United States ‘Ohlsson Performs Mozart’: Garrick Ohlsson (piano), Cleveland Orchestra / Franz Welser-Möst (conductor). Mandel Live performance Corridor at Severance Music Heart, Cleveland, 30.10.2025. (MSJ)
Tyler Taylor – Permissions
Mozart – Piano Concerto No.23 in A serious, Okay.488
Encore: Chopin – Waltz No.2 in C-sharp minor, Op.64
R. Schumann – Symphony No.3 in E-flat main, Op.97, ‘Rhenish’
Tyler Taylor nearly deleted the e-mail inviting him to turn into the Cleveland Orchestra’s subsequent Daniel R. Lewis composing fellow. He hadn’t utilized for any such place, and he thought that possibly the e-mail was a phishing spam making an attempt to hook a naïve composer. Seems, it was the actual factor. Composers don’t apply for this place; reasonably, the Cleveland Orchestra conducts a secret search each three years and identifies a composer for the residency after analyzing the work of many potential figures.
Taylor, nonetheless in his early thirties, is an American composer greatest recognized for his work with the Louisville Orchestra, although the work receiving its Cleveland premiere on this live performance, Permissions, was his dissertation at Indiana College. The composer’s said function was to provide the often-subverted elements of the orchestra – wind and percussion – permission to steer from the again of the stage, although the identify additionally applies to how all of the orchestral devices are dealt with, permitting some ingenious touches.
With its first gestural flourish, the listener is likely to be forgiven for pondering that Permissions will likely be simply one other in an extended line of noisy, high-modernist summary items premiered after which rapidly forgotten. What so typically goes incorrect with this form of work is {that a} composer posits him- or herself a mad scientist with the orchestra as laboratory. They throw some random elements collectively, it fails to ignite after which crumples all the way down to a sullen, irritating mass of sound that nobody a lot cares to play or hear once more. All longtime listeners have heard dozens of such works.
However what do you do when the mad scientist really triggers some form of fusion? That’s precisely what occurs in Permissions, formidably educational and gestural although it might be. It goes someplace. Issues occur. Although not historically tonal, Taylor nonetheless offers long-held pitches that function tonal orientation factors. Lots of reactions construct up and fade, offered right here with equal elements fierceness and stylish poise by the gamers of the Cleveland Orchestra. However as these waves of motion rise and fall, it doesn’t really feel just like the piece is working in a vacuum. It’s progressing by way of its personal world, and the happenings trigger reactions that remodel the encompassing soundscape. Then the piece punched by way of to a unprecedented closing part, the place conductor Franz Welser-Möst froze, not conducting, because the strings slowly, softly slid up and out, because the dissipating sounds had been punctured by tightly self-coordinated strikes from the percussion. One might really feel the stress rise like a chill on the again of 1’s neck, left unresolved on the finish. The reception was enthusiastic.
It’s attention-grabbing that Welser-Möst is making the selection of such a difficult composer for his remaining choice for the orchestra’s Daniel R. Lewis fellowship, which is able to final a yr past Welser-Möst’s tenure. The query needs to be requested, is there sufficient of a musical training construction left in US public education to help an experimental composer’s explorations? To that finish, Taylor has instantly indicated an curiosity in enterprise applications to work with native faculty youngsters throughout this residency, to supply them the chance to allow their imaginations to take flight. And this demonstration of his capacity to show orchestral chemistry experiments right into a compelling narrative affords promise of attention-grabbing issues to return.
Following such a bit with a Mozart concerto makes the grace of the previous music really feel cleansed and refreshed, notably with an august soloist corresponding to the good Garrick Ohlsson available. I don’t know if it was Ohlsson’s request, however the orchestral strings had been intriguingly lowered for this efficiency of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.23, opposite to Welser-Möst’s regular observe of utilizing a full brace of strings in classical-period items. The discount labored completely for this efficiency, permitting each woodwind particulars to percolate up by way of the string mattress and Ohlsson to dialogue with everybody concerned with out having to beef up his sound to journey over a financial institution of strings.
Certainly, Ohlsson, contemporary off chairing the jury on the XIX Worldwide Chopin Piano Competitors in Warsaw, was restrained, discovering an nearly conversational tone in his Mozart, harking back to Artur Schnabel’s approach with the music. Ohlsson had little interest in calculating attraction or swooning over Mozart’s extra beautiful moments. As an alternative, he made his piano converse plainly, letting the music work its magic with out begging for consideration, the primary motion culminating in Mozart’s surviving cadenza, which is as transferring as it’s virtuosic. Ohlsson’s method was much more affecting within the second motion Adagio, the place his piano line sang. The finale was lithe and versatile, the orchestra underneath Welser-Möst matching the pianist at each flip.
Coming off that Chopin competitors, one might need thought Ohlsson could possibly be uninterested in Chopin, however he used his encore of the Waltz No.2 in C-sharp minor as a compact textbook on methods to discover Chopin. He balanced the sense of dance with the poise of Chopin’s bel canto melodies, delivering each iteration of the whirling second theme in a unique method, one flowing, one staccato, one slower, one discovering buried countermelodies within the left hand. Solely a minor thumb slip prevented perfection, proving that even greatness is topic to human fallibility.
Talking of human fallibility, Robert Schumann’s Symphony No.3 is an endearing combination of brilliant imagery, unsure scoring, intimate heat and troubling shadows. That Schumann supposed it to be an image postcard of the Rhine river valley, the place he and his household had moved for Schumann to take a conducting job, was his said goal. And, on the floor, the piece is brighter and jollier than most of his works. However it has a approach of harmonically side-slipping, a approach of turning melodically inward, that implies there’s extra right here than the floor. This duality results in a variety of efficiency approaches, from aggressively brilliant to somberly restrained.
Characteristically, Franz Welser-Möst embraced neither method and charted his personal path between the extremes. As an alternative of making an attempt to push the primary motion to Beethovenian brusqueness, Welser-Möst saved it relaxed, at occasions wistful. He didn’t let the frequent tremolo string passages sound manic, nor did he clean over their nervous judders. It was an method emphasizing Schumann’s tender heat with out ignoring the frequent shadows that peek across the edges of the brightness. The second motion saved dancing alongside even because it turned wistful, whereas the mild third motion was tender with out turning valuable. He neither exaggerated nor averted the somber trombone chorale of the fourth motion, then turned with out pause to the finale, embracing its pleasure with out pushing it. Certainly, he supplied a flexibility not at all times heard on this half, permitting it to really feel like an escape from the earlier motion’s gloom with out forgetting the place it has been. For the report, Welser-Möst spoke in a pre-concert speak earlier than the start of the season as if he had by no means carried out Schumann’s Third earlier than. Whereas he hasn’t carried out it beforehand in Cleveland, he most actually did conduct it in London a few years in the past, the place he recorded it with the London Philharmonic. That efficiency, nevertheless, pales as compared with the humane heat of his dealing with of Schumann now, so it hardly counts.
Whoever finally ends up following Welser-Möst because the Cleveland Orchestra’s subsequent music director, allow us to hope they be aware of the intriguing programming, each difficult and beguiling, that has marked the height years of his tenure. It has constructed up an viewers that may respect every part from the grace of Mozart to the pioneering analysis of Tyler Taylor.
Mark Sebastian Jordan
Featured Picture: Garrick Ohlsson performs Mozart with the Cleveland Orchestra © Yevhen Gulenko/Human Artist Pictures
