The Cleveland Orchestra & Franz Welser-Möst

Helsinki Music Centre, Concert Hall
Thu 29.8.2024 19:00
Duration: 2h, intermission

The Cleveland Orchestra, one of the world’s most renowned symphony orchestras, will perform a second concert at Helsinki Festival. In addition to the previously announced concert, the orchestra will perform at Helsinki Music Centre on 29 August, featuring Sergei Prokofiev’s Second Symphony and Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique.

The Cleveland Orchestra, one of the world’s most prestigious symphony orchestras and one of the “Big Five” United States orchestras, returns to Finland for the first time in nearly 60 years. The orchestra, which has rarely visited the Nordic countries, last performed in Finland in 1965. 

Founded in 1918, the orchestra enters its 23rd season led by top Austrian conductor Franz Welser-Möst, who also led the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a memorable performance at the 2015 Helsinki Festival.

The Cleveland Orchestra is regarded as one of the world’s best orchestras, and in 2020, The New York Times named it the best in America. Under Welser-Möst, the orchestra has been honed to its technical and artistic peak.

First performed in Paris in 1925, Prokofiev’s Second Symphony is renowned for its rhythmic power and the influence of the European avant-garde of its time – Prokofiev himself described the work as a vision of “iron and steel”. 

Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique has established itself as one of the most important orchestral works of the 19th century. In this work, Berlioz pioneered new orchestral practices and techniques to achieve dreamlike and opium-infused visions previously unheard in Western music.

The Cleveland Orchestra
Franz Welser-Möst, conductor

Sergei Prokofiev: Symphony No. 2 in D minor, Op. 40
Hector Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14

Allegro ben articolato
Tema con variazioni

Prokofiev’s Second Symphony is a magnificent example of the craze for “machine music” that gripped composers in the 1920s. While musical depictions of a train whistle or the sound of an engine chugging had been represented in songs and piano pieces since their invention, the idea of noise as an aesthetic concept belongs wholly to the period after World War I, when mechanisms of progress and industrialization — including airplanes, motor cars, and factories — suddenly provided modernist composers with fresh sources of inspiration.

Machine music was, in many ways, in direct conflict with the ideals of 19th-century Romanticism and turn-of-the-century Impressionism. Its deliberate noisiness and its inescapably rhythmic beat were intoxicating elements — and a direct answer against earlier, lusher music.  

In Italy, composers explored non-musical noises, including foghorns, sirens, and whistles. Soviet composers were encouraged to applaud the work of hydroelectric dams and large-scale machines in the guise of orchestral music. In France, where Prokofiev was based during the decade, musicians favored making traditional instruments imitate clocks, hammers, and other mechanical tools. Maurice Ravel wrote an article titled “Finding Tunes in Factories.” 

American composer George Antheil toured London, Berlin, and Paris from 1922 to 1923, giving concerts that featured his compositions Mechanisms and Airplane Sonata. At the same time, Swiss composer Arthur Honegger was completing Pacific 231, which represents a mighty steam locomotive getting up to speed and braking to a halt. It first “pulled out of the station” at a concert in Paris on May 8, 1924, under the baton of Serge Koussevitzky, who would also lead the premiere of Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 2. 

Directly inspired by Honegger as well as new musical ideas and experimentation, Prokofiev composed his Second Symphony, describing it as a work “of iron and steel.” The music was clearly influenced by the era’s fascination with mechanistic rhythm and brutal noisiness.

This is music that is exhilarating and exciting. Its unrelenting rhythm, heavy textures, and loudness are reinforced by intense dissonance, with crunching harmony high in the trumpets, low in the trombones, or everywhere all at once. All in all, it is a virtuoso performance in audacity and cheek.

Much of the point was to signal that this is modern music. The year was 1925, and this was Prokofiev proving that he could be more advanced — or brutally noisy — than Stravinsky. That he too could shock the intelligentsia as well as the bourgeoisie.  

