Originally published on Cleveland.com
by Daniel Hathaway, Cleveland Classical
CLEVELAND, Ohio — In his Concert Overview for The Cleveland Orchestra performance at Severance Music Center on Wednesday evening, January 17, music director Franz Welser-Möst wrote:
“Tonight’s program was conceived as part of Carnegie Hall’s festival, Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice, which looks at the 15 years of the Weimar era (1918–33), some of the wildest and most innovative for the arts in history.”
The program, which will be repeated tonight (Thursday) before the Orchestra travels to New York for a two-day Carnegie residency, included brilliant performances of wildly contrasting, two-movement works by Sergei Prokofiev and Anton Webern that both bore the title of “Symphony,” though they couldn’t have been more divergent in intent and style.