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Review: Cleveland Orchestra with Herbert Blomstedt & Mark Kosower (April 17)

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by Robert Rollin

KosowerLast Thursday evening, April 17, The Cleveland Orchestra under guest conductor Herbert Blomstedt’s masterful hand performed a stunningly beautiful concert of romantic music. The program featured two wonderful Slavic works.

The evening’s highlight was the performance of the Antonin Dvořák Cello Concerto in b, Opus 104 with Mark Kosower, the orchestra’s principal cellist, as soloist. The piece is one of the great romantic concertos.

The opening Allegro’s orchestral exposition sparkled with gorgeous solos by Frank Rosenwein, principal oboe, Michael Mayhew, associate principal French horn and Franklin Cohen, principal clarinet. The tutti grew in intensity as it approached Kosower’s first passages. The rapport among soloist, conductor, and orchestra was apparent in the very first soloist entrance. The performance had a remarkable clarity, and all the cello’s rapid sixteenth notes were apparent even when the accompanying textures were thick.

Kosower’s clear, bright tone and Blomstedt’s supple and well-prepared conducting helped maintain the wonderful balance. After an orchestral transition, the second theme in D, the relative major, emerged in the solo cello like a sudden ray of sunshine. This lush romantic melody gradually ascended to the high range. Lovely solos in principal flute and oboe followed. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Orchestra — a second week under Herbert Blomstedt: Mozart & Dvorak (February 21)

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by Daniel Hathaway

TheBlomstedt-Herbert-3 Cleveland Orchestra never fails to play at a high level, producing results that can make even an indifferent guest conductor look good. When the orchestra collaborates with someone as inspiring as Herbert Blomstedt, the outcome can be sheer magic. The second weekend of Blomstedt’s sojourn at Severance Hall treated audiences to luminous and revealing performances of symphonies by Mozart and Dvorak so well-known and so often played that they can seem as ordinary as the furniture in your living room.

For Mozart’s second g-minor symphony (No. 40), the 84-year old Swedish-American maestro scaled down the string section by one-half to two-thirds, discarded both baton and podium and led the ensemble from memory at stage level. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Orchestra with Herbert Blomstedt: big symphonies by Nielsen and Beethoven (February 14)

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 by Daniel Hathaway

GuestBlomstedt-Herbert conductor Herbert Blomstedt is in a symphonic mood this weekend and next during his current appearances with The Cleveland Orchestra. Thursday evening’s program featured two of the most original works in the literature. Next weekend’s concerts include two of the most often played, but if Mozart’s No. 40 and Dvorak’s “New World” end up sounding as fresh and newly-composed as Nielsen’s No. 3 and Beethoven’s No. 7 did this week, we’ll have much to look forward to.

The Danish composer Carl Nielsen had a lot in common with his earlier Austrian colleague Anton Bruckner. Both grew up as country lads who combined native straightforwardness with the musical sophistication they acquired in Copenhagen and Vienna to produce highly original compositions that synthesized those two worlds. Both composers also built large structures out of simple but striking motives and seemed to exhaust all the possible permutations of those themes in the course of a symphonic movement (Beethoven started that, but Bruckner and Nielsen took the game to a whole new level). [Read more…]

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