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    Vienna Philharmonic and Franz Welser-Möst Return to Carnegie

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    Franz Welser-Möst, who stands at the top of this storied orchestra’s roster of conductors, led three meaty programs at Carnegie Hall over the weekend.The Vienna Philharmonic hasn’t had a chief conductor since 1933. But it has had favorite conductors.Of the great musicians who have led this self-governing, proudly idiosyncratic orchestra, Leonard Bernstein and Pierre Boulez were made honorary members; Herbert von Karajan and Karl Böhm were given honorary conducting titles. The violinist Daniel Froschauer, the Philharmonic’s chairman, has said that today, the ensemble not so secretly has two maestros at the top of its roster: Riccardo Muti and Franz Welser-Möst.At Carnegie Hall last weekend, it was the Austrian-born Welser-Möst, 63, who conducted three breathless, exhilarating and often moving performances by the Philharmonic, in meaty programs of Bruckner and Mahler symphonies, and works by Berg, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Strauss and Ravel.It takes a lot to win over the affection of the Philharmonic, one of Europe’s finest ensembles, just as it takes a lot to join its ranks. These players — known for their lush sound, their brighter, higher tuning frequency and their distinctly Viennese articulation — can be haughty and stubborn; I have seen them outright defy a conductor in rehearsal.Welser-Möst has not only penetrated the Philharmonic’s inner circle, but also has done so while leading the Cleveland Orchestra — another top-notch ensemble, though one whose sound differs enormously from that of the Viennese.The main difference between the Cleveland Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic is that while the Clevelanders have been criticized for giving performances that are too good, no one could ever accuse the Viennese of the same.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Cleveland Orchestra Says a Lot, but Only Through Music

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      With neither encores nor speeches, this ensemble presented a subtly clever, cogent and complete pair of concerts at Carnegie Hall.The conductor Franz Welser-Möst is a man of few words. Or, judging by his two concerts with the Cleveland Orchestra at Carnegie Hall last weekend, no words.Dressed in his usual performance costume of white tie and tails, Welser-Möst strode to the podium, turned his back to the audience and, with the finesse that characterizes this orchestra’s performances, let the music speak for itself.If he did want to speak, he’d have a lot to talk about. Welser-Möst recently announced that he was stepping down from the Cleveland Orchestra in 2027, after 25 years as its music director. He is one of Carnegie’s Perspectives artists this season, and with these concerts was opening the hall’s festival Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice.The Clevelanders, with their evenly balanced tone and precise articulation, reflect the understated poise of their maestro. Their sound has a lovely finish: softly molded winds, round-toned brasses, strings that never turn strident. The unflashy solos captivate in the way they refuse to draw attention. When a tempo takes off, there’s no sense that the players are flustered or swept away in it. Transitions are handled with care, even perhaps too much so.Perspectives artists open their musical world, the loves and preoccupations that animate it, by organizing their own series. In March, Welser-Möst will lead the Vienna Philharmonic in three programs, and for his two last weekend, he surveyed some sounds of the Weimar era — jazz, serialism, lurid down-at-heel drama, machine music — with a rigor and cohesion that were his own.The ensemble’s meticulous and methodical approach found an inspired match on Sunday in two challenging symphonies by Prokofiev — one written during the years of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933), and one during the wartime years that followed. At first, the players’ resistance to the garishness of the Second Symphony’s blaring machine music, Prokofiev’s nod to the fashion for compositions that imitate the sounds of industry, seemed to miss the point. But it was as though Welser-Möst took apart this rusted apparatus, polished every screw and gear, and put it back together again. It whirred with magnificent efficiency; the strings, locked into repetitive patterns, threw off bright, clean sparks. The sequence of variations on a theme was kinetic, and lyrical moments wore their beauty lightly.Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, grandly classical in conception, with dashes of the composer’s wily idiosyncrasies, was played with lush strings and enveloping brasses. Motifs were given expansive statements, then were cut up and brought back with edge and suavity. The fourth movement had a mahogany tone of divided cellos and a finale of mechanical energy and busy tinkering before a thrilling final flourish.Felicities abounded in the programming. The first concert paired Ernst Krenek’s “Little Symphony,” a Neo-Classical mishmash of Mozart and jazz, with the Adagio from Mahler’s unfinished 10th Symphony, whose score Krenek completed at the request of Mahler’s widow, Alma. The second concert juxtaposed two symphonies that utilize a theme-and-variations form, Prokofiev’s Second and Webern’s Op. 21. Both concerts ended with some drama, with the suite from Bartok’s ballet “The Miraculous Mandarin” and Prokofiev’s Fifth, which incorporates music from his stage works.The concerts gestured at the historical context on either side of the Weimar era. Prokofiev’s Fifth represented a time when the composer was writing under Stalin’s totalitarian regime; the Mahler, the work of a turn-of-the-century composer whose legacy the Nazis tried to tarnish. As programming it felt subtly clever, cogent and complete, despite the tight focus.The flip side of the Clevelanders’ general unflappability, which served them so well in Prokofiev’s ardent, piquant musical language, was a tendency to smooth out a work’s individuality. In the Mahler, Welser-Möst charted an unbroken, long-breathed line from the violas’ mysterious sadness and the violins’ soaring romanticism to the dissonant climax, in which the piece seems to implode with its own emotional cataclysm. But Mahler’s music is too multifaceted, too spiked with peculiar about-faces, for lyrical sameness.A similar problem bedeviled the Bartok. Welser-Möst sanitized the sordid street scene that brings the curtain up, and the piece’s 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.The clarinetist Afendi Yusuf beautifully rendered the solos that represent a woman who lures men off the street to be robbed; Yusuf’s playing was reluctantly beckoning at first and then more fluid, confident and complicit.An arrangement of Bartok’s Third String Quartet by Stanley Konopka, the orchestra’s 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’s delicacy and aggression with an exciting, fruitful tension.At both performances, there were no encores. Perhaps Welser-Möst and the Cleveland musicians had already said everything they wanted to say. More

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      Franz Welser-Möst to Leave the Cleveland Orchestra

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      One night last fall, Franz Welser-Möst, the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, walked onto the stage of Severance Hall, crossed over to the podium and faced the audience. He was neither solemn nor particularly expressive; he just flashed a Mona Lisa smile before turning to the players and gesturing the downbeat of a Mozart symphony.For the regulars in the audience, this was a familiar sight. Welser-Möst, 63, is known more for his authoritative, even demanding, conducting than for his showmanship. And what followed that night was also familiar, as the orchestra turned out a program of the Mozart, a new percussion concerto and a Tchaikovsky rarity at the exhilaratingly high level that has led many to call this ensemble the finest in America.Unflashy yet unmatched. Such is the culture of the Cleveland Orchestra, an oasis of excellence, maintained and nurtured since Welser-Möst became its music director in 2002. And while there is more to come — the orchestra opens Welser-Möst’s Perspectives series with a pair of concerts at Carnegie Hall on Jan. 20 and 21 — the end of his tenure is in sight: He announced on Thursday that he would not renew his contract when it expires in 2027, which is relatively soon given the far-ahead planning cycles of classical music. More

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      Musical Performances to See in Europe This Winter

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      Concert halls and opera houses in Vienna, Berlin and beyond are offering fan favorites (“Die Fledermaus”) and surprises (an operatic “Animal Farm”).The winter opera and classical music season in Central and Eastern Europe balances holiday classics with rarities and even some fresh works. Opera houses and concert halls from Vienna to Berlin to Prague are presenting a varied program of old chestnuts and new discoveries. Here is a selection.Munich“Die Fledermaus,” Bayerische Staatsoper, through Jan. 10Barrie Kosky’s new production of Johann Strauss Jr.’s most popular operetta, “Die Fledermaus,” a New Year’s Eve favorite in much of Europe, is one of the most eagerly awaited events of the season here at the Bavarian State Opera. Mr. Kosky, an Australian director with a wide-ranging résumé — his recent successes include “Das Rheingold” in London and “Chicago” in Berlin — stages Strauss’s infectiously tuneful farce with energetic panache and a dash of camp. Vladimir Jurowski, the Munich company’s general music director, leads a spirited cast headed by the German star soprano Diana Damrau. The dynamic performances, carefully controlled chaos of Mr. Kosky’s staging, and a few unpredictable touches make this 150-year-old work seem fresher than ever. The Dec. 31 performance will also be streamed on the State Opera’s online platform. For the more traditionally inclined, the company is also bringing back August Everding’s sumptuous 1978 production of Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” (through Saturday).Barrie Kosky’s staging of “The Golden Cockerel,” performed in