by Peter Feher

Mozart was the main event at Severance Music Center on April 20, but The Cleveland Orchestra gave only a teaser of what it can do with this great composer.

Chalk it up to the small and generally intimate scale of the performance. Guest conductor Bernard Labadie, a specialist in 18th-century repertoire, led the Orchestra — pared down to period-ensemble numbers — in half a dozen Mozart pieces, many of them excerpts from longer works. You could think of the program as a preview for next season here in Cleveland, which opens with a soundtrack of the composer’s greatest hits (accompanying the film Amadeus live in concert) and closes with a production of The Magic Flute.

On Thursday, everything was building to Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 (“Jupiter”). [Read more…]