by Jarrett Hoffman
For Vinay Parameswaran, leading The Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom on Saturday, August 17 at 8:00 pm will be only one important event in what has to be called a good couple of months. He’s also conducted in Europe, driven about 5,000 miles back and forth across the U.S., and gotten hitched.
We spoke last week over the phone, and first he filled me in on all the details of June, July, and the first bit of August. Then we talked about this Saturday’s program, which includes Ives’ “Decoration Day” from the Holidays Symphony, Bernstein’s Jeremiah: Symphony No. 1 with mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano, and Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances.
August is when the end of summer comes into sight, a blues for which Mendelssohn’s Fourth Symphony might be the antidote. The composer himself called it “the jolliest work I have so far written” — and the first movement really is bottled joy.
Whether performing with the Omni Quartet or soloing with The Cleveland Orchestra, violinist Jung-Min Amy Lee takes the same approach. “The orchestra is just a bigger setting for chamber music,” the associate concertmaster said in an interview last weekend. “It’s the same ideas, transfigured.”
