Met Opera names Nézet-Séguin as music director

June 2, 2016 by Daniel Hathaway

Yannick Nézet-Séguin, 41, will succeed James Levine as music director of New York’s Metropolitan Opera beginning in the 2020-2021 season, but will assume the title of music director designate in 2017-2018. He will remain music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra through the 2025-2026 season. Read the New York Times story here.

About Daniel Hathaway

Daniel Hathaway founded ClevelandClassical.com in September, 2008, after a thirty-one year tenure as music director of Cleveland’s Trinity Cathedral, where he founded the Wednesday Noon Brownbag Concert Series and Trinity Chamber Orchestra. A graduate of Harvard College and the Episcopal Divinity School, he also studied historical musicology at Princeton and Harvard Universities. Before coming to Cleveland in 1977, he served as head of humanities at the Sunset Hill School in Kansas City and as head of arts at Groton School in Massachusetts. In Cleveland, he has served on the music staff of Cleveland Opera, Great Lakes Theater Festival, and the faculty of Laurel School. As an organist, Hathaway has played recitals in the U.S., England, France, Germany, and Austria. He team-teaches Music Journalism at Oberlin College and Conservatory and is a member of the Music Critics Association of North America.

Elim Chan sculpts endless varieties of glorious sound from Yefim Bronfman, Cleveland Orchestra (Sept. 27)

by Daniel Hathaway

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com.

CLEVELAND, Ohio — In the symphonic world, a change of conductor often means a change of repertoire as well. When Elim Chan stepped in to lead four Cleveland Orchestra concerts this weekend featuring Yefim Bronfman in Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 (1909), she swapped out Stravinsky’s Petrushka for another Rachmaninoff work, his Symphonic Dances (1940).

On paper, that looked like an overabundance of Rachmaninoff, but Chan and the Orchestra made the Russian super-melodist’s lavish scores sound freshly minted, transparent, and teeming with exquisite detail.

After hearing numerous performances of “Rach 3” by piano competition hopefuls, it was revelatory on Thursday evening, September 26, to experience the work interpreted by a mature artist who is fully in control of its musical content, and whose transitions can make sense of the composer’s mercurial changes of direction.

[Read on…]

Music gives voice to the unspoken in Two Remain (Sept. 26)

by Stephanie Manning

“For some melodies, there are no words.”

More than just an inner monologue, this lyric from Jake Heggie’s Two Remain is really the thesis of the entire opera.

Telling the stories of two Auschwitz survivors through music is no easy task. But Heggie’s work approaches the subject with sensitivity and lyricism — as did the cast and crew of the Nightingale Opera Theatre on September 28.

After performances in Australia this summer, the production came to Cleveland for a one-night-only performance at Congregation Mishkan Or in Beachwood. [Read on…]

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