“Thursday at Severance Hall, music director Franz Welser-Möst literally ended his year in Cleveland with a bang,” writes Zachary Lewis in Saturday’s (5/27) Plain Dealer (Cleveland). The Cleveland Orchestra performed Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht, “a lavish orchestral setting of a poem about love’s power to transcend even the bounds of faithfulness. Digging deeply into this harmonically turbulent score, Welser-Möst and the strings allowed emotion to peak and even, sometimes, to overflow.… They [navigated] its stormy waters with masterful fluency and keen dramatic insight…. Things got wilder still in ‘Amériques,’ Varèse’s clangorous ode to the questing spirit. There, instead of expression and nuance, the object was mayhem; disciplined mayhem, but mayhem nonetheless. What’s interesting is how tolerable it has become. What was once panned as pure noise now strikes modern ears as something almost beautiful in its hardness. Welser-Möst and the orchestra went in with no holds barred. Like some primordial soup out of which a symphony could conceivably emerge, the music in their hands raged and rumbled, haunted and harangued, beguiling the ear with an endless and unpredictable stream of ideas … To paraphrase philosopher Thomas Hobbes, their ‘Amériques’ was nasty, brutish, and utterly too short.”
Posted May 30, 2017
