CLEVELAND, Ohio – We’ll never know what ailing conductor Semyon Bychkov would have made of this week’s Cleveland Orchestra program.
One thing’s certain, however: He wouldn’t have done what conductor Xian Zhang did with it in his stead Thursday night at Severance Hall.
Like a sound engineer wielding a giant contrast knob, Zhang turned her given lineup of Mozart and Tchaikovsky into a sometimes fatiguing but always exciting and unique musical roller coaster, trading balance and suavity for relentless boldness and dynamism.
Right up there with Zhang on the liveliness front were pianists Katia and Marielle Labeque, the soloists in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 10 for two pianos. They, too, eschewed the smooth, lyrical path, choosing instead the road of brightness and animation. They also chose an unusual encore: the torrential first movement from Philip Glass’s Four Movements for Two Pianos.
REVIEW
Cleveland Orchestra
What: Xian Zhang conducts Mozart and Tchaikovsky.
When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Feb. 17 and 18.
Where: Severance Hall, 11001 Euclid Ave., Cleveland.
Tickets: $49-$149. Go to clevelandorchestra.com or call 216-231-1111.
The Labeques, last heard here in July 1997, may be sisters, but they are far from carbon copies of each other. One of the many great joys in listening to their Mozart, in fact, was spotting the differences between them, appreciating the host of meaningful variations in touch and interpretation.
There was much to savor generally. The Andante, in their hands, was a model of grace and sweetness, the Rondo a succession of increasingly heated exchanges culminating in a memorable cadenza containing an extended trill and a moment of magical reverberation.
Zhang, meanwhile, music director of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, avoided equilibrium altogether, routinely thrusting passages and instruments out of the background and into the sonic forefront. Tiresome though it grew, this tendency was not without its merits. One particular upshot: a lovely and widely overlooked oboe solo, played Thursday by principal oboist Frank Rosenwein.
Thursday marked the end of a 20-year gap without the Labeque sisters in Cleveland. It also marked the end of a 27-year span at Severance without Tchaikovsky’s “Manfred” Symphony.
There are reasons the work gathers so much dust. Between its enormous length and even larger instrumentation, the symphony is the sort of piece many ensembles either reserve for rare occasions or rule out altogether. It’s also more than a bit blustery, heavier on display than on true substance.
Zhang, though, pulled it off. The rousing and often poignant performance she led made at least one listener wish the symphony hadn’t been absent so long.
The conductor’s stir-the-pot approach paid huge dividends, warding off tedium and generating powerful and vivid dramas. She also evinced a firm grasp of the work’s larger structures. Each of the four movements told its story in an organic and compelling manner.
And yet Zhang didn’t have her eyes only on the big picture. For all its collective sweep and large-scale turbulence, her reading contained just as much that was refined and nuanced, as well as virtuosity at the individual level.
So ethereal were the orchestra’s swirling woodwinds, the Spirit of the Alps they conjured in the second movement Thursday was almost physically palpable. Equally vivid were the personalities evoked by the whole ensemble in the Pastorale.
Manfred the poetic character does not survive. He transcends his agony in death. Manfred the Symphony, meanwhile, lives on, gloriously, via Zhang and the Cleveland Orchestra.
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