The Cleveland Orchestra @ Severance Hall, 11/19/09

Let’s get the new music out of the way first. It’s hard to say anything definitive about a work only heard once, but a quick first impression of the world premiere of Julian Anderson’s “Fantasias” is that it’s a lively exploration of the orchestra’s considerable sonic talents as lead by guest conductor Jonathan Nott.

The work’s form reminded me of T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” after it had been edited by Ezra Pound (who suggested that Eliot tear apart and assemble at random the original version). For example, in the first movement every other note of Anderson’s work reminded me of Bernstein’s “Cool” from “West Side Story” (when the Jets are told to “be cool”).

A bright spot came next when Alisa Weilerstein, soloist in Dvorak’s “Cello Concerto in B minor,” sensitively combined the work’s lyric and strident passages into a coherent and striking performance. Viewers of HBO’s Mad Men might recognize the sad urgent pulse in title theme that the Orchestra splendidly brought out in the second movement of the Dvorak work.

Conducting without a score, Nott then led the orchestra in a memorable version of Richard Strauss’s “Also sprach Zarathustra” that showed the work as so much more than the oft-invoked “2001, A Space Odyssey” passage. In it one can hear germs of melody and structure that Strauss will pack into later, fuller works such as “Salome” and “Der Rosenkavalier.”

It’s a promise of genius to come and a delight in and of itself. Overall, it truly was a win-win evening and one of the best concerts of the fall season.

Laura Kennelly is a freelance arts journalist, a member of the Music Critics Association of North America, and an associate editor of BACH, a scholarly journal devoted to J. S. Bach and his circle.

Listening to and learning more about music has been a life-long passion. She knows there’s no better place to do that than the Cleveland area.