Lyon, France. The Komische Oper in Berlin, where the production will play this winter, has a long history with Slavic repertoire.Jean Louis FernandezBerlin“The Golden Cockerel,” Komische Oper Berlin in the Schiller Theater, Jan. 28-March 20A new production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Golden Cockerel” at the Komische Oper Berlin is the first premiere to be led by the company’s newly minted general music director, the American James Gaffigan. This riotous and surreal take on the fairy-tale opera by Mr. Kosky, who ran the Komische as artistic director from 2012 to 2022, has also graced stages in Aix-en-Provence and Lyon, France, and Adelaide, Australia. In Berlin, it becomes the company’s latest foray into Slavic repertoire after inventive and gripping productions of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” Prokofiev’s “The Fiery Angel” and Shostakovich’s “The Nose.”“Rusalka,” Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Feb. 4-22Antonin Dvorak’s 1901 opera “Rusalka” hovers on the edge of the standard repertoire. The lyrical and soaring aria “Song to the Moon” is better known than the rest of this dark and symbolically rich adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” The Hungarian filmmaker Kornel Mundruczo directs the first new production of “Rusalka” at the Berlin Staatsoper in over half a century. The British maestro Robin Ticciati, music director of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, conducts the lush and frequently melancholy score.Vienna“Animal Farm,” Wiener Staatsoper, Feb. 28-March 10The Russian composer Alexander Raskatov’s “Animal Farm” arrives at the Vienna State Opera in late February, in a production by the Italian director Damiano Michieletto. Reviewing the work’s world premiere in Amsterdam earlier this year, Shirley Apthorp, the Financial Times’s opera critic, praised Raskatov’s “violent, compelling sound-world, percussive and angular, full of unpleasant truths” in this operatic setting of Orwell’s famed allegory of the Russian Revolution. The British conductor Alexander Soddy leads the work’s Viennese premiere.Franz Welser-Möst and the Wiener Philharmoniker, Feb. 22-26In the first of five February concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic, Franz Welser-Möst, the former general music director of the Wiener Staatsoper and longtime leader of the Cleveland Orchestra, tackles Mahler’s towering and elegiac Ninth Symphony at the Wiener Konzerthaus. On subsequent programs, performed in the Musikverein, the Austrian maestro leads the Viennese in works by Ravel, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Berg, Bruckner and Richard Strauss.West Side Story, Volksoper Wien, Jan. 27-March 24In late January, music by Leonard Bernstein will resound through Vienna’s opera houses. Shortly after the American director Lydia Steier unveils her “Candide” at the MusikTheater an der Wien, a new “West Side Story” arrives at the Volksoper, the city’s traditional operetta and musical stage on the other side of town. (The house’s other productions this season include “Die Fledermaus” and “Aristocats.”) For the director Lotte de Beer’s rendition of the quintessential American boy-meets-girl musical, performed in a mix of German and English, the Puerto Rico-born, New York-raised choreographer Bryan Arias updates Jerome Robbins’s classic dance moves.“Katya Kabanova” at the National Theater in Prague, featuring, from left, Jaroslav Brezina, Eva Urbanova and Alzbeta Polackova. Zdeněk SokolPrague“Katya Kabanova,” The National Theater, March 22-27Leos Janacek’s searing 1921 opera about the emotional unraveling of an adulterous wife in 19th-century Russia returns to the National Theater in Prague in a production by the provocative Catalan director Calixto Bieito, who is famous for his unorthodox interpretations of classic operas. Jaroslav Kyzlink, a Janacek specialist, leads the psychologically raw score and Alzbeta Polackova, a much-loved soprano with the company, tackles the vocally and emotionally punishing title role.Bratislava, Slovakia“Hubicka (The Kiss),” Slovak National Theater, March 1-June 8In honor of the 200th anniversary of the great Czech composer Bedrich Smetana’s birth, the Slovak National Theater presents his 1876 opera “The Kiss.” Once among the composer’s most popular works, “The Kiss” has long been eclipsed by Smetana’s earlier comic opera “The Bartered Bride,” and is remembered mostly for its lilting lullaby. With Andrea Hlinkova’s new production, the Slovak National Theater, which, coincidentally, was opened in 1920 with a performance of “The Kiss,” hopes to change that.Budapest“Bartok DanceTriptych,” Hungarian State Opera, Feb. 1-24Three works by Hungary’s great modernist composer Bela Bartok comprise this new ballet, choreographed by a trio of creatives. Laszlo Velekei, the director of the Ballet Company of Gyor, in northwestern Hungary, tackles “The Wooden Prince,” a pantomime ballet (a work half-danced, half-mimed) that premiered at the Hungarian State Opera House in 1917. Bartok’s second (and last) ballet, “The Miraculous Mandarin,” caused a scandal when it was first performed in 1926 in Cologne, Germany, because it depicted a girl forced into prostitution in a seething modern metropolis. In her production, Marianna Venekei, a longtime member of the Hungarian State Opera, explores the psychology of the work’s motley crew of city dwellers. Rounding out the program is the “Dance Suite” (1923), originally a concert piece and here choreographed by Kristof Varnagy, whose varied résumé includes projects with classical ballet companies, contemporary dance troupes and even Cirque du Soleil. Writing about the short movements that make up the “Dance Suite,” Bartok said his aim was to “present some idealized peasant music.” More

