“It’s just the second week of the season, but already the Cleveland Orchestra is engaged in some of its boldest work in some time,” writes Zachary Lewis in Saturday’s (10/23) Plain Dealer. “The orchestra and music director Franz Welser-Möst grabbed attention with a program stocked entirely with local premieres [by] Josef Strauss, George Walker, and Erich Korngold…. All three works were inspired in part by traumatic events and are imbued with a sense of yearning for better times. The heaviest hitter Thursday was Korngold’s Symphony in F-Sharp, a work completed in 1952 after the Jewish-Austrian composer’s return to a war-ravaged Vienna…. George Walker’s Sinfonia No. 5, titled ‘Visions,’ … penned in 2016, near the end of the composer’s life and shortly after a mass shooting at Emanuel church in South Carolina, … gripped the house in a firm but vague trance…. People have always treated each other horribly, he seemed to say, and yet beauty and humanity endure…. A set of waltzes by Josef Strauss titled ‘Heldengedichte’ (‘Heroic Poem’) … ended up fitting the conflicted but optimistic bill. The waltzes were composed in honor of a victory by Austria’s Archduke Charles over Napoleon.”
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