Prom 68 - 7.09.14: Cleveland Orchestra, Smith / Welser-Möst

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Sunday, 7 September
7.30 p.m. – c. 9.35 p.m.
Royal Albert Hall

Brahms: Academic Festival Overture
Jörg Widmann: Flûte en suite (UK premiere)

Brahms: Symphony No. 1 in C minor

Joshua Smith, flute (Proms debut artist as soloist)
The Cleveland Orchestra
Franz Welser-Möst conductor

The Cleveland Orchestra is one of America's great ensembles. After an absence of almost a decade it returns to the Proms under Music Director Franz Welser-Möst for the first of two concerts.
If Brahms's stormy and intricately structured First Symphony sees the composer at his most serious and structurally ambitious, his Academic Festival Overture is a rare example of his levity - an elegantly constructed musical thank-you-letter to Breslau University, taking its themes from boisterous student songs.
At the centre of the programme is a concerto commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra for its principal flautist Joshua Smith. Rejecting anything too grandiose, young German composer Jörg Widmann has opted for a suite of dance movements - playful, referential and imaginatively disorienting.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Jörg Widmann? Not yet on my radar.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Jörg Widmann? Not yet on my radar.

Rattle's featured his Music in concerts with the BPO (including this Flute Concerto: http://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en...mann-beethoven). A sort of German Julian Anderson, perhaps? (And, at 41, "young" is being a bit generous )

Some stuff on youTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8EmzHCNLrA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuAqpwCGCVw

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Thanks, Ferney.

[Petrushka]

Don't forget that this Prom is being broadcast live on BBC4!

[pastoralguy]

Thank you!

[pastoralguy]

Superb performance of the Brahms overture showing the disciplined virtuosity of this orchestra. (Although they look a pretty glum crew...).

Interesting music in the flute concerto although, IMHO, it went on a bit. Fantastic flute playing.

Seem to be a few empty seats around the hall and I notice that the roving camera that moves between the stage and the front of the proms area is missing avoiding those terrible shots of the first violins nostrils.

[Zucchini]

Fantastic flute playing...

Certainly was

[pastoralguy]

Brahms 1 = subtlety, subtlety and yet more subtlety.

Wonderful performance.

[Cornet IV]

Brahms 1 = subtlety, subtlety and yet more subtlety.

Wonderful performance.

Well, I mean, was that something else, or what?

Wonderful performance indeed!

The Academic Overture was unusually revealing and I enjoyed a work which I have never thought of as Brahms at his best. I have learnt to avoid anything which is promoted as "premier" of "first performance" so phoned a friend and missed the flute thingy but hung up in time for the Brahms 1. I have never heard a better or more satisfying performance.

Many years ago when in Ohio, I attended a Cleveland concert when George Szell was The Man; I thought it a brilliant and extraordinarily cohesive orchestra then and nearly fifty years later, still think it perhaps the best. We had a rare treat tonight.

Thanks to Aunty who seems to get so little right these days but scored a real win in inviting this orchestra.

[Alison]

Plenty of subtlety though I have to say at the symphony's conclusion I wasn't exactly bowled over. Will be interested in other opinions.

[Petrushka]

A thoroughly satisfying Prom though, like PG, I thought that the Widmann piece, brilliantly played as it was, did go on a bit.

The Brahms items were excellent but I do like to hear more forceful timpani in the opening of the Symphony No 1 and also at that point in the finale that ushers in the horn theme. FW-M was in his element in the encore, wonderfully played.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Plenty of subtlety though I have to say at the symphony's conclusion I wasn't exactly bowled over. Will be interested in other opinions.

Yes - I wasn't as impressed as Pastoralguy and CornetIV. A good performance, splendid playing, but a little underpowered in places - at least as it came over on the telly. Like Pet, I prefer a little less subtlety from the Timps.

[aeolium]

I thought it was a very good performance, with good tempos and clarity and lovely playing especially from the woodwind, the sort of performance that a conductor like Sawallisch might have given, not highly expressive or with extremes of contrast, but none the worse for that.

[Maclintick]

Well, I mean, was that something else, or what?

Wonderful performance indeed!

Brahms 1. I have never heard a better or more satisfying performance.

Many years ago when in Ohio, I attended a Cleveland concert when George Szell was The Man; I thought it a brilliant and extraordinarily cohesive orchestra then and nearly fifty years later, still think it perhaps the best. We had a rare treat tonight.

Thanks to Aunty who seems to get so little right these days but scored a real win in inviting this orchestra.

Wonderfully articulate & expressive playing, well-shaped by a conductor who has really blossomed in Ohio. Comparisons at this level of music-making are odious, but on the evidence of last night Cleveland have maintained their historically stratospheric standards.

We've been lucky to hear such wonderful Brahms-playing from Cleveland & Budapest in this Proms season. I'll be in my usual spot in the RAH for some more tonight.