolds with a sense of inevitability through all its changes.Welser-Möst said on the podcast that the performance for the near-empty hall — with everyone “calm but extremely, extremely focused” — was “as close to perfection” as he’d ever heard the orchestra sound. That this wasn’t hyperbole became clear when the full symphony was released on the in-house record label that the ensemble started during the pandemic.On Friday, too, the notion of perfection came to mind. The Clevelanders played, as usual, with clarity, poise and adroit balances among the sections, elegance without reticence, urgency without pressure, airiness without weightlessness. But while descriptions of their precision and transparency sometimes make them seem cool, even chilly, this was poignant, humane, truly warm music-making.The first movement was brisk — as is Welser-Möst’s wont — but easygoing in its phrasing, without exaggeration, even in emphasis. As I felt when I heard this ensemble play Dvorak’s Fifth Symphony here in 2015, there was one foot in aristocratic Vienna, the other in a country meadow; I don’t know another American orchestra that lilts with such unforced gracefulness.Heat radiated off the high strings in the second movement, before softening to a gentleness that surpassed that of the recent recording. The passing of a line among different instruments — cello, flute, clarinet, oboe — was an understated layering of liquidities of different densities.The Scherzo was lushly garrulous until it relaxed into spacious calm; the fourth movement had the panache of bursts of golden powder. Throughout, Schubert’s huge section repeats weren’t drudgery, but displays of quietly accumulated power, of material subtly yet thoroughly transformed.From left on platform, Raymond Aceto, Pene Pati, Tamara Wilson, Welser-Möst, Limmie Pulliam, Christopher Maltman, Jennifer Johnson Cano, Owen McCausland and Kidon Choi, with the Cleveland Orchestra, after Verdi’s “Otello.”Roger Mastroianni/Cleveland OrchestraSuch was the quality of the symphony, and the intensity of the emotions it conjured, that it slightly overshadowed the main event of the weekend: Verdi’s opera “Otello,” which was given as a semi-staged concert on Saturday (and will be repeated this Thursday and Sunday).The operatic repertory has been a glory of Welser-Möst’s tenure here. The pandemic sadly spiked a run of Berg’s “Lulu,” but “Otello” is a sweeping orchestral showcase. (I won’t soon forget the Chicago Symphony’s ferocious rendition under Riccardo Muti at Carnegie Hall in 2011.)And the playing was excellent, with attention to detail in moments like the slight wooziness that enters the rhythms as the first-act drinking song grows drunker. The third act progressed toward a finale of controlled nobility; the opening of the fourth was an elegy of mellow, mournful winds, their music seeming to exhale into being taken up by the low strings.But overall Welser-Möst flew through the score at a clip; coupled with this ensemble’s lithe textures, even at its loudest and most powerful, there was sometimes a sense of skating atop the music. The opera impressed; it didn’t shock or wound.In the title role, the tenor Limmie Pulliam had a healthy, attractively grainy tone, with a hint of weeping in it. Once he got past some dropped high notes in “Ora e per sempre,” he sang with burnished security, and acted — even in this semi-staged setting — with moving sobriety.The soprano Tamara Wilson, as Desdemona, gained authority and tonal richness as the performance went on, her high notes strong and clear. But from the start, the baritone Christopher Maltman oozed juicy seductiveness as an imposing Iago.Jennifer Johnson Cano’s mezzo-soprano was smoothly plangent as Emilia; the tenor Pene Pati was a sweetly ingenuous Cassio. The chorus, directed by Lisa Wong, was far more nuanced than usual in this piece, even while wearing face masks; I heard harmonies in the opening scene that were new to me.Whatever the quibbles, few ensembles are ready to do Schubert’s Ninth and “Otello” back-to-back with such accomplishment. Part of it is doubtless the enchanted, silvery atmosphere of Severance, but there is always a sense of occasion when this orchestra performs.Not that everything is perfect. Attendance has been down this season from prepandemic averages, as it has been for many arts institutions; the question is whether those numbers will rebound or settle into a disconcerting new normal.And while Welser-Möst has filled many important positions over the past few years, there are still a handful of openings, none more conspicuous than the concertmaster seat that has been vacant since William Preucil was fired in 2018 after an investigation revealed he had engaged in sexual misconduct and harassment. The orchestra’s principal trombonist was also fired then, for the same reason; that chair remains empty, too.But there was nothing to fear this weekend from either of those corners of the ensemble. Peter Otto, the first associate concertmaster, gave a solo in Berg’s “Lyric Suite” — which preceded the Schubert on Friday — that had the self-effacing eloquence for which Cleveland is justly renowned. (Solos from this orchestra often, in the best way, don’t feel like solos at all.) And in the first movement of the Schubert, the trombones played with an uncanny evocation of doleful distance, as if they were on a nearby hilltop rather than right in front of us.It speaks to the depth of this extraordinary ensemble’s roster that what should have been its weaknesses ended up as particular strengths. And it was so, so good to be back here.OtelloThrough May 29 at the Severance Music Center, Cleveland; clevelandorchestra.com. More

