On 24 May Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra returned to Oliver Knussen’s Cleveland Pictures. The orchestra gave the work’s long-awaited first public performance with Ryan Wigglesworth in June 2022 at the Aldeburgh Festival, as part of a day of concerts dedicated to the composer.
Each movement of Cleveland Pictures is dedicated to one of Knussen’s composer colleagues: George Benjamin, Alexander Goehr, Augusta Read Thomas, Colin Matthews, Mark-Anthony Turnage, and Magnus Lindberg. Even incomplete, at 15 ½ minutes the work ranks as one of Knussen’s most extensive orchestral statements. Of seven projected movements, four exist complete, two exist as fully-orchestrated fragments, and one exists only as sketches:
I. Portail avec Penseur (Façades and lake with Rodin)
II. Calabazas (Velásquez)
III. Dans les vagues (Gauguin) [a fragment]
IV. Two Clocks (Tiffany/Fabergé)
V. St. Ambrose (Goya)
VI. Don Quixote (Masson) [sketches only – not performed]
VII. The Burning of the Houses of Parliament (Turner) [a fragment]
The Cleveland Orchestra originally commissioned the work from Knussen. Each movement translates a different item from the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art into sound, following the pattern of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, whose orchestration by Stokowski Knussen recorded with the orchestra. On 26 January they gave the US premiere of the completed movements with Franz Welser-Möst as part of their annual Florida residency.
It was in Florida that Knussen conducted the New World Symphony in a private read-through of the extant material in 2008. Cleveland Pictures also received its Spanish premiere on 2 February 2024 from Ludovic Morlot at L’Auditori with the Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona i Nacional de Catalunya. On 25 October 2024 Edward Gardner gives the German premiere of the work with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich, alongside Knussen’s Flourish with Fireworks.
The first of its seven planned movements...conjured up Rodin’s statue The Thinker from a wondrous mix of gnarled brass chords, rippling harps and tonalities lost and found. Knussen’s microscopic flair for instrumental detail showed more strongly still in his Velázquez portrait (fast and spiky), in the Gauguin fragment, and the sparkling, ticking movement suggesting two Fabergé and Tiffany clocks — the section closest to the early-20th-century sound world of Stravinsky and Ravel that always seemed Knussen’s home base.
The Times (Geoff Brown) 27 May 2024
Cleveland Pictures hinted at an expansive new sound world for a composer usually celebrated for the intimacy of his music.
The Guardian (Fiona Maddocks) 2 July 2022