by Peter Feher
It was a good thing that preparations for last weekend’s Cleveland Orchestra concerts started seasons ago. The ambitious and challenging program wouldn’t have been possible without some serious planning, and that meant thinking well ahead of the first performance on October 20. A huge ensemble of more than 100 players, including a couple of unusual instruments, came together at Severance Music Center on Thursday — and this was an expert group.
The musicians’ skill and experience went beyond a simple mastery of the evening’s two works, Jörg Widmann’s Viola Concerto and Richard Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony. Pulling off both pieces — each a production in itself — required an instinctive grasp of the composers’ overall styles, and the players had that knowledge in spades.
Apollo’s Fire can’t help returning to the music of Claudio Monteverdi. Cleveland’s period orchestra revived its thrilling take on the composer’s 
When the first notes sounded in Mixon Hall on August 7, the star of the afternoon’s program was nowhere to be seen. Stanislav Khristenko would only sneak onstage after the fourth movement of Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet had already started. It was a playfully modest entrance — that is, until he took up the theme in this sparkling set of variations for piano and strings.
The August 13 program at Blossom Music Center was a grand finale in all but name. The Cleveland Orchestra played the last classical concert of its summer season there (the group would save a couple of preview performances for Severance later in the month, ahead of setting out on its 2022 European tour), and the repertoire was exceptional and expansive to match the occasion.
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra has an advantage when it comes to commanding a crowd. The ensemble of scarcely more than a dozen string players performed for a packed Blossom Music Center on August 27 and seemed entirely at home in the huge venue. Saturday’s concert brought the summer classical season here to a close in understated yet completely gripping fashion.
Some music never goes out of style. The famous first bars of Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto opened the program on August 6 at Blossom Music Center with a flourish. And the brilliance hardly let up after that, with The Cleveland Orchestra sounding superb in a pair of works that put symphonic tradition front and center.
The crowd at Blossom Music Center on July 16 received two concerts for the price of one. The Cleveland Orchestra went in a jazzy direction with the program’s first half, before turning to the dazzling symphonic repertoire that this ensemble does best.
The Cleveland Orchestra told a familiar story, but with some unfamiliar faces, on July 9 at Blossom Music Center. The narrative sweep of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade was the highlight of an all-Romantic program that let several excellent young musicians take center stage.
Gilbert & Sullivan might be the Ohio Light Opera signature, but the company in residence at the College of Wooster each summer has made other traditions out of its love for lyric theater. One curious case is the 1924 operetta The Student Prince, which OLO reprises for a seventh time in a production running through July 29 at Freedlander Theatre.