Cleveland Orchestra Performs "From the House of the Dead"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 21 March 2025 13:56

Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Fadi Kheir

At the wonderful Stern Auditorium, on the night of Tuesday, March 18th, I had the great pleasure to attend a terrific concert presented by Carnegie Hall—the first of two on consecutive days—featuring the amazing Cleveland Orchestra under the superlative direction of Franz Welser-Möst.

The event started fabulously with a dazzling account of Ludwig van Beethoven’s magnificent, incredibly famous Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67. The initial, Allegro con brio movement is dramatic, stirring, even exhilarating, while the ensuing Andante con moto is stately on the whole, with some almost pastoral passages—the music gradually intensifies, becoming more playful briefly near the movement’s end. The relatively brief Allegro that follows is forceful with an awesome, fugue-like section, succeeded by a slower, more tentative episode. The stunning, Allegro finale is exuberant and exultant, but with quieter, graceful interludes; it concludes triumphantly.

A highlight of the evening was the first work in the second half of the concert: an excellent rendition of the seldom played, marvelous, superbly orchestrated Suite from Leoš Janáček’s opera—first performed in 1930—From the House of the Dead. According to Hugh Macdonald’s useful notes on the program, “In 1979, conductor František Jílek devised an orchestral suite from three sections of the work.” He adds that, “The first movement is the opera’s Prelude.” Marked Moderato, it has some folk-like elements, and is kaleidoscopic and ultimately mesmerizing. Macdonald then explains that: 

The second movement is music that accompanies a play within the opera in Act II. The prisoners are working outside on the construction of a riverboat. On an improvised stage, they perform two plays, mostly in mime. The first is the Don Juan story, with the Don being carried off by devils at the end, and the second is “The Miller’s Beautiful Wife,” based on a short story by Gogol about a wife who hides her lovers around the room while her husband is away. The last lover turns out to be Don Juan, who dances off with the miller’s wife before the flames consume him.

An Andante, the movement is again variegated, even heterogeneous, but once more bewitching in its ingenuity and imagination—it finishes unexpectedly. The annotator concludes: 

The last movement represents the original ending of the opera. Alexandr Petrovic, the leader of the group of prisoners, is to be released along with an eagle that the prisoners caught earlier. There is a sense of freedom and triumph, even though, at the close, the prison guards order the remaining prisoners back to work.

Also with a Moderato tempo, some of this has affinities with musical Impressionism—it closes brilliantly.

The night finished satisfyingly with an exceptional realization of Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3, Op. 72b, from 1806—its performance surpassed the recent one of the New York Philharmonic conducted by Marin Alsop. The annotator records that:

[ … ] the three Leonore overtures are incorrectly numbered, misnumbered when they were published, and not, as it turns out, in the order in which they were written. No. 2 was the first Beethoven wrote, No. 3 the second, and No. 1 the third, all to some extent sharing musical material. The Fidelio Overture itself, quite different from the others, came last.

He says further:

By common consent, No. 3 is the finest as a self-supporting concert work, although in the theater it is usually felt to dwarf the opening act musically and preempt the final act dramatically. No doubt Beethoven felt the same, for his replacement for it, No. 1, is shorter and much milder in tone. And the eventual final replacement, the Fidelio Overture, makes no reference to the opera’s music and serves simply as a curtain-raiser.

According to the annotator, the No. 3 was composed “for a revival of the opera in Vienna [ … ] building on themes that had served in the original overture in 1805 and expanding their reach and impact.” The introduction is measured and portentous; Macdonald reports: “In the slow section, the melody from Florestan’s Act II aria, when he lies in a dark subterranean dungeon in mortal despair, is briefly given out by clarinets and bassoons before the music winds itself up for the transition to the Allegro.” About the lively middle part, which has its quiet moments, he cites some passages as remarkable:

These include the second main theme in the bright key of E major, which is another version of Florestan’s aria played by the flute over the violins. Then, in the middle of the action, everything stands still as a trumpet call is heard from the distance. This is the signal, in the opera, for the arrival of the Minister, who will intervene in time to stop Florestan’s murder at the hand of the evil prison governor. The trumpet call is heard a second time, confirming the prisoner’s rescue and the joy of his wife, Leonore, who has contrived to get into the dungeon disguised as a young man named Fidelio.

The coda is propulsive, breathless and jubilant; about it, the annotator astutely observes that for the composer, “it was the ultimate affirmation of constancy, liberty, and human courage.”

The artists, deservedly, were very enthusiastically applauded.

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