ORCHESTRA ON TOUR

Welser-MÖst and players captivate Swiss at new hall

Lucerne, Switzerland

The eyes and the ears are seduced in this picturesque and pricey city in central Switzerland, to which musicians, writers, painters and tourists galore long have been lured.

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In 1859, Richard Wagner put the finishing touches on "Tristan und Isolde" while living at the Hotel Schweizerhof, which housed part of the Cleveland Orchestra during its residency at the Lucerne Festival over the weekend.

The German composer later took up residence at Tribschen, the country estate on Lake Lucerne where he completed "Die Meistersinger" and created the "Siegfried Idyll."

And long before "War and Peace," while a guest at the Schweizerhof, Leo Tolstoy was inspired to write: "As I opened the window overlooking the lake, straight away I was literally dazzled by the beauty of this water, these mountains and this sky."

The musicians of the Cleveland Orchestra were similarly dazzled in recent days, but not only by natural sights. The ensemble and music director Franz Welser-MÖst performed for the first time in the extraordinary concert hall at the Lucerne Culture and Congress Center, giving three concerts for festival audiences totally smitten with the Cleveland visitors.

On previous sojourns to Lucerne, the orchestra played in the dingy, cramped auditorium that audiences and musicians endured for decades. With the 1998 opening of the Lucerne Culture and Congress Center (or KKL, in the German acronym) on the same site, the city and its world-renowned festival gained one of the world's finest concert venues.

Jean Nouvel's concert hall is a ravishing cathedral of white surfaces, wooden stage canopy and dark-blue ceiling with lights that glitter like stars in a Swiss sky. Acoustically, the 1,840-seat hall provides utmost clarity and warmth, as well as exceptional bass response. Many listeners believe this to be American acoustician Russell Johnson's finest achievement, better even than his celebrated halls in Dallas and Birmingham, England, and surely worlds above Philadelphia's problematic Kimmel Center.

The best of the best

The Cleveland Orchestra is one of six major orchestras - and the only American ensemble - in residence this year at the Lucerne Festival, which began in 1938 with a concert conducted by Arturo Toscanini. The orchestra also will take advantage of the hall's superior qualities and the festival's prestige during residencies in 2005 and 2006.

This year's first of three annual residencies offered the orchestra the chance to inaugurate the Roche Commissions, a project funded by the Swiss pharmaceutical firm that engages a prominent composer to write a piece for the Cleveland Orchestra for performances at the Lucerne Festival, Severance Hall and New York's Carnegie Hall.

The first recipient was Sir Harrison Birtwistle, whose "Night's Black Bird" received its world premiere Saturday on a program that included the British composer's "The Shadow of Night" and Schubert's "Great" C-Major Symphony.

Birtwistle wrote "The Shadow of Night" for the orchestra and former music director Christoph von Dohnanyi, who premiered the piece in Cleveland in 2002. "Night's Black Bird" is a companion piece to that score and - at 12 minutes - half its length. Both works are based on a Renaissance song, John Dowland's "In Darkness Let Me Dwell," which countertenor Kai Wessel and lutenist Ulrich Wedemeier performed Saturday between the 21st-century creations.

Did Roche get its money's worth this first year? "Night's Black Bird" turns out to be slim contemporary pickings, much of its material drawn from "The Shadow of Night," another reflection of melancholy in music typical of Birtwistle: gloomy, fierce, extreme, impenetrable. The text of the Dowland song refers to "hellish jarring sounds," which are abundantly present in both scores.

Birtwistle told the Cleveland musicians at Saturday's rehearsal that he could "never be better served by an orchestra," and he was right. Welser-MÖst and his players deftly negotiated tricky Birwistle writing that would cross the eyes of many orchestras. (The same morning, Roche announced that China's Chen Yi will be next year's honored composer.)

Appreciative reception

The well-heeled Lucerne listeners gave Birtwistle's pieces an appreciative reception, and the audiences all three nights were enthralled by the orchestra's elegant virtuosity, bringing Welser-MÖst back to the stage for five or six curtain calls.

At every concert during the tour so far, Welser-MÖst has generously acknowledged his musicians' prowess by asking solo players and sections to stand during bows. The refinement, cohesion and boldness of the orchestral artistry often have had the magical effect of distracting from the dearth of personality from the podium.

Friday's program included a straight-laced account of Rossini's "William Tell" Overture (which had distinguished solo turns by cellist Desmond Hoebig, flutist Joshua Smith and English hornist Felix Kraus), a stylish if unsmiling performance of Haydn's "Military" Symphony and a clean, underpowered reading of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 15.

The Schubert "Great" C-Major Symphony on Saturday found Welser-MÖst emphasizing lyricism and soft dynamics at the expense of regal muscularity. Sunday's pairing of Debussy's "Jeux" and Mahler's Seventh Symphony abounded in delicate and potent orchestral splendor, though only to cursory interpretive effect.

Next stop: The Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland, where Welser-MÖst and company repeat these programs tonight through Thursday.

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:

drosenberg@plaind.com, 216-999-4269

© 2004 The Plain Dealer. Used with permission.