The Finest Orchestra? (Surprise!) Cleveland

By MICHAEL WALSH CLEVELAND

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 past conductors had included such doughty maestros as Artur Rodzinski, Erich Leinsdorf and George Szell.

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.

The orchestra remains a proud exception to the age of clock-watching union stewards, pettifogging management and perils-of-Pauline finances. Players routinely take their parts home to practice, and they sometimes request extra rehearsal time in particularly difficult or unfamiliar works. Morale is buoyed by the support of the city, which treats the musicians as local celebrities; the death last November of longtime concertmaster Daniel Majeske occasioned editorial eulogies the likes of which would be rare elsewhere. Under executive director Thomas W. Morris, the orchestra sits atop an impressive $73 million endowment, operates in the black and is retiring a $6.2 million accumulated deficit incurred during some lean years in the 1980s.

Yet Cleveland would not have achieved its current prestige without Dohnanyi, who arrived in 1984 after having worked his way up the traditional German opera-house ladder. Beginning with the Frankfurt Opera, where he was Georg Solti's assistant, Dohnanyi spent time in Lubeck, Cologne and finally his adopted hometown of Hamburg before heading to the shores of Lake Erie. He has ended any doubts about his abilities as a symphonic conductor with performances that combine Szell's rigor, Boulez's unerring ear and a controlled interpretative fire.

What finally explains Cleveland's eminence is the happy intangibles that previously elevated Stokowski and Philadelphia, Karajan and Berlin, and Solti and Chicago to musical supremacy: leadership, talent, discipline and desire, perhaps especially the last. "For musicians there's not much else to do here," Dohnanyi points out. "There's no opera, there's no freelancing; you don't come to Cleveland to enjoy the weather. You come here to play in the Cleveland Orchestra." And play they do, better than anybody.