By MARK SATOLA
UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS, Ohio -- CityMusic Cleveland opened its 2017-18 season with a curiously constructed program sandwiching John Corigliano's vivid "Red Violin Concerto" between two oft-played works by Schumann, the "Genoveva" Overture and the Symphony No. 3 in E-flat, nicknamed the "Rhenish" symphony.
Avner Dorman was on the podium, marking the beginning of his fifth season as CityMusic's music director, and returning as soloist in the concerto was Tessa Lark, a young artist who hails from Kentucky and is a winner of the Naumburg Competition.
Dorman fielded slightly fewer than 50 players Thursday night in the sanctuary of Church of the Gesu in University Hts., a marble-walled hall of extreme resonance which allowed the sound produced by a chamber orchestra to expand to sound like a group twice its size.
This was particularly evident in the "Red Violin Concerto," a demanding work whose drama would seem to require the force of a full orchestra. There was no deficit in the sound the chamber-sized ensemble produced.
The concerto is an extension of Corigliano's "Red Violin Chaconne," itself a reworking of music Corigliano wrote for the 1998 Francois Girard film "The Red Violin." (Thanks to the exigencies of film distribution, the Chaconne appeared a year before the movie hit the screens.)
Corigliano used the variations-on-a-ground format of the chaconne to guide his own scoring of the movie, which itself plays out as a sort of variations on a theme, in this case the diabolic influence over generations of a possibly cursed instrument.
The "diabolus-in-musica" theme is prominent in the concerto, with its fugitive flights, dissonant harmonies and, in the finale, ghastly, non-musical scrunching sounds from the soloist and accompanying strings. Running counter to this is a soaring lyricism of aching and often tragic beauty.
Lark has fully mastered the daunting score, and her performance Thursday night was a marvel of emotional concentration, technical prowess and not a little showmanship. She played from a score and, given the 35-minute work's unrelenting difficulties, who could blame her?
The two Schumann pieces might not have been natural choices for a program centering on Corigliano's high-voltage work, but Dorman led CityMusic in perfectly fine performances of both.
The overture to Schumann's only opera, "Genoveva," is a little formulaic, but the players acquitted themselves well, with nice contributions from solo woodwinds and strong flourishes from a mostly perfect horn section.
Dorman's reading of the well-known "Rhenish" Symphony was a brisk, no-nonsense affair, which suited the outer movements perfectly, though the laendler-like second movement seemed to falter a bit as it tried to catch up with its own fast tempo.
Interestingly, it was in the fourth movement, a long introduction to the high spirits of the finale, that Dorman and his players achieved something special. Marked "solemnly," this evocation of hieratic ritual, with somber trombones and low woodwinds prominent, was given a well-paced reading, with textures carefully balanced and richly conveyed.
Praise must also go the the very fine horn players, who were bold and confident in the many fanfare-like passages Schumann gives them. Dorman's measured accelerando in the coda sealed the deal on an outstanding performance.