CONSIDERED OPINION OF THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA CONCERT OF 1/17/08

Igor Stravinsky: Suite from Pulcinella; Suite from The Firebird (1919 version). Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466. Thomas Adés: Overture, Waltz, and Finale from Powder Her Face. (Radu Lupu, p.; Franz Welser-Möst, cond.)

Seven decades before Paris Hilton, there was Margaret Whigham—a beautiful and wealthy young socialite, famous for being famous, a superstar without portfolio. Those were slower-paced times. Unlike Paris, Whigham—by then Margaret, Duchess of Argyll—was nearly fifty years old before she had a public run-in with her own photographic image. Her husband had come to possess compromising Polaroids of Margaret and a man whose face was cut off by the pictures' top borders. During the lurid divorce proceedings that followed, the identity of the so called "headless man" became the subject of public speculation all across Britain. The magistrate hearing the case judged Margaret "a completely promiscuous woman" whose "attitude toward marriage was what moderns would call enlightened, but which in plain language was wholly immoral."

A good subject for opera, in other words. And so she proved when Thomas Adés used her life as the basis of his chamber opera Powder Her Face. Over a decade after Powder's composition, Adés has boiled down its music and expanded its instrumentation. The result is a fifteen-minute suite which receives its U.S. premiere at this weekend's Cleveland Orchestra concerts. Conductor Franz Welser-Möst and the Orchestra sound perfectly at home in Adés' sound world, with its brassy impudence and quick-changing diction. If you haven't encountered Powder in its CD or DVD incarnations, this is an excellent opportunity to sample an inventive and thoroughly accessible contemporary composition.

Igor Stravinsky's Pulcinella Suite, which opens this weekend's programs, is an ideal concert companion for Adés' jazzy musical palimpsest. Unfortunately, Thursday evening's reading sounded like an early rehearsal: heavy-footed, rhythmically uncertain, altogether unremarkable except for some nicely vivid textures in the Serenata movement. Welser-Möst fared far better with the same composer's 1919 Firebird Suite. Orchestral execution at this first performance didn't meet the standard set by the London Philharmonic on Welser-Möst's critically acclaimed recording of the complete ballet. But the occasional blemishes came nowhere near negating the effect of the variegated instrumental hues and bold dynamics.

I was a bit alarmed by the diffidence with which Welser-Möst and the Orchestra opened Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20. But when you heard Radu Lupu's approach to the work, the subdued accompaniment began to make sense. Lupu's interpretation might be described as a "late night" version of the Concerto: deeply introspective and darkly melancholic. Tense moments are quickly diffused and absorbed into the music's disconsolate undercurrents.

Sandwiching a performance of such marvelous intimacy between the bold statements of Adés and Stravinsky seems as if it must break some fundamental law of orchestral programming. But ultimately, as Paris Hilton wrote in Confessions of an Heiress, "The only rule is don't be boring and dress cute wherever you go."

Jerome Crossley for WCLV 104/9.

Considered Opinions is WCLV's program that reviews performances by Cleveland-area music ensembles. Commentator Jerome Crossley offers an informed and witty perspective on performances by groups that include the Cleveland Orchestra, Opera Cleveland, and Red {an orchestra}. Considered Opinions typically airs at 9.45 a.m., 12.20 p.m., and 5.20 p.m. the Friday following a Cleveland Orchestra concert, and it repeats at 9.45 a.m. on Saturday. Other air-times depend on the schedule of the ensembles reviewed.

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