United States Summearrs at Severance 2024 [1]: Inon Barnatan (piano), Cleveland Orchestra / Oksana Lyniv (conductor). Mandel Live performance Corridor at Severance Music Heart, Cleveland, 11.7.2024. (MSJ)
Janáček – Suite from The Crafty Little Vixen (compiled by Sir Charles Mackerras)
Rachmaninoff – Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
Liatoshynsky – Grazhyna, Op.58
Stravinsky – Suite from The Firebird (1919 model)
Encore: Silvestrov, ‘Serenade’, Op.305, No.6
Operating parallel to the Cleveland Orchestra’s Blossom Music Pageant in the course of the summer season season are a handful of live shows that happen downtown on the orchestra’s fundamental house, Severance Music Heart. This sequence kicked off with an admirable program carried out by Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv in her Cleveland Orchestra debut, with a blazing visitor soloist in Inon Barnatan. This system mixed vivid performances in a mixture of outdated favorites, one thing acquainted in a brand new association and one thing utterly new to Cleveland.
One of many acquainted issues was Rachmaninoff’s ‘Paganini Rhapsody’, however it got here in a efficiency so stuffed with depraved wit and harmonic perception that it felt freshly minted. To do the rating justice, a efficiency wants sharp reflexes, daredevil virtuosity and unstoppable nervous vitality. Israel-born pianist Barnatan had these components after which some, however what took this efficiency to a brand new stage was the best way he has clearly examined Rachmaninoff’s twisted piano half and harmonically untangled it, typically exposing inside strains that helped form the place the music was going. This can be a vastly vital ingredient that’s all too typically missed within the teeming blur of exercise of twenty-four variations obsessive about each Paganini’s twenty-fourth caprice and the medieval ‘Dies Irae’ loss of life chant. Barnatan explored the piece’s vary from essentially the most mischievous snaps to the melting launch of rigidity within the eighteenth variation to the near-oblivion of the closing pages, and he made all of it really feel inevitable.
That eighteenth variation achieved true distinction as a result of, first, Barnatan set it up with an unearthly crawl by the harmonically unstable previous variation, however then he and Lyniv resisted the urge to go for over-the-top lushness within the eighteenth. As an alternative, they gave it a private, even hesitant tenderness. Even as soon as the complete financial institution of strings got here in, Lyniv formed it to sing as an alternative of simply wallowing in it. It gave the variation success with out ever fairly letting go of the trauma lurking simply past its borders, so quickly to return with an exhilarating vengeance.
In an exquisite nod to each the conductor and present occasions, Barnatan responded to the viewers’s rapturous ovation with a really completely different encore, a tremulous ‘Serenade’ by Valentyn Silvestrov, the distinguished Ukrainian composer who needed to flee the Russian invasion and is at the moment sheltering in Berlin. Tender and pensive, the piece ended irresolutely, as devastating a metaphor for this world proper now as could possibly be imagined.
Oksana Lyniv introduced one thing utterly new as a part of her efforts to advertise worldwide the music of her Ukrainian compatriots. Borys Liatoshynsky was a barely older modern of Dmitri Shostakovich, and his moody Grazhyna felt much like a number of the later warscapes of Shostakovich’s Symphonies Nos.11, 12 and 13, besides that this work got here first. Thus, a few of Liatoshynsky’s influences should be thought to incorporate the tone poems of Liszt and Tchaikovsky, maybe Janáček’s Taras Bulba and Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky. It recounts the historic story of Ukrainian princess Grazhyna, who’s livid when her brother invitations Teutonic knights to confer about becoming a member of forces to assault different lands. She steals her brother’s armor and leads a shock assault towards the Teutons. Too late, her brother realizes his error and joins the battle, however not quickly sufficient to stop Grazhyna’s loss of life. After a procession to Grazhyna’s funeral pyre, her brother flings himself into the flames.
The piece began with a quietly writhing line within the violas and constructed rigidity from there till erupting in a scene of battle. The next funeral march treaded ominously, with a shifting lament performed eloquently on the English horn. The tip of the piece collapsed again right down to the disconsolate viola line, paying homage to the shut of the primary motion of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, however much more bleak right here. Lyniv led with a positive hand by the work’s twenty-minute unfolding, and the orchestra savored the chance to play such however little-known piece. It was obtained warmly.
Extra acquainted however in unfamiliar type was the suite organized by Sir Charles Mackerras from the primary act of Janáček’s The Crafty Little Vixen. We occur to know that work effectively right here in Cleveland, because of a spectacular manufacturing that the orchestra did with music director Franz Welser-Möst in 2014 and once more in 2017 (and I hope that it’ll return at the least as soon as extra earlier than Welser-Möst departs Cleveland in 2027!). In his observe in this system, commentator Tanner Cassidy wryly poses the query concerning the opera: ‘[I]s it optimistic and comedian or pessimistic and tragic?’ The very best reply is ‘sure’, and Lyniv didn’t hesitate to discover the always shifting moods of the piece, like dapples of shade in a sunlit forest. One might argue that Mackerras’s association is a bit of rambling, operating from one favourite second to the following, however the moments are candy, and it’s good to listen to them once more, even outdoors the context of the complete work.
Final, however not least, was Lyniv’s balletic dealing with of the 1919 suite from Stravinsky’s The Firebird. She began with a daringly sluggish tempo, however sustained it till the music turned brighter, buoyed alongside the best way by excellent solos, together with Frank Rosenwein on oboe. King Katschei’s dance was punchy and fierce, with the brass given a bit of extra room to roar than they’re often allowed round right here, adopted by a spellbound Berceuse. The Finale was dispatched briskly, with a grand slowing for the ultimate peroration.
Mark Sebastian Jordan
