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FESTIVAL REVIEW
Festival Orchestra George Cleve July 30, 2006
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A Symphony in Three Acts
By Alexander Kahn
The First Congregational Church in Berkeley is one of those spaces that inspires either joy or terror in a performing ensemble. In a hall like this, everything can be heard. If performers have nothing to hide, the space is a pleasure; if there are any weak links, they are brutally exposed. Fortunately, no such weak links were audible at a performance by the Midsummer Mozart Festival Orchestra on Sunday. Under the direction of George Cleve, the ensemble delivered a moving and polished performance of the last three Mozart symphonies.
In a program note, Music Director Cleve compared the symphonies (Nos. 39, 40, and 41) to a "three-act opera ... when performed together, they express an incredibly operatic arc of optimism, tragedy, and redemption in three acts." Cleve's comparison is an apt one, as these symphonies are filled with music that echoes Mozart's late operas: The opening of Symphony No. 39, in E-flat Major, has a direct correlation with the Masonic music in The Magic Flute; the second movement of Symphony No. 41 brings to mind the second act of The Marriage of Figaro. Cleve's interpretations emphasized the vocal character in each of these works by consistently bringing the melodic line to the forefront and muting the accompaniment — no small task in a hall like this. For the most part this balance was felicitous, although the winds and brass (especially the trumpets) played tentatively at climactic moments, when a melodic line might have given way to a mass of sound.
Cleve was also highly effective in evoking the different moods of these three symphonies. No. 39 was stately and warm, with a rich sound quality that never became edgy or bombastic. The performance of No. 40 was an about-face, introducing a certain edginess. Cleve emphasized the darker aspects of the score, drawing attention to the almost Brahmsian rhythmic displacements throughout the piece, as well as the strident third-movement minuet, which is more emotionally fraught than any minuet in the entire symphonic literature. In the last symphony, the final movement was particularly compelling, as the orchestra maneuvered through Mozart's contrapuntal wizardry. A performance of all three symphonies in one evening feels operatic in another sense: It was a long and tiring program, especially for the first and second violins, who performed their difficult runs with admirable execution. Sunday's concert was the final night of four performances of these works, and fatigue seemed to have set in by the time Symphony No. 41 was performed. This fatigue was not helped by the tempi Cleve chose throughout the program, which tended to be on the slow side. Although Mozart's music can work at a variety of speeds, some of the forward momentum was lost in the slower movements. The sparkle and ironic wit in the first movement of Symphony No. 41 would have been better served by a faster pace.
(Alexander Kahn is a Ph.D. candidate in music history and literature at UC Berkeley, where his research is focused on the Hollywood émigrés. He is also the assistant conductor of the Oakland Civic and the UC Berkeley symphony orchestras.)
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George Cleve
