by Daniel Hathaway
This article was originally published on Cleveland.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio — A strange vibe hung in the air at Severance Music Center on Thursday evening, September 24, as The Cleveland Orchestra and its audience gathered for the second program of the new season. Contract talks had broken down shortly before the performance and a midnight strike was looming.
Aside from a string trio playing welcoming music inside the entrance, orchestra members greeting arriving patrons, and someone shouting “Give our musicians what they want” when concertmaster Joel Link came onstage to tune, there was little hint of a labor dispute to sully the evening.
Franz Welser-Möst and his players brought their customary rhythmic precision and signature sound — rich and well-balanced — to the occasion. And that shout-out, which inspired an ovation before a single note of works by Franz Liszt, Bohuslav Martinů and Johannes Brahms had been played, said a lot about the esteem that Clevelanders have for their orchestra.
The concert world makes much of “world premieres,” but equally important are second performances and beyond. In his program book comments, Welser-Möst noted that Martinů’s Second Symphony was to be played tonight for only the second time by the Orchestra since its commissioning in 1943 by the American Friends of Czechoslovakia in Cleveland.
It’s an attractive, bustling work whose swirling musical fragments keep building and changing, blending into dramatic statements punctuated by pointed, percussive notes in the piano.
The energetic Poco allegro, a colorful march, featured fine percussion playing and interlocking rhythms.
Egged on by Welser-Möst’s sweeping gestures, the final movement became a spirited, chaotic musical romp. Jessica Sindell’s lovely flute solo projected beautifully over glissandos in the harp and piano.
The evening began with a rare performance of Liszt’s lovely, understated tone poem “Orpheus,” originally written to replace Christoph Gluck’s bland overture to his otherwise remarkable opera Orfeo et Eurydice.
A pair of harps stand in for the Greek god of music’s lyre, with which he made “trees, and the mountain tops that freeze bow their heads when he did sing” (Shakespeare, Henry VIII). Liszt writes long, expressive lines for the horns, winds, and solo violin and cello that the Cleveland Orchestra musicians beautifully dovetailed, passing them off in flawless transitions.
In what we hope won’t be their last performance for a while, Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra closed out the evening with a masterful account of Brahms’ Second Symphony, setting a lilting tempo for the grand opening in the cellos and horns and keeping the textures light and full of life.
Fine conversational passages between strings and winds followed, enhanced by mellow solo horn lines from Naathan Silberschlag and charmed by the famous cradle song melody.
The cello section set up a lush Adagio and rounded it off with a superb final chord. And in the Allegretto the playing was sublime, with the melodic wind passages led by oboist Frank Rosenwein over pizzicatos in the cellos.
After a hushed opening, the music exploded wonderfully in the concluding Allegro con spirito. Welser-Möst kept everything well-paced as the sound, and tempo grew to a thunderous, emotional conclusion.
But that wasn’t the last word. Welser-Möst added a brief, rare orchestral encore — Johann Strauss Jr’s Entr’acte to A Night in Venice.
Photo courtesy of Yevhen Gulenko
Published on ClevelandClassical.com, October 1, 2026
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