by Daniel Hathaway
This article was originally published on Cleveland.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio — Over the course of a concert season, The Cleveland Orchestra is called upon to play a variety of works in all categories from four centuries’ worth of repertoire. Not so often do audiences get to experience in a single concert three such wildly different works as were on display at Severance Music Center on Thursday evening, May 7.
Sergei Prokoviev’s Symphony No. 1, Olga Neuwirth’s “Zones of Blue,” and four excerpts from Richard Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” require, in turn, cool neoclassical clarity, expert control of avant-garde techniques, and the kind of pre-film cinematic virtuosity that pushes 19th-century instruments to the limits of their original design.
If their first tale of July 2022 was any indication, ENCORE Chamber Music Institute’s “Storytelling” Music & Ideas Festival is true to its name. On July 1, ENCORE premiered and livestreamed “Tales of Wünderkinds: The Hunt & Chase” — a formidable continuation of this year’s primarily narrative-driven Music & Ideas Festival. Interestingly, Jorg Widmann’s Hunt would be the only piece from the evening’s program to share a word with this title. I watched the livestream.
German violinist Christian Tetzlaff never shies away from a challenge. He made his debut with The Cleveland Orchestra at the age of 22, playing the daunting concerto by Arnold Schoenberg. Tetzlaff’s most recent area performance in May of this year, also with The Cleveland Orchestra, featured the violinist in Jörg Widmann’s concerto, a physically taxing work written for him in 2007.
Since May of 2008, the Cleveland-based FiveOne Experimental Orchestra (51XO) has presented concerts featuring an eclectic mix of repertoire that bridges the gap between pop and art music at out of the ordinary venues such as the Sculpture Garden and the East Cleveland Cemetery. On Saturday, September 26 at 8:00 pm,
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. 
As the normally-resident birds gave way to the end-of-summer locusts, The Cleveland Orchestra bade farewell to Blossom on Sunday evening in a season closer that also served as a send-off for the ensemble’s forthcoming European tour. Like Friday evening’s Summers @ Severance performance, the repertoire was a condensed version of what audiences in London, Lucerne, Berlin, Linz, Vienna, Paris and Amsterdam will enjoy in thirteen performances from September 7-22: works by Johannes Brahms and Jörg Widmann, the orchestra’s former Daniel R. Lewis Young Composer Fellow (an entire concert in Berlin’s Philharmonie on September 11 will be devoted to Widmann’s music).
As a prelude to its three-week European tour, Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra previewed some of their tour repertoire in the third of the 2014 Summers @ Severance concerts on Friday, August 29. This was no summertime “orchestra-lite” concert, but featured two demanding and arresting works by Jörg Widmann, the orchestra’s former Daniel R. Lewis Young Composer Fellow, as well as that monument of the orchestral repertoire, Johannes Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 in C minor, op. 68. Severance Hall was well filled with a very diverse audience of Cleveland Orchestra fans.