Of course, not even in the first movement can the heavy artillery keep firing throughout. There is a very short moment where the tempo slackens, and later, some longer moments where the texture thins. Yet with only one or two prominent thematic ideas — a downward glissando in the trumpets, the octave leaps in the violins — the music is powered not by conventional melody and keys, but by power itself. 

Why Prokofiev chose to model the second movement as a theme and variations is a mystery, for although it provides some welcome repose after the bludgeoning of the first movement, the new mood does not last — and soon again every opportunity for renewed violence is seized. (Some commentators have suggested Beethoven’s final piano sonata, Op. 111, provided a model in key structure and the use of a theme and variations format. Franz Welser-Möst says he is reminded of another Beethoven sonata, the “Hammerklavier,” Op. 106, for the kind of wild and audacious experimentation pursued in these two pieces.)

The musical theme of the second movement, begun by the oboe, is long and elegant, not unlike some motifs in Prokofiev’s later symphonies. Its comfortable harmony is welcome. In the first variation, the theme is heard in the lower strings, with delicate counterpoints wandering above and below it. The second variation is more inventive with some remarkable textures in the strings. In the third variation, a quicker tempo is reached. There are hints of forceful dissonance, but the temperature is largely under restraint. 

The fourth variation is a beautiful Larghetto. This is the last chance for our ears to enjoy a peaceful resolution, because the fifth variation brings back madcap activity and crunching dissonance. Things intensify even more in the sixth variation, which builds to the most overwhelmingly brutal climax of all. In the midst of such turmoil, the theme is still heard, shouted out by trumpets and horns. This return of the theme offers much needed consolation, and the music ends on a magically mysterious chord in the strings, played pianissimo.      

Text: Hugh Macdonald

“Rêveries – Passions” (Daydreams – passions) – C minor/C major
“Un bal” (A ball) – A major
“Scène aux champs” (Scene in the country) – F major
“Marche au supplice” (March to the scaffold) – G minor
“Songe d’une nuit du sabbat” (Dream of a night of the sabbath) – C minor/C major

When a New York newspaper in 1868 described Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique as “a nightmare set to music,” it was meant to be an insult. Yet this was exactly what Berlioz intended — not that the critic should have a miserable evening, but that the listener should grasp the nightmarish agonies of the composer’s own experience.  

Of Berlioz’s suffering there can be no doubt. One has only to read his letters from 1829 (when Berlioz was 25 years old) to glimpse the torment of a composer whose mind was bursting with musical ideas and whose heart was bleeding.  

The object of his passion was an Irish actress, Harriet Smithson, whom Berlioz had seen on the stage two years before in the roles of Juliet and Ophelia. Since then, he had viewed her only at a distance, while she was still unaware of his very existence. How was this all-consuming passion to be expressed? His first thought, naturally enough, was a dramatic Shakespearean work, perhaps Romeo and Juliet, for which he composed, it seems, a few movements. He then set several of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies to music, evoking the land of her birth. Once he had encountered Beethoven’s symphonies, especially the “Eroica” (which impressed him just as strongly as Shakespeare), he liked the idea of writing a Beethovenian symphony — excluding the customary triumphant ending that found no parallel in his own world.  

The dilemma was resolved early in 1830 when he was informed, evidently by a new aspirant to the role of lover, that Harriet was free and easy with her favors and in no way worthy of the exalted passion that consumed him day and night. Now, he suddenly realized, he could represent this dramatic episode in his life as a symphony, with a demonic, orgiastic finale in which both he and she are condemned to hell.

The symphony was speedily written down in little more than three months and performed for the first time later that year. It became a main item in Berlioz’s many concerts in the 1830s, for each of which he issued a printed program explaining the symphony’s narrative.  

Although the symphony is explicitly about an artist and his beloved, it borrows from Romeo and Juliet and more obviously from his own obsession with Harriet. Even after Berlioz had, by a strange irony, met and married Harriet Smithson three years later, the symphony’s dramatic program remained. There are few similar episodes to this extraordinary tale of love blooming in real life after it had been violently repudiated and exorcized in a work of art.

