THE CLEVELANDERS.(Cleveland Orchestra--Severance Hall)

The home of the Cleveland Orchestra--Severance Hall--may be the most beautiful symphony hall in America, thanks to a bridal gown. In 1928, a local oil magnate, John Long Severance, and his wife, Elisabeth, pledged a million dollars toward the construction of a new music center. Elisabeth Severance died unexpectedly, and Severance instructed local craftsmen to copy the leafy pattern of his wife's wedding dress for the ceiling of the auditorium. When the hall was restored, seventy years later, the renovators extended the tracery of the dress to a new acoustical shell that encloses the orchestra behind a silvery proscenium arch.

The characteristic sound of a symphony orchestra is shaped by its hall, and the acoustics of Severance have a clean, evenly spread vibrancy that promotes the extraordinary precision, transparency, and balance among the sections for which the Cleveland is famous. The Severance auditorium, which has a seating capacity of twenty-one hundred, is the most intimate of America's great symphony halls. The walls have no right angles, and the stage bellies out, as if to lock the audience in an embrace.

In January of last year, a concert conducted by Pierre Boulez, whose crisp, understated style is much favored by the orchestra, demonstrated the Cleveland players' uncanny powers of collaboration. The highlight was "Concertate il Suono," a specially commissioned piece by the young French composer Marc-Andre Dalbavie. Audaciously, it required the orchestra to be split up into four groups--the largest on the stage, the others in side boxes and toward the rear of the balcony. What began as quiet, simple scales, like a child warming up, soon became a wraparound tapestry of sound--a hundred musicians humming along with such apparently telepathic awareness of one another that they seemed to be inside the same skin. With any other orchestra, the struggle to keep everything from falling apart would have been palpable. For the Clevelanders, it seemed as effortless as breathing.

Before the concert, Boulez was in his dressing room, glancing through the score's beehive of notes with the look of a man enjoying his morning Le Monde. When I asked him whether the piece was especially challenging for the orchestra, he said, "No, nothing fazes them. They are ready for everything. And when they play a new, very difficult work like this one it sounds completely natural."

Ranking symphony orchestras is more sport than science. But in the classical-music world there is general agreement that, among the three hundred and twenty-five professional orchestras in America, the old pantheon of the Big Five--the orchestras of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Chicago--still holds. (Californians argue, with some justice, that the club should be renamed the Big Seven to admit the flourishing Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony.) Each of the Big Five has developed a certain institutional personality, and each plays a broad range of repertoire with brilliance and authority. But the Cleveland Orchestra is the only one with a collective identity; its hundred and five musicians have sustained a consistent approach to the immensely complicated business of symphonic music-making that illuminates whatever they happen to be playing as no other orchestra quite does and transcends whoever happens to be conducting them. For this reason, the Cleveland is widely regarded as the most "European" of the American orchestras, the only one that is distinctive and refined enough to stand alongside the two preeminent European ensembles: the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic.

Last summer, the orchestra toured Europe with its new music director, the young Austrian conductor Franz Welser-Most, and drew raves from critics who may not have been predisposed to bow down before an orchestra from the American heartland, especially during that election season. The previous autumn, when the orchestra played in Vienna at the Musikverein, the home of the Vienna Philharmonic, the hard-to-please Viennese cheered the visitors, and some of the Vienna players even turned up to hear them rehearse. This week, the Clevelanders arrive at Carnegie Hall with four programs featuring a characteristically sophisticated mixture of modern and traditional masterpieces, from a challenging new work by the English composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle to the five Beethoven piano concertos, with Radu Lupu as soloist.

The Clevelanders' triumphant tours came during tough times in their home town. After a decade of prosperity, the orchestra was running the biggest deficit in its history. Corporate support had dropped sharply, thanks in part to an exodus of Cleveland firms that had been happy to help bankroll the city's most prestigious cultural ambassador before they merged with companies whose headquarters were elsewhere. (During the past four years, the orchestra has lost five of its top ten corporate backers.) Ticket sales for the past several seasons were flat. Revenue from CDs had been diminishing since it became prohibitively expensive to record American symphony orchestras, in the late nineties. ...