A New Century —The Cleveland Orchestra/Franz Welser-Möst (Cleveland Orchestra 0001)
This three-disc set—the initial release on TCO’s brand new label----is scheduled for full release June 5 (the first volume went on sale March 13). All the recordings were made during live performances in Severance Hall, and each CD pairs a newer and older work. Disc 1 contains Beethoven’s Quartet No. 15 played by the strings of The Cleveland Orchestra, followed by Amériques, the still quite modern-sounding 1921 work by Edgard Varèse. On Disc 2, the newer work comes first, Johannes Maria Staud’s Stromab (“Downstream”), music for a huge orchestra inspired by Algernon Blackwood’s novella The Willows, the classic horror story. Richard Strauss’s first symphonic poem, Aus Italien, rounds out the CD. Paul Jacobs is at the console of Severance Hall’s Norton Memorial Organ for the world-premiere recording of the 2015 concerto by Bernd Richard Deutsch called Okeanos, a title taken from Greek mythology. The final work in the set is the enigmatic Symphony No. 3 from 1929 by Sergei Prokofiev. A New Century’s 150-page program book contains this quote from The London Times: “Franz Welser-Möst has managed something radical with The Cleveland Orchestra — making them play as one seamless unit...with a very delicate beauty that makes the Clevelanders sound like no other orchestra.” This album proves the point.
Note: Link sends you to The Cleveland Orchestra's website.