Review Cleveland Orchestra — All Brahms concert with Julia Fischer and Franz Welser-Möst (January 9) by Daniel Hathaway Circled by video cameras — including a giraffe-like "jib" that hovered ominously over the front seats on stage right — Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra played 3'$
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eventual release on DVD and television and over the course of four days, the concerts would include two different over- tures and symphonies and four iterations of the violin con- certo. Thursday's concert featured works written in the seven-year period between 1878 and 1885: the Academic Festival Overture, the Violin Concerto, and the Symphony No. 4 in e minor. Sometimes concert programs are designed to challenge the audience or to juxtapose works in interesting and revelatory ways. Sometimes — as in a retrospective art exhibi- tion — programs are curated for the sheer pleasure of enjoying a body of work brought 3.&$3'$1
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a conductor and ensemble who know instinctively how to bring out the essence of 1 ',2
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grumpy. In Thursday's lean and expressive readings, the composer's novel variations on classical forms, textures and techniques came clearly to the fore, and revealed his infre- 04$-3
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honorary university degree, he responded with an overture seeded with student drinking songs. Welser-Möst and the orchestra gave an unhurried, understated reading of the Aca- demic Festival Overture that revealed its good-hearted humor and downplayed the rau- cousness of its borrowed themes. At one point, while Gaudeamus igitur was holding forth (-
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sound craggy and disjunct, but Julia Fischer turned it into a longer line which infused the whole movement with purpose and direction. In many ways, the fourth symphony was the star of the program and Welser-Möst and the 1"'$231
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Published on ClevelandClassical.com January 14, 2014