The Oberlin Review
<< Front page Arts February 18, 2005

Finney goes wild for Oliver Knussen

My father likes to call his time asleep at the orchestra his “beauty sleep.” It’s true: sometimes the gentle soothing chords of the orchestra, the serious yet non-threatening manner of musicians and maestros alike, the calm, steady coughs and concentration of the audience add up to quite a nice doze, complete with sweet dreams and the occasional musical wandering. However, this becomes quite a problem, when instead of your average timid, elderly conductor, you have a musical and literal giant who towers several feet over the orchestra — suit buttons pushing and straining at every gesture, hair flapping across a serious and determined face. He stands before the audience grasping his baton like a piece of kindling ready to snap, with a beard that flares out in all directions with wild abandon.

Not your average classical musician, composer/conductor Oliver Knussen led the Cleveland Orchestra in a concert at Finney Chapel last Friday featuring an eclectic assortment of old and new works, stretching from the prickly and otherworldly to the sweet and standard. Knussen is a golden boy of classical music, having premiered his first symphony when he was just 15 and gaining fame in the ’80s with an operatic version of the children’s book Where The Wild Things Are. Standing before the orchestra, Knussen quite uncannily resembled one of the wild things from his opera, an imposing but lovable guide to the evening: your friendly neighborhood giant ready to start a musical rumpus. The concert featured two works by living composers, one of which was Knussen’s Violin Concerto, written in 2002. (Supposedly it is an unspoken rule in orchestral circles never to have more than one work by a living composer on a concert or you’ll scare your audience, so this was a unique, enterprising and potentially disastrous idea.)

The concert began with two pieces by Chopin, orchestrated by Igor Stravinsky. The pieces were cheerful and lively, occasionally displaying Chopin’s dark side. In the second piece, the Grande Valse Brillante, the orchestra began to do some strange things, mixing slaps of the bow with little darts out of the trumpets, and the character of the waltz turned modern and jaunty. The influence of Stravinsky was starting to show and the piece seemed to evoke a theme that echoed throughout the concert, which could be summarized as, “Watch how the orchestra has changed and is changing, how new sounds are being discovered and expanded...”

The two middle pieces were the Concerto for Orchestra by 47-year-old Magnus Lindberg and Knussen’s Violin Concerto. The two works both pushed the boundaries of orchestral color and style. The Concerto for Orchestra was a flashy, energetic piece, mixing different sections of the orchestra like separate chamber groups to create a cacophony out of smaller, more intimate structures. Imagine walking through the practice rooms in the Conservatory and trying to capture the rhythmic and melodic complexity of all that, well, noise. Shape this a little bit more, pull out what you like and add some fantastic orchestral effects, and you get a glimpse into Lindberg’s work. The music moved through dense swirling textures, letting the occasional major chord, trumpet fanfare or a bossa nova rhythm float to the surface and renew the listener’s curiosity and interest.

The violin concerto was more melodic than the Lindberg piece, played by concertmaster William Preucil with a lyrical and deep sound that added a certain comfort to the floating and ethereal piece. The orchestra took a back seat to the soloist in this work, providing a sparse accompaniment to Knussen’s long, flowing violin lines and frequent edgy, yet sweet, high notes. Both of the modern pieces ended softly, shortly after the unexpected reassurance of some kind of major or minor chord: the Lindberg in an eerie, uncertain chorale that slowly decayed and the Knussen more decisively with a jazzy, dissonant feel.

The concert was rounded out with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol, an orchestral showpiece that is designed to make the orchestra sound bright, wonderful and energetic. When the last major chord was struck, the crowd erupted with cheers, soaking in the exuberance and clarity of this glorious ending.

In some ways the whole concert played out like a journey from tonality to some other world and back again. If the endings to the modern pieces seemed strange and uncertain, the Capriccio was overflowing with a sense of completeness. It wouldn’t have sounded the same without the strangeness and freshness of the modern pieces. Against these more tonal works, the listener could truly hear the colors and shapes expanding in the newer works.

The orchestra demonstrated flawless playing and an incredible amount of energy in the modern pieces. It’s not every day that you get to go to the orchestra and see musicians not only taking themselves seriously, but also enjoying themselves, loving and attacking the music with an abandon that only musicians and wild things can muster.