by Mike Telin
On Wednesday, July 1 at 7:00 pm, ChamberFest will pull out all the stops when it caps off its season with a concert at the Blackstone Pipe Organ Residence in Bratenahl. The concert, titled “Stars and Stripes,” will feature Todd Wilson on the home’s custom-built organ in a performance of Ives’s Variations on a National Hymn, “America.” The prize-winning Echo Saxophone Quartet will play Terry Riley’s Tread on the Trail, and the concert will conclude with Dvořák’s String Quintet No. 3, Op. 97. At 6:15 pm, festival speaker Joel Smirnoff will present a prelude talk, and a picnic on the lawn will follow the performance.
At the suggestion of bassoonist Fernando Traba, the concert will also include Ned Rorem’s rarely-performed Winter Pages for clarinet, bassoon, violin, cello, and piano. “Frank Cohen asked me to let him know if I hear any great piece that hasn’t been played at the Festival,” Traba recalled during a recent telephone conversation. “I often visit YouTube and Spotify to try to find pieces that I don’t know. I came across a performance of this one, and it immediately struck me that it should be played at ChamberFest. I sent Frank the link, and he got back to me saying that he had actually played the piece shortly after it was premiered. I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t know a lot about Ned Rorem. He is 91 years old now, and he’s mainly known as a composer of art songs.”
Franz Welser-Möst returned to the Severance Hall podium on Thursday, May 14 to lead The Cleveland Orchestra in a dynamic concert of music by Paul Hindemith, Jörg Widmann and Antonín Dvořák. Though the marketing department successfully advertised Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony as the main attraction (resulting in a large turnout for a Thursday evening), Christian Tetzlaff’s riveting performance of Widmann’s Violin Concerto was the most musically intriguing entry on the program, with The Orchestra’s reading of Hindemith’s Concert Music for Strings and Brass not far behind. 
French guest conductor Lionel Bringuier and French cellist Gautier Capuçon brought a program of French music both well-known and obscure to Severance Hall last weekend. The ever-adaptable Cleveland Orchestra took on a French accent for the occasion, producing a concert that was elegant and savory, and structured like a classic French menu. I heard the performance on Thursday evening, April 16. 
If you didn’t catch one of last weekend’s Cleveland Orchestra concerts, you missed an extraordinary experience. Pianist Daniil Trifonov, making his Severance Hall debut on Thursday evening, March 19, was simply breathtaking in Shostakovich’s first concerto — in cahoots with principal trumpet Michael Sachs and guest conductor Jahja Ling. And Ling’s interpretation of Rachmaninoff’s second symphony — the only other work on the program — was as sonorously thrilling as it was expertly paced. 
Though The Cleveland Orchestra marketed last weekend’s concerts as “Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony,” Finnish guest conductor Hannu Lintu, Israeli violinist Vadim Gluzman and the ensemble pulled off a hat trick. All three works on Thursday evening’s program were equally infused with personality and burned themselves indelibly into memory. 
Although the second concert of this busy Severance Hall week wasn’t formally part of the Boulez tribute, Friday’s performance fit right in, featuring as it did the premiere of a new work by British composer-conductor Ryan Wigglesworth, and an expedition into one of Gustav Mahler’s more enigmatic and unwieldy symphonies.