Mozart & Shostakovich With The Cleveland Orchestra

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Tuesday, 17 February 2026 14:26; Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Chris Lee

At the wonderful Stern Auditorium, on the night of Wednesday, January 21st, I had the privilege to attend an excellent concert—the second of two on consecutive days—presented by Carnegie Hall and performed by the superior Cleveland Orchestra, led with exceptional skill by Franz Welser-Möst.

The first half of the event consisted of an impeccable account of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s extraordinary final symphony, the No. 41 in C Major, K. 551, the “Jupiter,” from 1788. The initial, Allegro vivace movement begins majestically although the music acquires an urgent quality, but there are passages of contrasting gracefulness—it closes affirmatively. The succeeding Andante cantabile is elegant but not without a certain intensity at times, if nonetheless sunny in outlook; it ends softly. The Menuetto, marked Allegretto, is appropriately dance-like and sometimes playful, with a charming Trio. The Molto allegro finale is exhilarating and glorious in its fugal complexity, ending triumphantly.

The second part of the evening was at least equally memorable: a sterling realization of Dmitri Shostakovich’s imposing, undervalued Symphony No. 11 in G Minor, Op 103, “The Year 1905,” completed in 1957. About it, the scholar and program annotator Harlow Robinson has commented as follows:

“I have great affection for this period in our national history, so vividly expressed in revolutionary workers’ songs of the time,” wrote Shostakovich. In the Symphony No. 11, he incorporated the tunes of seven different revolutionary folk songs, tunes from his own Ten Poems (1951), and a quote from Soviet composer Georgy Sviridov’s 1951 operetta Bright Lights. This use of imported material was a notable departure from Shostakovich’s usual practice.

He added:

The first movement (“Palace Square”) portrays the merciless inhumanity of autocracy. Its powerful opening casts a hypnotic spell, evocative of autocracy, the cold, and the austere expanse of stone around the Winter Palace. This episode returns throughout the symphony as a kind of refrain. Then the movement introduces two prison songs (“Listen” and “The Convict”). The second movement (“The Ninth of January”) depicts the Cossacks’ assault, using two marching songs (“O Tsar, Our Father” and “Bare Your Heads!”). Meditative and requiem-like, the third movement (“In Memoriam”) unfolds variations of a well-known tribute to fallen heroes (“You’ve Fallen Victim”) over a slow ostinato foundation. Four different fast marching tunes (“Rage, O Tyrants”; “The Varsovienne”; “Comrades, the Bugles Are Sounding”; and Sviridov’s tune) combine in the raucous, percussive finale (“The Tocsin”). Several of the songs appear in multiple movements. Adding to the overall sense of unity, the four movements are played attacca, without pause.

The Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, was asked about the song quotations and said, “They were like white birds flying against a terrible black sky.”

The opening Adagio has a hushed, mysterious beginning that precedes a series of fanfares—the movement is programmatic and largely subdued but portentous, while much of the ensuing Allegro has a tense, driving rhythm. The Adagio third movement is elegiac and gentle for an extended period but becomes more passionate. In the finale, an insistent, solemn and powerful march builds to a climax before the music from the first movement returns overlain with a poignant English horn solo; the closing section is turbulent, drawing on music from the second movement, concluding forcefully.

The artists deservedly received a standing ovation.