All five movements contain a single recurrent musical theme, the idée fixe, or obsession, which represents the artist’s love and is transformed according to the context in which the artist finds his beloved. After a slow introduction (“Reveries”), which depicts “the sickness of the soul, the flux of passion, the unaccountable joys and sorrows … before he saw his beloved,” the idée fixe is heard as the main theme of the opening movement’s Allegro section (“Passions”), with violins and flute lightly accompanied by sputtering lower strings. The surge of passion is aptly described in the later volcanic eruptions of the first movement, although it ends in an unexpected picture of religious consolation.

In the second movement (“A Ball”), the artist glimpses the beloved in a crowd of whirling dancers.  In the third movement (“Scene in the Country”), two shepherds call to each other on their pipes, with the music depicting the stillness of a summer evening in the country, the artist’s passionate melancholy, the wind caressing the trees, and the agitation caused by the beloved’s appearance.  At the end, the lone shepherd’s pipe is answered only by the rumble of distant thunder.

In his despair, the artist has poisoned his beloved and is condemned to death. The fourth movement portrays the “March to the Scaffold,” as he is led to the guillotine before the raucous jeers of the crowd. In his last moments, he sees the beloved’s image (the idée fixe in the clarinet’s most piercing range) before the blade falls.  

In the final movement (“Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath”), the artist finds himself a spectator at a sinister gathering of specters and weird, mocking monsters of every kind. The idée fixe appears, horribly distorted, bells toll, the religious Dies irae motif is coarsely intoned by tubas (originally written for ophicleide, a lower-pitched keyed bugle created in 1817) and bassoons, and the witches’ round-dance gathers momentum. Eventually the dance and the Dies irae join together and the symphony ends in a riot of brilliant orchestral sound.

For nearly two centuries, Symphonie fantastique has remained a classic document of the Romantic imagination and a great virtuoso piece for orchestra. Berlioz’s uncanny grasp of the orchestra’s potential charge at so early an age kindled his novel writing, particularly for brass and percussion. This is also evident in the second movement where a solo cornet evokes the ballroom music of his day and harps are introduced into the symphony orchestra for the first time, while the finale calls for bells and the squeaky high-pitched E-flat clarinet. The ophicleide (which is often replaced in modern performances by tuba, as with The Cleveland Orchestra’s performances) was relished by Berlioz for its coarse tone in such demonic contexts as this.

It is curious to reflect that much of this shockingly new symphony’s musical material was drawn from earlier compositions. For instance, the main melody of the third movement was originally the main theme of a movement in Berlioz’s early Messe solennelle, and the “March to the Scaffold” was rescued from an unperformed opera called Les francs-juges.  

In addition, it is probable that the ballroom music was originally meant for Berlioz’s aborted Roméo et Juliette. If so, its new function in the symphony is strikingly apt since Romeo’s first glimpse of Juliet at the Capulets’ ball is exactly how Berlioz imagined the artist seeing his unhappy, doomed “beloved” — and not unlike his own experience on first seeing Harriet perform on stage. 

Symphonie fantastique remains the most potent example in music of the Romantic spirit in full flood, melding music, literature, poetry, imagination, and personal experience into a sensational drama — a drama of the senses and of uninhibited emotion, bursting with life.

Text: Hugh Macdonald

Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation

The Cleveland Orchestra thanks these corporations and individuals for generously supporting the ensemble’s tour performances: Raiffeisenlandesbank Oberösterreich, Jones Day, Dr. and Mrs. Wolfgang Berndt, Drs. Wolfgang and Gabi Eder, Dr. and Mrs. Robert Ehrlich, Mr. and Mrs. Michael Gröller, Dr. and Mrs. Herbert Kloiber, Miba AG and Dr. and Mrs. Peter Mitterbauer, Park-Ohio Holdings, SPÄNGLER PRIVATSTIFTUNG, Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Umdasch, and Susanne Wamsler and Paul Singer.