MIAMI, Fla. – No doubt about it: Miami loves the Cleveland Orchestra. Last week, however, the city responded even more warmly to the group’s guests.
And no wonder. No audience anywhere could have given the cold shoulder to performances like those given Thursday and Friday by violinist Nikolaj Znaider and cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Against such bold, impassioned and deeply personal readings, resistance was simply futile.
The orchestra’s reception wasn’t too shabby, either. The audience clearly knew brilliant Sibelius and Tchaikovsky when it heard them, and rewarded the ensemble and music director Franz Welser-Most with sustained ovations.
Say this about Yo-Yo Ma: There’s a reason he’s known everywhere, and it’s not just his charming name.
As all who heard him play the Dvorak Cello Concerto Friday at the Arsht Center in Miami can attest, he’s a dynamic and profoundly expressive artist, one who doesn’t so much play music as shape and sculpt it. He regards the score as raw material, something to be manipulated afresh on every occasion into a personal statement.
Give him a work like the Dvorak, which he surely has performed hundreds of times, and he’ll do as he did Friday. He’ll join the orchestra seamlessly and communicate with others as if he’s been there for years. He’ll bring out the best in his colleagues and give his own very best as well: lyricism of unparalleled sweetness and gusto without bounds.
He might even play an encore, as he did in Miami. In that case, he turned once more to Dvorak, to the composer’s “Silent Woods” for cello and orchestra.
Znaider isn’t quite the personality Yo-Yo Ma is. He wasn’t about to dance onstage with Welser-Most, as Ma did. Still, he was every bit as compelling in the Nielsen Violin Concerto. Where the cellist traversed territory that could be described as familiar, Znaider on Thursday whisked his crowd across a landscape widely unknown.
Mystery, in fact, seemed to be his mission. Even listeners who knew the score well probably hovered in suspense. His game wasn’t just jaw-dropping virtuosity. It was the studious avoidance of predictability, a refusal to utter any phrase the same way twice or lead the ear in any expected direction. The result was total immersion, an episode both relentlessly gripping and utterly beguiling.
Listeners in South Florida likely had no idea of the several tour performances and rehearsals that lay behind the account of Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2 they heard Thursday. All they know is what they encountered that night, a performance as cohesive, moving and brilliantly executed as they come. A work new to Welser-Most as recently as a few months ago now stands as a possible new calling-card.
Conductor and orchestra also were very much in their element Friday, in the works that preceded and came after Yo-Yo Ma’s Dvorak.
An encore on the Cleveland Orchestra’s tour last month in the Midwest, Smetana’s Overture to “The Bartered Bride” served Friday as the concert opener, and a vivacious one at that.
More in that vein then followed in Tchaikovsky’s “Capriccio Italien.” The showpiece to end all showpieces received from Welser-Most and crew an evocative and lilting performance, one that, like Ma and Znaider, would have been impossible not to admire.
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