Fridays@7 @ Severance Hall 11/20/09

It is clear that metropolitan Cleveland has enthusiastically embraced the laid-back, user-friendly concept of the Cleveland Orchestra’s new-this-year Friday’s at 7 programming. This time around we had balcony seats, where we could look down and see all the musicians on stage, the sublime silvery environment in which they play, and also appreciate both the full house (packed to the rafters in the nosebleed section and everywhere else too) and the diversity of the surrounding audience, from the knowledgeable young music students sitting in front of us with their almost participatory enthusiasm, especially for the concert’s second piece, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, to the youngish middle aged woman who came late, towing her date, a man obviously not-too-friendly-to-the-orchestral-experience, who argued, after it was all over, how easy must be the conductor’s job (“I could do that. Look! I can wave my arms like this … and then this! What’s the big deal?”).

It’s a big deal to pry an opening in the door of high-culture resistance, and Fridays’ at 7 does this wonderfully well.

This particular Friday at 7 concert presented two works, Antonin Dvorak’s “Cello Concerto in B minor,” with native Clevelander Alisa Weilerstein in the soloist role, and Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” both late Romantic works, but monumentally different from each other. The Dvorak Cello Concerto offers a 3 movement ‘conversation’ between Weilerstein as solo cellist and a selectively limited orchestral complement. Weilerstein’s playing is rich, warm, vibrant, subtle, emotional, tender, individual, and complex, which all sounds contradictory but is not, and the orchestra and occasional soloists meet her with an equal voice (one would think it would be easy for the orchestra to overpower a single low voiced cello but - here’s the conductor’s important role - it is really pretty hard to imagine anyone overpowering Ms. Weilerstein.).

Whereas the Strauss seems to put the climatic music ass-backwards so to speak, in the beginning (with which everyone is familiar, thanks to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”), and thereafter one is lost in a kaleidoscope of uninterrupted symphonic sound in which individual voices speak only briefly before disappearing back into the whole. To change the experience to another visual (rather than an aural) one, imagine a summer day dawning with a spectacular sunrise, giving way to a blue sky thickly studded with many swift running white clouds. Occasionally there are openings where more blue sky shows through, or one cloud briefly takes an individual shape before quickly melting back into a whole, but it is the experience of the whole rather than the parts which is memorable and moving.

We have a musician friend who thinks “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” is not worth listening to after the climatic opening, but the young musicians around us in the balcony obviously did not feel this way.

As usual with the Fridays @ 7 series, after the 2 works, dressed down, no-intermission orchestra concert, departing concert-goers found a second post-concert concert in progress in the 2-story lobby. This time it was world music and jazz percussionist Jamey Haddad (Cleveland born) who had invited some of his favorite colleagues to join him in performing, one of whom was Weilerstein, again displaying her virtuosity, in this chaotically informal setting. Haddad soon had the audience enjoying participating through complex clapped rhythms.

Photo by Roger Mastroianni

From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas. Elsa and Vic are both longtime Clevelanders. Elsa is a landscape designer. She studied ballet as an avocation for 2 decades. Vic has been a dancer and dance teacher for most of his working life, performing in a number of dance companies in NYC and Cleveland. They write about dance as a way to learn more and keep in touch with the dance community. E-mail them at vicnelsaATearthlink.net.