Word: dohnanyi
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When Christoph von Dohnanyi's appointment as the sixth music director in the history of the Cleveland Orchestra was announced in 1982, the reaction was nearly unanimous: Christoph von Who? The Berlin-born Dohnanyi, 53 -- grandson of the urbane composer Erno Dohnanyi, nephew of the martyred Nazi-era theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and husband of the glamorous dramatic soprano Anja Silja -- was nearly unknown in the U.S. Among the few who were aware of him, he was regarded as a workmanlike German kapellmeister with a suspicious fondness for 20th century music, and certainly an odd choice to command an orchestra whose...
Time to think again. Under Dohnanyi, the Cleveland has become the best band in the land. No other American orchestra can rival its combination of virtuosic technique, consummate ensemble playing and rich, burnished tone, especially in the Central European repertory of Haydn, Beethoven and Brahms. It has also successfully branched out to opera: last month's dazzling concert version of Wagner's Das Rheingold, continuing a Ring cycle that is being recorded by London/Decca, was as fine a performance as one is likely to hear outside Bayreuth or the Metropolitan Opera...
...Dohnanyi modestly ascribes the orchestra's excellence to the diligent work habits and pride instilled under Szell, the Hungarian-born terror who became music director in 1946 and transformed Cleveland from a cultural backwater into one of the orchestral world's powerhouses. Szell's ironfisted discipline brooked no contradiction, and the musicians played for him as if their livelihoods -- if not their lives -- depended on it. "Under Szell they had to be the best," notes Dohnanyi. "With me, they want to be the best...
With 42 players remaining from the Szell era, the orchestra has lost none of its famous precision. Yet as buffed by Pierre Boulez, who became musical adviser after Szell's death in 1970; by Lorin Maazel, music director from 1972 to 1982; and now by Dohnanyi, it has added a voluptuousness that sets it above its stiffest American competition -- principally, Daniel Barenboim's Chicago Symphony, Leonard Slatkin's St. Louis Symphony and Kurt Masur's New York Philharmonic...
DVORAK, SYMPHONY NO. 6; JANACEK, TARAS BULBA (London). Though Dvorak composed at least four great symphonies in which Czech-flavored melodies flow with Schubertian ease and Brahmsian grandeur, he is known mostly for his ninth, the "New World." Christoph von Dohnanyi leads his Cleveland Orchestra here in a fine performance of the sixth and a deftly dramatic reading of Leos Janacek's programmatic rhapsody Taras Bulba...