by Daniel Hathaway
This article was originally published on Cleveland.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio – The keyword for Thursday evening November 13 at Severance Music Center was stamina.
Without that essential quality, the performance of two demanding works by English hornist Robert Walters and The Cleveland Orchestra, led by guest conductor Tugan Sokhiev, might have fallen flat.
Instead, the concert entered the record books as a meticulously played sonic spectacular.
Geoffey Gordon’s Mad Song, written in 2020 after a fascinating poem by the 18th-century English mystic William Blake, was commissioned for Dimitri Mestdag, solo English horn of the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra.
There are very few American cities who can count themselves as having an official fanfare. But now, Akron is one of them.
Two Romantic meditations on death comprised the first of this year’s Cleveland Orchestra Summers @Severance programs last Friday evening — Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration and Johannes Brahms’s A German Requiem — both works of ambitious scope and seriousness, led by music director Franz Welser-Möst.
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.