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      Carnegie Hall Announces Its 2023-24 Season

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      We choose highlights from events featuring Mitsuko Uchida and Franz Welser-Möst as Perspectives artists, and the composer Tania León in residence.The threats facing democracy will be a central focus of Carnegie Hall’s coming season, the presenter announced on Tuesday, with a festival devoted to the flourishing cultural scene in Germany between the two world wars.From January to May, Carnegie will host “Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice,” an exploration of creative expression during the fragile democracy in Germany from 1919 to 1933. The festival will feature ensembles such as the Vienna Philharmonic and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s performing works by composers of the time, including Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill.“We’re seeing the challenges to democracy more and more clearly, and it’s all the more reason we have to treasure it,” Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said in an interview. “We want people to ask questions and contemplate why democracy matters, and what the threats are in our day.”The 2023-24 season, which begins in October, will feature some 170 performances, beginning with two concerts by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of its outgoing music director, Riccardo Muti. The pianist Mitsuko Uchida and the conductor Franz Welser-Möst, the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, will each organize a series of Perspectives concerts.The composer Tania León, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2021, will lead a season-long residency; in January, the Boston Symphony Orchestra will offer the New York premiere of a new piece by her.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.Here are a dozen highlights of the coming season, chosen by critics for The New York Times. JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZEnglish Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir, Oct. 25You can safely bet on a few things whenever the conductor John Eliot Gardiner comes to town: agile, historically informed performance; obsessively precise articulation; and virtually ideal readings of beloved repertoire. In early 2020, he led his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique in just about as good a Beethoven symphony cycle as you could imagine. And now he brings the English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir to Carnegie for Bach’s Mass in B minor and, on Oct. 26, Handel’s “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato.” JOSHUA BARONEThe mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre will appear at Weill Recital Hall with the lutenist Thomas Dunford.Joel Saget/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLea Desandre and Thomas Dunford, Nov. 2These two artists — Desandre, a clarinet-mellow mezzo-soprano who can burst with bright agility, and Dunford, an eloquent lutenist — are among the brightest lights of a young generation of early-music specialists. They join in Weill Recital Hall, ideally intimate for this repertory, for “Lettera Amorosa,” a program of love-focused Baroque works by Monteverdi, Frescobaldi and Handel, alongside names like Tarquinio Merula (his songs exquisite) and Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger (a specialist in music for lute). ZACHARY WOOLFEAmerican Composers Orchestra, Nov. 9This essential organization has brought music by George Lewis to Carnegie’s various spaces before — the most notable instance being his Virtual Concerto (for a “computer-driven” piano soloist) back in 2004. The orchestra will continue its productive relationship with the composer to perform one of his latest orchestral works. No title for the piece is available yet; the same goes for a few other new works on the bill (including those from the likes of Guillermo Klein and Augusta Read Thomas). We do have one title: “Out of whose womb came the ice,” by the up-and-coming composer Nina C. Young, whose premiere was co-commissioned by Carnegie. SETH COLTER WALLSStaatskapelle Berlin, Nov. 30When the Staatskapelle Berlin and its longtime music director, Daniel Barenboim, last appeared at Carnegie, in 2017, it was an epic nine-performance stand that paired Mozart piano concertos and Bruckner symphonies. A lot has happened since then; most recently, in January, Barenboim stepped down from the orchestra’s podium because of health problems. So their return will be poignant: just two nights, and the four symphonies of Brahms, a composer Barenboim performed as a pianist in this space in 1962. ZACHARY WOOLFEEnglish Concert, Dec. 10The British soprano Lucy Crowe’s expertise and imagination in Baroque music gives her the freedom to turn da capo arias into feats of feeling. That exhilarating sense of spontaneity uplifted the English Concert’s performance of Handel’s “Serse” at Carnegie last year, and it will be exciting to hear Crowe apply her gifts to more dramatic material when she takes the title role in “Rodelinda.” OUSSAMA ZAHRThe pianist Daniil Trifonov will appear on Carnegie’s main stage to perform Beethoven’s mighty “Hammerklavier” Sonata.