Since he took over its directorship in 1984, Christoph von Dohnányi has maintained the Cleveland Orchestra as a musical ensemble that plays consistently on the highest level. He is stepping down after this season, and last week, the FleetBoston Celebrity Series brought him to Symphony Hall for his last Boston appearance as music director of his orchestra. It was a typically uncommon and challenging program: two late 20th-century pieces, Witold Lutoslawski’s moving Musique funèbre (1958) and Wolfgang Rihm’s recent Concerto "Dithyrambe" for String Quartet and Orchestra, with the Emerson String Quartet as guest "soloist," followed by one of the best-loved works in the classical repertoire, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.
It was, also typically, a coherently organized program. The Lutoslawski is, as its title suggests, a dirge, an indrawn lament for string orchestra written for the tenth anniversary of Bartók’s death. Rihm’s "Dithyrambe" is a piece of Dionysian hysteria that put strings in the center — a wild game of "chicken" pitting the string quartet against the rest of the orchestra. Then, with the Beethoven, came a paean to joyous exuberance, one that — like the program itself — passes through a funeral march on its way to a final celebratory dance.
In several ways, the Lutoslawski was the most satisfying piece of the evening. The strings are a particular glory of the Cleveland — that gleaming tone is like no other orchestra’s. There’s a fineness about it — never too thick or fuzzy, infinitely flexible. The orchestra has always excelled in pieces for strings. And then, the Musique funèbre has a powerful emotional shape. It begins with a quiet duet for two cellos — like two friends whispering at a wake. Without any breaks, the piece moves through various stages of grief, in sections marked Prologue, Métamorphoses, Apogée, and Épilogue.
Lutoslawski’s themes incorporate all 12 tones, yet the music is grounded in tonality, even as it increases in complexity. There’s supposed to be no exercise more academic than a fugue, but Lutoslawski’s intertwining fugal voices are dramatic and rich in feeling. Shivering pizzicatos in the basses create an undercurrent of mystery. Wailing melismas are punctuated by staccato chords (think Psycho). Hysterical high violins argue with fast low cellos. In the Apogée, dissonant chords repeat obsessively, growing louder — but slower. The music sounds deranged. But after this climactic point in the arch, the Épilogue slowly restores the opening calm. The piece ends with a poignant alternation between eerie, ethereal high violins and single barely audible notes on a solo cello. You’ve come back to the beginning, but you’ve also been changed from grief to quiet acceptance.
Rihm’s "Dithyrambe" takes you into a different sound world. Gongs, chimes, bell-like chords in the piano, and an ominously tapping tom-tom are, in Rihm’s own words, like a "cage, or a chamber with open windows; inside, the quartet plays, well, ‘chamber’ music." Rihm calls the quartet "a creature with four mouths." This "beast" is in almost constant, rapid, nervous motion. The Emerson (except for the cellist, of course) played standing up, and that created a vivid image of being surrounded, trapped, at the same time that it suggested the tradition of a Baroque concerto, which also pits a group of soloists against the orchestra.
At first hearing, the music didn’t seem particularly memorable in itself, apart from the gestures it was living through: the perpetual motion of the quartet, inside, facing the noise and vitality of the world outside with its one-track repetitions (like a choo-chooing locomotive), bellowing brasses (traffic?), explosive orchestral outbursts (construction?), collapsing glissandos on the piano (de-construction?), slower night music (dreamlike monsters in the dark — yet still a relief from the violent energy), and then humming, whirring, otherworldly tonalities in the highest strings, accompanied by the unearthly sound of a bow sliding down the side of a pair of cymbals. And this all ends on a quiet, traditional D-minor chord. I found it pretty engrossing, but I’m not sure whether what was engaging my imagination was Rihm’s music or the stunning performance.
The Beethoven Seventh is one of the most endearing — and foolproof — works in the repertoire. And played as well as the Cleveland can play it, how could it miss? The strings were radiant — especially with first and second violins divided antiphonally, so you could hear Beethoven’s stereophonic effects as he imagined them. In fact, the parts for firsts and seconds here are very different, so it’s amazing what a difference this historical seating plan makes, as in the violins’ back-and-forth volleying — Allegro con brio — in the finale. Dohnányi also kept things light by letting the balances favor the lovely winds and full-throated horns. Teasing, energetically scampering climaxes played full-out (especially at the end of the first movement), always stylish, and technically brilliant, with that wonderfully clean, lean, buoyant Cleveland playing (which sounds even better in Symphony Hall than in Cleveland’s Severance Hall) — this was a superb performance. I’ve seldom seen the very serious, self-effacing Dohnányi enjoy himself more. He gets the best from this orchestra, and he’ll be missed.
