CLASSICAL CLEVELAND
Severance Hall has a world-class orchestra in a setting rich with Art Deco, Egyptian Revival flair.
Severance Hall is a little Art Deco and a little Egyptian Revival in appearance, but it’s really all about the renowned orchestra that has kept a sterling global reputation even when the local economy struggled. The city is on the upswing, and this concert palace sings.
CLEVELAND — Above, the ceiling was done up in silver, beige and blue like frosting on a wedding cake. Below, at the lip of the stage, a tall man in a black suit and white bow tie leaned forward with a tip.
“This is going to be something,” said Mark Jackobs, one of the Cleveland Orchestra’s viola players. “This is a freight train.”
Jackobs, who has played in the room for 25 years, knew just how the sound would flood Severance Hall, one of North America’s most admired classical music venues.
This was my first concert in the hall, so I had plenty of questions. But before I could ask more, the lights dimmed in the 1,920-seat auditorium, and we rushed to our seats.
Conductor Franz Welser-Möst raised his baton. A hundred musicians, including Jackobs, snapped to attention. The train, also known as Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 3, was leaving the station.
Inside the hall
When the orchestra’s leaders launched the campaign to build Severance Hall in 1928, Cleveland was on a roll. As America constructed skyscrapers, Cleveland’s steel mills were shipping vast tonnage on Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River.
The city’s population was about to hit 900,000. The orchestra, founded in 1918, had already played New York, made its recording debut, and started on the path to worldwide acclaim.
Since then, Cleveland has shrunk, suffered and been smirked at like few other American cities. But it also has reinvented itself and begun to bloom again.
As I explored the auditorium and roamed the city for four days in September, I was amazed that in the middle of a city so changed, the orchestra and its hall have never stopped doing what they set out to do.
A day before I heard the orchestra, Andria Hoy, its archivist, gave me a tour of the hall.
First, I found my way to University Circle, the cultural hub about 5 miles west of downtown, where the hall, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the campus of Case Western Reserve University sprawl alongside the grassy expanses of Wade Park.
The art museum was terrific, from the Egyptian mummy cases to the gritty canvases of New York’s Ashcan School. At the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, I got to look a live eagle in the eyes.
The concert hall, however, did not quicken my pulse right away. In fact, if architecture is frozen music, Severance Hall’s Georgian neoclassical exterior is “Pomp and Circumstance” at 23 beats a minute.
But inside, it’s “Rhapsody in Blue” meets “King Tut.” Once you step into the grand foyer, you’re swallowed by a mashup of Art Deco swoops and Egyptian Revival details.
It was 1928, Hoy told me, when philanthropists John and Elisabeth Severance pledged $1 million for a project to be designed by Walker & Weeks, a local architecture firm.
Then Elisabeth died at the family winter home in Pasadena, followed by the stock market crash in late 1929.
Yet John didn’t hesitate. Construction began a month after the crash, and he took every opportunity to stamp the concert hall with Elisabeth’s personality, ultimately spending more than $2 million in Great Depression dollars, about $29 million today. It opened in 1931.
The intricate, lace-like aluminum leaf pattern on the ceiling is said to match Elisabeth’s wedding dress. Thus, also, the lotus blossoms (her favorite flower) in the grand foyer’s terrazzo floor.
As for the building ’s papyrus imagery and other Egyptian Revival touches, John Severance and his family were among the legions of wealthy Americans who journeyed to Egypt in the 1920s to see King Tut’s newly uncovered tomb.
“He really turned this building into a memorial to her, which is where a lot of the opulence comes from,” Hoy told me.
The grand foyer, a doubleheight oval space outfitted with marble from Italy and Indiana, is surrounded by two dozen columns, a series of Egyptian Revival murals and two sets of stately stairs.
Outside the hall
The last 50 years have been rough on Cleveland. The city’s economy stumbled in the 1960s, population began to plummet, crime jumped, and the Cuyahoga River, profoundly polluted, caught fire more than once. The slump lasted decades. A wicked nickname emerged: the Mistake by the Lake.
Nowadays, the city’s population is about 390,000; one steel mill remains. But Cleveland — the town that gave us Drew Carey, Halle Berry and Molly Shannon and great sports performances from running back Jim Brown of the Cleveland Browns and pitcher Bob Feller of the Cleveland Indians — has pivoted.
On the Cuyahoga (no flames since 1969, thank you), you can see kayaks, rowers and the Nautica Queen, a dinner cruise ship.
As downtown reinvents itself, hotels, restaurants and Heinen’s Grocery Store have taken over grand old bank buildings along Euclid Avenue. Condos and apartments are multiplying near the riverside. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Playhouse Square theater district have helped push tourism up by about 25% in the last six years.
And Cleveland’s orchestra? The musicians kept playing, touring and recording, never relinquishing the reputation that spread globally under the exacting George Szell, music director from 1946 to 1970.
New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles may be bigger cities, but in January a New York Times headline proclaimed that “At 100, the Cleveland Orchestra May (Quietly) Be America’s Best.” (A later article in October noted that the orchestra had fired its concertmaster and principal trombonist for sexual misconduct and harassment.)
Béla Bartók, Leonard Bernstein, Benny Goodman, Wynton Marsalis, Yehudi Menuhin, Leontyne Price, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Mstislav Rostropovich — all have stood on the Severance Hall stage.
It remains the orchestra’s home for about 100 performances a year in fall, winter and spring. (Concerts move to the Blossom Music Center in Cuyahoga Falls in the summer.) The hall also hosts graduations, weddings, Cleveland Pops Orchestra concerts and other events.
The legacy
On concert night, I arrived early so I could start with a meal at
Severance, the venue’s fine-dining restaurant. Solicitous service, tasty sea bass special. Good omens.
The music began with Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1, a sprightly, sunny work despite being composed while Russia and the rest of Europe were a mess. I’m no music critic, but it sounded seamless and precise to me, and the rest of the room seemed to agree.
The hall was about two-thirds occupied, the crowd mostly 50 and older and white, although one or two sections were dominated by students. Eager to woo young and varied listeners, the orchestra offers free admission to those 18 and younger for many performances.
The next piece was Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 2 from 1931 — a challenging, dense work featuring ferocious guest pianist Yefim Bronfman. In one passage he seemed to conjure the sound of mist rising from a pond. In another, Bronfman played with such force and speed that his whole body shuddered.
“He proved that the piano is a percussion instrument,” usher Joette McDonald whispered to me later. She’s been working concerts for 17 years “because I’m never disappointed,” she said. “It never gets old. I do. But it doesn’t.”
After intermission was the sonic assault that Jackobs had warned me about, Prokofiev’s third symphony, composed in 1928.
Before beginning, Welser-Möst addressed the audience, suggesting that Sigmund Freud must have inf luenced this piece. He also asked us “to listen for not just the melody but what is happening underneath.”
Then, from the first note: shrieking strings and brass, booming tympani, curious three-note clusters ascending and descending — a beginning as dark and alarming as the night’s first Prokofiev piece had been bright and frisky.
From there, things calmed a bit, with plenty of delicate passages. I could relax and look around a little. But this is a symphony that began its life as an opera about demonic possession, so chaos was bound to return.
At the close of the fourth movement, Prokofiev dispatched us with a pair of booming, dissonant fullorchestra chords. Utter doom, under a twinkling aluminum ceiling.
At the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the amps are turned to 11 to get effects like this. In Severance Hall, they do it without amplifiers, in a suit and bow tie, just as they have for 87 years.