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; Yusef’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.