And yet, compared with the Beethoven conducted by Claudio Abbado with the Berlin Philharmonic last fall, this remained a pretty conventional performance. I sensed that from the very opening of Beethoven’s remarkable slow introduction, which did not seem to be feeling its mysterious way toward some revelation, as it does in the very greatest performances, or in the relatively lightweight funeral march, which was perhaps a hair too fast. If you heard a Dohnányi recording without knowing who was in charge, would you recognize the conductor? Toscanini, Klemperer, Furtwängler, Beecham, Barbirolli, Abbado — for better or worse even Bernstein and Karajan — all left a more personal stamp on their performances. When it comes to the very deepest musical insight, is Dohnányi’s worthy place among the first tier of conductors, or at the very top of the second?
THE YOUNG GERMAN CONDUCTOR JUN MÄRKL, who made his Boston Symphony Orchestra debut leading an attractive program last week, is not yet remotely in either category. Märkl’s official bio in the BSO program book says he’s been "acclaimed" (the word is used in two consecutive sentences) for his opera performances. In 1993 he made his debut at the Vienna State Opera (which Seiji Ozawa is taking over next season) with Puccini’s Tosca. He’s done Wagner at Covent Garden and in Tokyo. Back in 1987, he was a conducting fellow at Tanglewood, working under Ozawa and Bernstein. He seems to have picked up some of his teachers’ worst habits.
His most visible problem was his appearance. His photo in the program book shows a puckish face and bangs. He now has longer hair (more like Ozawa’s), which he tossed whenever he wanted to make a dramatic point. He conducted with his pinkies sticking out while his hands made little electric-blender circles. Either one toe or the other was always pointing out like a ballet dancer’s, and his arms were self-consciously ballerina-like in a rubbery, Dying Swan sort of way. Every gesture screamed: "See how sensitive I am!"
Unfortunately, his sense of underlying rhythmic and architectural structure had the same rubbery, soft-focus quality. The program included the four-movement suite of Fauré’s incidental music to Pelléas et Mélisande (commissioned by Mrs. Patrick Campbell for an English production of Maeterlinck’s play in 1898 — four years before Debussy’s opera!), Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto (in — can you believe it? — its very first BSO performance), and Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony. At least two of these composers, Fauré and Mendelssohn, were classicists under their veneer of romanticism, and even Rachmaninov was searching for classical structure.
But Märkl conducted these works as if they were all by Puccini, in glutinous phrases coming in waves of passion, without sharply delineated contrasts or transitions, as if one passage simply succeeded the next without any response to what had come before. Nothing had a strong pulse, nothing danced (except maybe Märkl himself), and that spelled disaster for Fauré’s understated contours (which turned merely syrupy) and Mendelssohn’s throbbing energy and yearning. Everything — especially everything slow — went limp. Mendelssohn’s Scherzo went much too fast to be a Scottish dance.
Märkl was, of course, conducting without a score, and more often than not he seemed to be following the orchestra rather than leading it. Technical catastrophe was mostly averted by the alertness of the players — when they were being alert. The performances came to life only in the solos — particularly in John Ferillo’s eloquent, insinuating oboe in Fauré’s "spinning" music and Fenwick Smith’s delicately floated flute in the Sicilienne.
Märkl was lucky in his piano soloist, too: Garrick Ohlsson, whose big hands and big technique gave Rachmaninov’s much maligned and much reworked concerto some heroic dimension, some inwardness — and some glitter. Rachmaninov first completed his Fourth Concerto in 1926, revising it for publication (mostly abbreviating it) in 1928; then he revised it again in 1941, when he recorded it. It’s a fascinatingly peculiar work, with none of the soaring big themes that make his Second and Third Concertos so seductive. No pop songs like "Full Moon and Empty Arms" could ever be derived from it. Rather, it’s put together out of smaller units, dour thematic and rhythmic fragments. It barely works on the composer’s own recording (with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy). But in spite of Ohlsson’s efforts, the concerto needed more help than it got. It remained a series of uninspired fragments, emerging, like Märkl himself, as little more than a collection of empty gestures.