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesDaniil Trifonov, Dec. 12Arguably the mightiest of the under-40 generation of superstar pianists meets the mightiest of repertoire in this recital, as Daniil Trifonov takes on Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata. It’s a banner year for youngish soloists in ambitious repertoire, in fact: Vikingur Olafsson plays the “Goldberg” Variations (Feb. 7); Beatrice Rana does the Liszt Sonata (Feb. 28); and Seong-Jin Cho journeys through the second book of the same composer’s “Années de Pèlerinage” (May 17). DAVID ALLENMet Orchestra, Feb. 1Yannick Nézet-Séguin has decided not to share next season. Rather than engage a guest conductor, he helms all three of the Met Orchestra’s concerts himself, embracing opportunities to bask in the tonal floodgates of Lise Davidsen’s soprano in Wagner’s “Wesendonck Lieder” and, later, the heavenliness of Lisette Oropesa’s Mozart arias (June 11), and the intense standoff of Bartók’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” with Elina Garanca and Christian Van Horn (June 14). OUSSAMA ZAHRYunchan Lim, Feb. 21This precociously mature pianist, still in his teens, played Liszt’s deliriously difficult “Transcendental Études” on the way to becoming the youngest-ever winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition last year. He’ll reprise the Liszt as part of his recital introduction on Carnegie’s main stage. By this point, another pianist, the spectacularly creative Igor Levit, needs no introduction at this point to this hall’s audience; on Jan. 20, he’ll play two symphony transcriptions (Liszt’s of Beethoven’s Third and Ronald Stevenson’s of Mahler’s 10th) alongside Hindemith’s Suite “1922,” raucous and very Roaring Twenties. ZACHARY WOOLFEVienna Philharmonic, March 1Most of the five concerts in Welser-Möst’s Perspectives series — Jan. 20 and 21 with the Cleveland Orchestra, March 1-3 with Vienna — are emblematic of his thoughtful, idiosyncratic, ultimately endearing approach to programming, but the March 1 performance looks especially constructive, full of connections and contrasts to draw: Hindemith’s Konzertmusik for Wind Orchestra, Strauss’s Symphonic Fantasy from “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra and, as if to bid farewell to a whole world of music, Ravel’s “La Valse.” DAVID ALLENJason Moran will return to Carnegie with a tribute to the pioneering jazz musician James Reese Europe.Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York TimesJason Moran, March 9In addition to being an elite improvising pianist, Jason Moran is a keen programmer; his Carnegie survey of Black American music from the Great Migration was a well-attended success. You can all but bank on the same when Moran brings his latest concert concept to Zankel Hall. This time, the focus will be on the music of the early 20th-century American original James Reese Europe. You might expect some of the same expert arrangements heard on Moran’s latest album, “From the Dancehall to the Battlefield.” But prepare also for some surprises; this restless innovator rarely does anything the same way twice. SETH COLTER WALLSEnsemble Modern, April 12Much of the festival “Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice” is more confusing than informative. This period in history produced so much excellent and overlooked music; why are we seeing Beethoven, Wagner and Mahler (among other head-scratchers)? At least there are engagements like that of Ensemble Modern, which will perform works including a lithe but still barbed smaller arrangement of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “The Seven Deadly Sins,” led by HK Gruber, one of our greatest living Weill interpreters. The group returns April 13 as part of León’s residency, playing her “Indígena” and “Rítmicas” alongside pieces by Conlon Nancarrow and others. JOSHUA BARONEDanish String Quartet, April 18A highlight of Carnegie’s spring months in recent seasons has been the Danish String Quartet’s Doppelgänger project, which juxtaposes Schubert quartets with premieres. Coming this April: a new work by Anna Thorvaldsdottir. And, for the fourth installment next year, the group is adding the cellist Johannes Rostamo to perform Schubert’s endlessly moving, even sublime String Quintet in C, paired with a commission from Thomas Adès. JOSHUA BARONE More

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      Review: The Unaffected Excellence of the Cleveland Orchestra

