CLASSICAL MUSIC
Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra makes dramatic effort

Saturday, April 18, 2009

By Mark Satola

Special to The Plain Dealer

The Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra is proving to be the place for unusual and exciting repertoire these days.

Unencumbered by the need to generate revenue through ticket sales, the orchestra and its conductor, Carl Topilow, are free to explore neglected but deserving works. Those would include the centerpiece of Wednesday night's 2008-09 season finale at Severance Hall, the Violin Concerto No. 2 in C Minor by Erno Dohnanyi, which was given a splendid reading by violinist Stefani Collins, a student of Paul Kantor at CIM.

Drama in one form or another was the focus of the evening's slate of works. Topilow and his players raised the curtain with Richard Strauss' notoriously difficult tone poem "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks," a sly jab at bourgeois complacency and the dangers of disturbing the status quo.

At the outset, Topilow's players sounded a little harsh and unblended in Severance's relatively dry acoustic, accustomed as they are to playing in the smaller Kulas Hall down the road at CIM. They soon adjusted to the space, however, and, under Topilow's competent guidance, delivered an enthusiastic reading.

Clarinetist Jieun Kim was appropriately puckish giving voice to prankster Till's taunting motto theme - and his strangled protests as the village elders tighten the noose around his neck.

The Violin Concerto No. 2 of Dohnanyi (grandfather of Cleveland Orchestra music director laureate Christoph von Dohnanyi) is a true rarity. One can only wonder why, in light of Collins' performance Wednesday night.
The concerto, written in 1949 for American violinist Frances Magnes, is scored for a small orchestra that eschews violins completely so that the soloist is the only violinist onstage.

Collins threw herself completely into Dohnanyi's dark and dramatic score, meeting its relentless technical and interpretive challenges with admirable aplomb and conveying the concerto's postwar darkness-to-light struggle in an unshakably confident manner.

The familiar suite from Prokofiev's ballet "Romeo and Juliet" finished things off for the night, with the added Topilovian touch of seating two actors onstage to provide narration and snippets from Shakespeare's tragedy between movements.

Again, a noticeable harshness from the orchestra plagued the opening movements of the suite. It was not until the balcony scene that the young players found their balance - and from then on, the luster of Prokofiev's timeless music came through well enough that the composer himself would have been pleased.
Actors Michael Gatto and Allison Bencar would have been more effective if their material had been more carefully chosen. The mix of prosaic narration and excerpts from the play seemed haphazard. Gatto rushed through his words, so that sense and poetry were sometimes lost. Bencar was more comfortable with her part, but she was underused in the presentation.