by Mike Telin
After a six-year absence, violinist Frank Peter Zimmerman will return to the Severance Music Center stage on Thursday, September 19 to play Robert Schumann’s concerto with Osmo Vänskä and The Cleveland Orchestra in the first performance of the new season. The program will be repeated on Sunday the 22nd at 3:00 pm.
“I’m extremely happy to be returning to Cleveland. It’s my favorite orchestra in the States and maybe the world, and the public is also special,” the violinist said in a telephone conversation from his home in Germany. “I have a long relationship with them — I think my first concerts were in 1987 with Christoph von Dohnányi — and I have many friends there. So it’s going to be a joy to come back for the season opener.”
The Schumann concerto is a musically complicated piece with an intriguing history. He wrote it very late in his career for Joseph Joachim, and although the violinist was in possession of the manuscript for the rest of his life, he never performed the Concerto. It finally received its premiere by George Kulenkampff and the Berlin Philharmonic on 26 November 1937.
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Four years on from pandemic disruptions, some ensembles are still working on returning to 100% of their pre-2020 programming. Case in point from this summer: The Cleveland Orchestra, which is reviving its Summers at Severance series for the first time in five years.