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      The Conductor Who Whipped American Orchestras Into Shape

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      Toting a loaded gun on the podium, Artur Rodzinski turned ensembles into technical marvels in the 1930s and ’40s.“For those who grew to musical maturity with the concert life of the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, his name may still have an aura,” Halina Rodzinski wrote in her memoirs, almost two decades after the death of her spouse, the Polish conductor Artur Rodzinski.“For those who are younger,” she went on to lament, “my husband is a dry reference in a musical encyclopedia or a name on a record cover in the cut-rate rack of a discount store.”That was in 1976. And the decades since have not been kind to Rodzinski, leaving him remembered, if at all, for embodying “all that a real maestro was supposed to be,” a critic once wrote: “preening, arbitrary, dictatorial, unpredictable, driven by ambition.”Possessing an “enormous vocabulary of Polish profanity” that he unloaded on musicians, as Time magazine reported, Rodzinski was also rumored to conduct with a revolver in his pocket. True, Halina confirmed in her book — and it was loaded.Rodzinski conducting at Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic’s home during his tenure in the 1940s.Bettmann/CorbisBut there was a time when Rodzinski was among the most lauded conductors in the land. He may have been “no poet of the baton,” as the critic Virgil Thomson put it in October 1943, when Rodzinski became music director of the New York Philharmonic. But he was “a first-class orchestral craftsman” and a “master trainer,” Thomson wrote later that season.Arguably no man had more of a hand in turning American orchestras into the technical marvels they became in the mid-20th century — whether through those he led himself, or through the example he set. He jolted up the standards of some of the great ensembles of the radio age: the Philadelphia Orchestra (as an assistant from 1925 to ’29), the Los Angeles Philharmonic (as music director from 1929 to ’33), the Cleveland Orchestra (1933 to ’43), the NBC Symphony (which he created in 1937), the New York Philharmonic-Symphony, as it was then known (1943 to ’47) and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for a single, tempestuous season after that.Flashier conductors would take those bands further: Leopold Stokowski, Rodzinski’s boss and booster, in Philadelphia; Otto Klemperer in Los Angeles; Arturo Toscanini, Rodzinski’s mentor, with the NBC; George Szell in Cleveland; Rafael Kubelik in Chicago. Their achievements were built on Rodzinski’s foundation, but their fame and commercial success far eclipsed his.Perhaps Rodzinski’s recordings might change our sense of him. With a rush of recent archival finds, for the first time since the LP era there is plenty to go on. Pristine Classical released a series of superb remasterings of Rodzinski’s studio work with the NBC, Cleveland and Chicago orchestras, as well as a few broadcast tapings from his New York period.Weightier still is a 16-disc box from Sony, which for the most part recovers 78s made with the New York Philharmonic from 1944 to ’46, filling a hole in the orchestra’s discography and offering a companion to Sony’s box, issued two years ago, of the Philharmonic recordings of John Barbirolli, Rodzinski’s widely derided predecessor.Wagner’s “Die Walküre” (New York Philharmonic, 1945)Sony ClassicalCompendiums such as these can bolster reputations, as long-silent work reaches fresh ears, or confirm legends born long ago. Sometimes, though, these box sets simply confirm the verdicts of history. And that, alas, is the case with Rodzinski.Here was a conductor capable of extraordinary feats of clarity and balancing, able to bring the lushest Romanticism to heel, whether in a sparkling Rachmaninoff Second Symphony, or in brisk, enthralling scenes from Wagner’s operas, including parts of “Die Walküre” with the soprano Helen Traubel.Perhaps surprisingly for such a turbulent character, objectivity was Rodzinski’s interpretive aim. He told Time for a cover story, just before his firing from the New York Philharmonic, that he hoped that “the music goes from the orchestra to the audience without going through myself.” (The very different Stokowski, he said with contempt, “plays music sexually.”)But if that literalism helped Rodzinski to train his orchestras in pinpoint precision, and brought out the best in intractable works like Sibelius’s Fourth, it could also bore — lacking the tension and vehemence of his idol and model, Toscanini.The New York Times critic Olin Downes admired Rodzinski’s technique, but he wrote in 1943 that he feared “a reticence approaching overrefinement.” Even Thomson — whose acclaim for Rodzinski surely had nothing to do with the conductor inviting Thomson, who was also a composer, to lead the Philharmonic in his “Symphony on a Hymn Tune” in 1945 — had to admit that guest conductors like Charles Munch made more of the orchestra Rodzinski had built.Perhaps surprisingly for such a turbulent character, objectivity was Rodzinski’s interpretive aim.Genevieve Naylor/Corbis, via Getty ImagesRodzinski was born on New Year’s Day 1892, in Split, and grew up in present-day Lviv, a city long fought over that was part of the Hapsburg monarchy and, later, Poland. While studying law in Vienna, he trained at the Academy of Music and, after suffering shrapnel wounds on the Eastern front in World War I, found a job as a cabaret pianist back in Lviv — relief from days spent inspecting meat shops. He made his debut leading Verdi’s “Ernani,” then moved to Warsaw. Stokowski heard him conduct Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” there, and offered to take him to Philadelphia.Filling in for Stokowski at Carnegie Hall in 1926, Rodzinski was already able to hold an orchestra “firmly in his grip,” Downes noted. Los Angeles and Cleveland followed — the latter a place where Rodzinski could add operas to the symphonic repertoire, not least the American premiere of Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” in 1935, a coup he scored against Stokowski’s Philadelphia.Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” (Cleveland Orchestra, 1940)Pristine ClassicalWhen Toscanini resigned from the New York Philharmonic in 1936, Rodzinski was asked to conduct eight weeks of the following season, and was widely seen as a plausible heir to the maestro’s throne. He became Toscanini’s favored candidate after the Italian conductor heard him at the Salzburg Festival.But the Philharmonic took a gamble on the less experienced Barbirolli that December, before Rodzinski had a chance to prove himself, which he did with an “Elektra” of “historic intensity,” Downes wrote, the following March. Furious, Toscanini instructed NBC to have Rodzinski drill the orchestra it was hiring for the Italian’s sensational return to New York.After the Philharmonic corrected its error (at least as Rodzinski saw it) at the end of 1942, Rodzinski had the unanimous support of the critics; their venom was infinite for Barbirolli, whose highly subjective aesthetic appalled writers who had been entranced by Toscanini’s lean, driven style.“The orchestra needs overhauling in every way,” Downes insisted. Time reported that guest conductors referred to its “undisciplined and arrogant members as ‘the Dead End Kids.’” When Rodzinski had 14 musicians fired months before his arrival, including the concertmaster, it was taken as evidence of a seriousness that Barbirolli was perceived to have lacked.After Rodzinski’s first concert in October 1943, performing Barbirolli’s beloved Elgar in a conscious attempt to demonstrate how it ought to go, Thomson wrote, brutally, that it was “pleasant” to hear the Philharmonic play “all together.” By April, he was drolly reporting that the strings “now play in tune.”Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony (New York Philharmonic, 1945)Sony ClassicalGranted this kind of shade, Rodzinski could do little but shine. He focused on music of the previous hundred years and rarely went back beyond Schumann and Berlioz to Beethoven, Mozart or Haydn. In the Sony box, his Brahms symphonies push on without quite becoming overwhelming; his Tchaikovsky Sixth is rather cool — “too conventional, too objective and too civilized,” as Downes put it in a review of its corresponding concert.Contemporary music did play a significant role in the Rodzinski era, taking a spot on most of his programs. Trying to duke it out with Serge Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony Orchestra, Rodzinski competed to premiere the works of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, whose Fifth Symphony he was the first to release on record. Hiring Leonard Bernstein as his assistant conductor in New York, Rodzinski also supported American composers like William Schuman and William Grant Still. Morton Gould’s “Spirituals,” Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait” and Darius Milhaud’s “Suite Française,” all composed during World War II, receive convincing recordings in the Sony box.Morton Gould’s “Jubilee,” from “Spirituals” (New York Philharmonic, 1946)Sony ClassicalStill, for Rodzinski the Philharmonic ultimately became the conductors’ graveyard it had long been reputed to be — far more so than for Barbirolli, who went on to greater things with the Hallé in Britain. Despite uniform praise for the excellence Rodzinski enforced, his position was never secure.Contract negotiations with the Philharmonic’s manager, the powerful agent Arthur Judson, dragged on so interminably that Rodzinski’s lawyer, the future C.I.A. director Allen Dulles, gave up. The conductor was left to discuss terms on his own, as he grew more anxious about his lack of control over guest conductors — his rival Stokowski among them — and what they performed.The Chicago Symphony, rebuilding after Désiré Defauw’s brief postlude to the 37-year tenure of Frederick Stock, sniffed an opportunity, and offered a post around Christmas 1946. With that offer in hand, Rodzinski dressed the Philharmonic’s board down with an hourlong speech about his problems with Judson on Feb. 3, before leaking his resignation to the press that night. The board fired him the next afternoon, amid mutual recriminations.“New York,” Rodzinski vowed to a reporter, “will go down.”Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” (Chicago Symphony, 1947)Pristine ClassicalHe lasted just months back in the Midwest. Critics there gave by-now-familiar praise to the rise in the quality of playing, and there were operatic successes, but Rodzinski again came up against entrenched interests, racking up deficits and finding far less willingness to make changes of personnel. Chicago’s board fired him in January 1948.There would be no more prominent posts for Rodzinski, the perfectionist who set the standards for the post-World War II era. He would make more recordings in the 1950s, mostly with the Royal Philharmonic on the Westminster label, but his health declined, and he would never again appear with the New York Philharmonic. He died in 1958. More