Prokofiev, Neuwirth, and Wagner with Welser-Möst and Widmann

With the Cleveland Orchestra’s 2025-2026 season approaching its close, music director Franz Welser-Möst returned to the podium to lead a program that seemed tailor made for the ensemble: a popular early-20^th Century Symphony, the US premiere of a new work, capped off by roof-shaking opera excepts from the 19^th Century.

The concert opened in with a perfectly proportioned rendition of Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1 in C major, the so-called “Classical” symphony.  Welser-Möst adopted a slightly more relaxed tempo than usual for the opening movement, almost an Allegro moderato instead of Allegro. This contrasted nicely with a somewhat brisker than usual second movement, before moving onto a Gavotte which featured some beautifully timed rubati when the winds entered with the main theme.  The Finale, which featured the repeat, was especially buoyant.

Clarinet soloist Jörg Widmann (a composer himself) joined Welser-Möst and the orchestra for Zones of Blue, a new work by Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth.  This is one of those works which takes the “everything but the kitchen sink” approach to orchestration.  I won’t waste your time or my mental energy going over the details of a work which was a curious mix of half-hearted riffs from Gershwin (including the opening salvo of Rhapsody in Blue) and Miles Davis, mixed with orchestral noise. I have never particularly cared for the sound of the clarinet, and this work only served to aggravate my tinnitus.

The second half of the concert was devoted to a well-selected grouping of from Götterdämmerung, the final opera in Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung tetralogy.  Welser-Möst’s approach to Wagner somewhat reminds me of Karl Böhm’s.  He keeps the tempos moving yet flexible, without allowing the orchestra to sound overly bombastic – as doing so in an operatic section would overwhelm the singers.  This made for an effective, cohesive presentation of what are usually derisively referred to as “bleeding chunks” from Wagner’s epic.

A relic from an earlier era at Severance

The previous day, Daniel and I attended a performance The Outsiders musical at Connor Palace theatre in Playhouse Square.  The performers should be lauded, but the musical numbers themselves were weak.  The whole did not pack the emotional punch of the 1983 film.