Is anyone a Franz Welser-Möst fan? I mean really a huge fan? Some people hate him like anything, I've never quite understood that, but it's not like his performances ever give revelations among revelations.
Until now.... these new releases from the Cleveland Orchestra's new label are goddamn revelations, just about every one of them I've heard so far. The only truly mainstream work on them is Schubert 9, and it's one of the most magnificent Schubert 9's ever set down. Whatever else Welser-Möst is, he perfectly understands the oral tradition of native Austria: Schubert, Mozart, Bruckner, Haydn, Johann Strauss, it's all genuinely magnificent. I remember, years ago, a revelatory (of all things) Mozart 28, which the Cleveland Orchestra took on tour to DC, followed by a Pathetique which if not particularly Russian, was extraordinarily detailed and resembled the Mozart and Schumann Tchaikovsky so loved - I was put in mind of Markevitch and Dorati. The next day, the Carnagie Hall leg of that tour received a critical savaging by Anthony Tomasini in the New York Times, particularly that Mozart 28.
I also remember, during a summer I lived in London, a Zurich Opera concert performance of Die Meistersinger with Jose van Dam as Sachs that, again, played up Wagner's debt to predecessors like Mozart and Schubert. It was the fleetest, lightest Meistersinger anyone had ever heard. For those of us who are Wagner-skeptics, it was perfect. But again, it recieved a critical savaging for being so understated and uninterested in traditional dramatic notions. But the beauty of the Zurich Opera orchestra was unlike anything I'd ever heard, a perfectly euphonious klang for the German tradition. This was clearly both an extremely unorthodox maestro and also a talent to be reckoned with, however strange his results.
But it can't be denied, FWM has given incredibly diffident performances, probably hundreds of times. At 30 years old, he was given the absolutely impossible task of following Klaus Tennstedt. Nobody could have succeeded a cosmic rocket like that with success, and next to Tennstedt's ultra-weight and drama, nothing could have sounded more disappointing than FWM's ultra-transparency and litheness. FWM, mystifyingly, made more recordings in London than he has ever since, and only one of them in my experience is a real necessity. The Bruckner 5 is worthy of Furtwangler, it both strips Bruckner of the cumbersome weight that weighs his music down unnecessarily (particularly in the fugues), and its Tennstedt worthy sense of drama also shows just how indebted Bruckner was to Beethoven.
Many artists who show extraordinary promise are given everything much too early. Their failures are entirely in the public eye, they sink or swim, they have to learn music under the pressure of constant touring and too high expectations. Some, usually the studious type like Abbado/Haitink/Davis/Barenboim, thrived in that pressure, at least eventually, while other more virtuoso types like Maazel/Mehta/Ozawa/Dutoit never developed probity to go with their innate musicality. And nobody quite remembered why they were ever taken so seriously.
Nobody really knew why FWM took over Cleveland from Dohnanyi either. At one point, FWM was rumored in the New York Times to imminently take over a great lower profile American orchestra like the St. Louis Symphony, but a curious thing happened: for the better part of twenty years, FWM kept being savaged in the press, but everybody agreed that the Cleveland Orchestra was as wonderful as ever. FWM programs, were, if anything, even more adventurous than Dohnanyi's, and if broadcasts were any indication, he particularly thrived in those eclectic, unknown pieces, both new and old, where there was no precedent and he had one of the world's great orchestras at his disposal to sink their teeth into unknown music with relish. And he was a true music director: conducting something like 16-18 weeks a year at a time when other music directors were fly by night and rarely stayed with the orchestra more than 10 weeks.
In more traditional repertoire, FWM has been completely obscured by that Austrian contemporary of his, less than two hours to his west: Manfred Honeck, who's worked miracles in Pittsburgh and created the best American orchestra for traditional repertoire since, well... Dohnanyi in Cleveland. But Honeck is ultra-traditional, and ventures into more modern repertoire only occasionally, and by many accounts is terribly ill at ease in it, the very area where FWM is at his best. Perhaps the golden age conductor Honeck most resembles Eugen Jochum - a humble Catholic who unassumingly gets the standard repertoire from the inside, and whose humility belies an ultrapassionate temperament, and who paid attention to current repertoire only cursorily. But if Honeck is Jochum, perhaps FWM is a modern Leinsdorf, a musical 'general practitioner' who can prepare an excellent performance of literally anything at all. But whereas Leinsdorf was a thoroughly unattractive personality whose unpleasantness came through in the coldness of his musicmaking, FWM now seems almost unceasingly warm. Perhaps the understatement of the past belied a shyness and introversion, because his musicmaking now seems as downright poetic and probing as Brendel or Lupu on the piano.
But an amazing thing has happened: over twenty years honing his craft with perhaps the world's most out of the spotlight great orchestra, FWM has genuinely become something resembling a master. Most of it is, thankfully, unfamiliar repertoire, the world doesn't need another Brahms cycle. But listen to that Schubert 9: it makes you long for a complete Schubert cycle from them, and is worthy of the very best Schubert, including Dohnanyi, who made two of the very best recordings of that work. But Dohnanyi is a structuralist, perhaps most comfortable in more unassailably German music like Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms. He is a musician of impeccable taste who finds the perfect tempo, balance, dynamics, and generally views works from the outside in. FWM, ever the Austrian, comes at Schubert from the inside out. We're suddenly in the world of D. 959 and 960. The sheer amount of subtle rubato is mind-blowing, and I wonder if the only conductors who've found this much color in Schubert 9 are Harnoncourt and Bruno Walter.
FWM's Prokofiev 3 is unlike any other Prokofiev 3 I've ever heard. I'm a Prokofiev skeptic too, I find his music unpleasant of character, much of it is deliberately ugly noise, much of it is deliberately over-simple, and rarely does he seem to take on the sophisticated expressive challenges of Shostakovich. But this Prokofiev is music, not noise, color, not ugliness. At times Mahler, at times Debussy. It's the first time I ever thought to myself that I could love Prokofiev 3. And then there's the string arrangement of Op. 132: the not even 14 minute Heiliger Dankgesang is obviously a little too fast but many of the pianissimo passages are spent on the fingerboard, and have an overtone-laden luminosity in a way you never could hear from even the best quartets. It almost sounds like the Tallis Fantasia. And the Varese Ameriques is maybe the greatest this very difficult work has ever received - the clarity is absolutely unprecedented, even by Boulez and Chailly, and the softer grain shows that Varese has a true debt to Debussy. There's plenty else, mostly unfamiliar, that I particularly look forward to listening to.
Those who didn't have opportunity to hear him regularly would never expect FWM (you remember his nickname...) to exhibit this kind of mastery. It is a different kind of mastery than the ultradramatic virtuosity we expect from most conductors. It is a much more inward, lyrical musicmaking that you rarely get from conductors, usually you only hear this kind of poetry from soloists, but FWM always was a very different kind of conductor, and he has truly come into his own and reveals himself as a very very unique kind of maestro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzMTYkysSr8
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