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      One of the finest American ensembles returned to Carnegie Hall with a program that made its argument persuasively, but without force.Classical music is an art form that can’t help having one foot in the past and an eye on its family tree. You hear about piano teachers who can trace their techniques back to Beethoven, or composers who realize only after the fact that Debussy has crept into their writing. Lineage is crucial; influence, inevitable.It’s an observation that was made with gentle persuasiveness by the Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst, its longtime music director, at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday. With the casual excellence that has made this ensemble, at least on a technical level, the finest in the United States, they assembled movements from Berg’s “Lyric Suite” and Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony into a five-section study in juxtapositions.Versions of this have been done; the conductor Raphaël Pichon and his group, Pygmalion, broke up the “Unfinished” and surrounded it with a sweeping Romantic collage on last year’s album “Mein Traum” — a nod to Schubert’s biography, and to the cultural world in which this work was created. But the musical connections on Wednesday were fewer, and more focused.Neither the Berg nor the Schubert is whole. The orchestrated form of the “Lyric Suite,” originally for string quartet, contains three of its six sections, and the “Unfinished” was never completed beyond the first two movements. Both products of Vienna, more than a century apart, they nevertheless share a quiet intensity, as well as expressiveness shaded by longing and melancholy. As tends to be the case with pairings like this, Schubert comes out sounding more innovative; and Berg, who here doesn’t write with a wholesale use of dodecaphonic style, more reverential.In its version for string orchestra — and particularly with five rows of violins on Wednesday — the Berg has an operatic edge, but under the baton of Welser-Möst, an often measured technician, the opening Andante amoroso was smartly balanced rather than exploited for dramatic effect. He continued into the first movement of the Schubert without pause, carrying the previous work’s subtle momentum through the symphony’s flowing melodies and the soft syncopations of its not-quite-waltzing second subject. Heard so closely with the “Lyric Suite,” the development stood out for its flashes of the future: harmonic language that would flourish at the height of Romanticism.It wasn’t so jarring, then, to return to the Berg — its whispering Allegro misterioso here like a distant and distorted memory emerging into consciousness, its quietness befitting the second movement of the Schubert, which ended with a halo of serenity. But Berg had the last word with his Allegro appassionato, seeming to make explicit the pervasive yearning of Schubert and take its Romantic sentiment to a breaking point. Like the symphony, however, it ended in sustained stillness.The program featured a rarity in Schubert’s Mass in E flat, performed with five vocal soloists and members of the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus.Chris LeeFor the concert’s second half — Schubert’s Mass in E flat, a wellspring of beauty that is bafflingly underperformed in the United States — the stage was drastically more populated with the addition of five vocal soloists and members of the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, an all-volunteer ensemble that behaves like an entirely professional one. Yet, in a miracle characteristic of the Clevelanders, this work had the sense of awe baked into its scale but the clarity of chamber music: the Latin text intelligible despite face coverings throughout the choir, the melodic line traveling with ease among the instruments.It’s not until the “Et incarnatus est” section of the Credo that the soloists enter (with a songlike theme of delicate longing that all but prefigures the aria “Nuit d’ivresse” from Berlioz’s “Les Troyens”). These roles, rarely employed throughout the Mass, were luxuriously cast: the tenors Julian Prégardien and Martin Mitterrutzner, the soprano Joélle Harvey, the mezzo-soprano Daryl Freedman and the bass-baritone Dashon Burton. But they were also artfully indistinct, behaving with a unified vision that gave way to egoless balance.The piece was not without its grandeur. Wednesday’s Sanctus was one of divine wonderment; the Agnus Dei resonated from the lower strings with the richness of an organ. But the “dona nobis pacem” of the final bars, begun at a fortissimo, quickly calmed to a glowing piano. The concert, as much as it was a web of connections, also made the argument that music doesn’t need a showy climax to win over an audience. And neither does this orchestra.Cleveland OrchestraPerformed on Wednesday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Manuscript Settles in Cleveland

