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Archives for July 2018

Conductor Michael Francis returns to Blossom on August 5

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by Mike Telin

When Michael Francis made his Cleveland Orchestra debut last summer, the British-born conductor brought along a program that featured music by Elgar and Vaughan Williams. When he returns to the Blossom Music Center stage on Sunday, August 5 at 7:00 pm, he will lead the Orchestra in a program featuring the music of Bedřich Smetana, Leoš Janáček, and Antonín Dvořák. Tickets are available online.

“I’m thrilled to be asked back,” Francis said during a telephone conversation from his home in Tampa, Florida. “The Cleveland Orchestra is a truly exceptional orchestra and the Blossom Festival is a real beacon of cultural life in America. To have a chance to do these three pieces that I love is a great honor.” [Read more…]

Summers at Severance No. 1 with Herbert Blomstedt (July 27)

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by Daniel Hathaway

At 45 minutes in length, the first of 2018’s three Summers at Severance concerts may have been short, but guest conductor Herbert Blomstedt and The Cleveland Orchestra used their three quarters of an hour onstage to make a powerful experience out of a single work — Brahms’ Fourth Symphony. Conducting without a stick and never cracking open the small score on the podium, Blomstedt sculpted every detail of the piece, melding expressive, colorful lines into a pulsing musical organism. [Read more…]

Service Day: Credo Music students visit Grafton Correctional Facility

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by Delaney Meyers

On a recent visit to Grafton Correctional Facility, students from Credo Music Festival performed for and talked with some of the residents in the prison’s chapel, with an audience of about 50 and a backdrop of multiple green plants. This was part of Credo’s weekly service day, during which young musicians engage with the community in multiple ways — from picking up trash along the side of the highway, to performing at places that aren’t often filled with music. [Read more…]

Blossom Festival 50th Anniversary: Reasons to celebrate (Part III)

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by Alice Koeninger

As we celebrate its 50th anniversary, it’s fun to look back on highlights from Blossom Music Center’s illustrious list of performances. In its inaugural season in 1968, Vladimir Ashkenazy made his first appearance with The Cleveland Orchestra as a pianist. The newly-formed Blossom Festival Chorus performed Carmina Burana on August 25, to great acclaim. This year, they will perform that same work on the same date, exactly 50 years later.

Blossom’s second year brought performances by such artists as Alicia de Larrocha, Victor Borge, José Feliciano, Duke Ellington, Maria Alba, Hank Thompson, Dionne Warwick, André Kostelanetz with Marian Anderson, and Peter Nero. The first Fourth of July concert also took place in 1969, conducted by Meredith Willson, composer of The Music Man. That same year saw the official record for the largest crowd ever at Blossom: 24,364 people came out to hear Blood, Sweat & Tears. That record was “unofficially” broken in 1973 when Pink Floyd attracted an estimated 32,000 people to Blossom’s green slopes.

Leonard Bernstein conducted Mahler’s Second Symphony –– his only appearance with The Cleveland Orchestra –– in 1970. While governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter visited Blossom in 1974 as the guest of Ohio governor John Gilligan. In 1984, Big Bird made a guest appearance, and in 1985, Christoph von Dohnányi presented a fully-staged production of The Magic Flute. [Read more…]

Kent Blossom Music Festival: Emerson String Quartet (July 18)

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by Nicholas Stevens

After the Emerson String Quartet’s performance with cellist Jerry Grossman at Kent State University last week, audience members exited Ludwig Recital Hall to find an extraordinary reception laid out. Food and drink of diverse tastes, textures, and temperatures lined half a dozen tables. It felt like a metaphor for the concert: so rich and extensive that to describe it is to make it sound excessive. Despite its duration and emotional range, however, the concert itself never felt overstuffed. It went down smoothly, like an expertly arranged and executed feast. [Read more…]

Preucil suspended by Cleveland Orchestra, resigns position at CIM

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Following the publication of a July 26 online article in the Washington Post by Anne Midgette and Peggy McGlone detailing previously unreported allegations of sexual harassment by Cleveland Orchestra concertmaster William Preucil, the Orchestra has suspended him with pay while an independent investigation is underway. According to another source, Preucil has resigned from his position as professor of violin at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Read an updated report here.

Cleveland Orchestra plays live score for Singin’ in the Rain at Blossom (July 14)

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by Nicholas Stevens

The film-with-live-orchestra format has swept the U.S. of late because of its broad appeal. It boasts advantages over both the traditional open-air concert and the movie theater experience, uniting the vivid sound and fresh setting of the one with the narrative cohesion and thrilling visuals of the other. When a distinguished conductor leads one of the world’s greatest orchestras in one of history’s greatest film musical scores, what could go wrong? [Read more…]

Ohio Light Opera: Offenbach’s La Périchole (July 18)

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by Kelly Ferjutz

You’ve heard of “screwball comedies,” right? Well, here’s your chance to see a screwball comedy disguised as an operetta. The sumptuous music is by the German-French master, Jacques Offenbach, and features a sparkling new English translation by OLO’s Jacob Allen. The original French libretto from 1868 is by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy. Offenbach wrote nearly 100 operettas from the 1850s–1870s, on more than a dozen of which Meilhac collaborated, while Halévy assisted on more than twenty. Today, only half a dozen or so are still in the active repertoire. [Read more…]

Sony Classical to release 106-CD set of Szell’s complete Columbia Recordings

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by Daniel Hathaway

Are you a big George Szell fan? Do you have 88 hours you’d like to devote to binge listening? Do you have room on your shelf for over a hundred CDs weighing 12.4 pounds? Are you interested in exploring monophonic recordings that have never appeared in digital form? If so, you’ll be delighted to know that a boxed set of the complete recordings George Szell made for Columbia Masterworks will be released by Sony Classical on August 10.

The 106 discs preserve 92 recordings remastered from original analogue tapes, including Szell’s performances with The Cleveland Orchestra from 1946 through 1969, as well as his collaborations with the New York Philharmonic and the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. Among the featured soloists are Robert Casadesus, Rudolf Firkušný, Leon Fleisher, Gary Graffman, Vladimir Horowitz, Rudolf Serkin, Zino Francescatti, Isaac Stern, Joseph Szigeti, Pierre Fournier, Leonard Rose and Judith Raskin. [Read more…]

Kent Blossom Chamber Orchestra & Cleveland Orchestra Side-by-Side (July 19)

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by Timothy Robson

The first Cleveland Orchestra concert at the Blossom Music Center occurred on July 19, 1968. On Saturday evening’s concert there was no official recognition of that 50th anniversary, but the event did mark another tradition in existence since 1990: a “side-by-side” performance in which members of the Kent Blossom Chamber Orchestra were interspersed with The Cleveland Orchestra. [Read more…]

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