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      The Cleveland Orchestra has been given the autograph score, which was sold at auction to a previously anonymous buyer for $5.6 million.When Gustav Mahler took the New York Philharmonic to Cleveland for a concert in December 1910, he drove the critic Miriam Russell, of The Plain Dealer, to paroxysms of prose:Little Mahler with the big brain.Little Mahler with the mighty force.Little Mahler with the great musical imagination.That, however, was to be his sole appearance there; by the following spring, he was dead.An important piece of Mahleriana will nevertheless now reside in Ohio for good. The Cleveland Orchestra announced today that it has received the manuscript of Mahler’s Second Symphony as a gift. And in doing so, it revealed the identity of the mystery buyer who paid $5.6 million for that autograph score in 2016: Herbert G. Kloiber, an Austrian media mogul.“He’s very much in the family,” André Gremillet, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, said of Kloiber, who is a trustee and chairs its European advisory board. “Given his deep knowledge and love of music, the fact that it’s coming from him has special meaning to us. It’s not just any collector who bought the score.”Kloiber, 74, who built his Tele München Group into a major European media company before selling it to the investment firm KKR in 2019, said that his decision to buy the Mahler manuscript had reflected a lifelong interest in music, as well as a friendship.The godson of the conductor Herbert von Karajan, Kloiber ran the production company Unitel, which made several renowned films of performances, before founding Clasart Classic in 1976. Clasart distributes Met in HD broadcasts internationally, and has made visual recordings of the Clevelanders playing Bruckner and Brahms with their music director, Franz Welser-Möst.It was through his business dealings that Kloiber became acquainted with Gilbert Kaplan, the Mahler devotee who had bought the 232-page manuscript in 1984 from the foundation of Willem Mengelberg, a Dutch conductor who had received it from the composer’s widow, Alma. Kaplan, a financial publisher with no musical training, was obsessed with the “Resurrection,” as the work is known, and controversially conducted it with leading orchestras, recording it twice.“We had both sold a piece of our companies to Capital Cities, the owner of the ABC network, so every year we gathered in Phoenix, Arizona, at the Biltmore Hotel for a corporate retreat,” Kloiber said. “Whilst everybody else was doing horse routes or playing golf, we were sitting at the bar talking about Gustav Mahler, and his particular inclination to the Second Symphony.”The score is unaltered, unbound and marked in blue crayon with Mahler’s own edits.David A. Brichford, the Cleveland Museum of ArtWhen Kaplan died in 2016, he left the manuscript to his widow with the intention that it be sold. Kloiber’s winning bid at Sotheby’s that November set a record for a manuscript score at auction. The acquisition was anonymous, but not entirely a secret.“We agreed to have a coffee in Vienna,” Welser-Möst said, recalling a meeting from a few years ago with Kloiber, a friend. “I knew he had bought it, but that was it. He showed up with a black briefcase. We sat down for coffee — you know, chatty, chatty — and it was like in one of those spy films. He pushed the briefcase underneath the table and said, ‘Have a look at it.’”For Welser-Möst, who occupied Mahler’s post of general music director at the Vienna State Opera from 2010 to 2014, examining the pristinely preserved manuscript — unaltered, unbound and marked in blue crayon with the composer’s own edits — was an emotional experience, not to mention a nerve-racking one. The clarity of Mahler’s handwriting convinced him, he said, that his scores ought to be followed to the letter.“When I opened the score in our apartment in Vienna, I got really teary,” Welser-Möst said. “How close can you get to a masterpiece, whatever it is? You can’t get any closer than that, and to have that intimate moment just for myself, not being in a museum and pushing other people to the side to get a glimpse of it, that was really a very special moment in my life.”He hid the manuscript under his bed, then returned it three days later.Kloiber, who admires the Cleveland Orchestra’s commitment to its youth programs and has been a board member since 2010, told officials that he would give them the manuscript in 2019, after a Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra concert at St. Florian, the abbey near Linz, Austria, where Bruckner was organist.“They are a lovely lot,” Kloiber said. “I like the way they are run and come on all these tours, and make a really big effort for the United States to be present on the European concert circuit.”Selections from the manuscript will be displayed at Severance Hall in a free public showing on Wednesday, and for ticket holders at the orchestra’s season-opening performances of the “Resurrection” on Thursday and Friday. The score will then be housed nearby at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which is led by William M. Griswold, the former director of the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, where several of Mahler’s other manuscripts are held.“It will be kept permanently at the museum,” Gremillet said. “We are still working on where it will be exhibited, but we want people to see that score. Certainly this is going to be a great source of pride for Cleveland as a whole, in addition to the Cleveland Orchestra.” More

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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