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Review: Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom: Mozart with Matthew Halls (August 9)

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by Robert Rollin

HALLS-MatthewOn Saturday evening, August 9, the Blossom Festival presented an exemplary Cleveland Orchestra Mozart concert under the gifted young British conductor, Matthew Halls, making his debut with the group. The Oxford-educated musician first became known as a keyboard player and conductor of early music. Since then he has come to prominence as Director of the Oregon Bach Festival and through appearances with major professional orchestras and opera companies in Europe, Australia, and North America.

The entire concert was a delight, thanks to the orchestra’s wonderful talent and to Halls’s remarkably colorful dynamics and sensitive control of tempi. Notwithstanding his youthfulness, Halls showed mature and outstanding interpretive skills, lending grace and beauty to the entire concert. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom with Jahja Ling and Yo Yo Ma (August 16)

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by Nicholas Jones

MA-Yo-YoYo Yo Ma is as close as the classical world is likely to get to a rock star. On Saturday night, the near-sellout crowd at Blossom was certainly rocking as Ma took the stage, strutting like a winning prizefighter with his cello triumphantly raised above his head.

But antics gave way to artistry almost immediately as Ma took his seat and launched into the Elgar cello concerto, stamping its opening chords with a ferocity that would alternate with lyricism throughout the performance.

In 1919, Elgar’s cello concerto suffered from a disastrous first performance, and for almost half a century it was barely played. A key figure in its rediscovery in the late 1960s was the charismatic young cellist Jacqueline du Pré, who reinterpreted it as a document of introspection and anxiety for a world newly tossed by war and social change. One of the cellos that Yo Yo Ma regularly plays is the Davidov Stradivarius on which du Pré also performed. [Read more…]

Peter Otto to perform Haydn’s rarely heard first violin concerto at Blossom

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By Daniel Hautzinger

Otto-Peter-180x200“Honestly, I’ve only heard this piece played very badly,” Cleveland Orchestra first associate concertmaster Peter Otto said of Haydn’s first violin concerto. Otto will perform the work with The Cleveland Orchestra under Jeffrey Kahane at Blossom Music Center on August 10. “Most often, a very old-fashioned, heavily edited version is played, even by people today. I have the critical edition, so there are a lot of different notes and different rhythms. Playing it from the bare bones text makes it sound like a completely different piece.”

So if you’ve heard this concerto before and dismissed it (“the first movement is often played by ten year-olds,” Otto said), the Blossom concert might be a good time for a reappraisal. [Read more…]

Hats, Liszt, and garlic: a conversation with pianist Stephen Hough

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By Daniel Hautzinger

Stephen Hough 2Interviewing Stephen Hough is a daunting task. Besides being one of the most successful, talented, and intelligent pianists of his generation, he composes, is a visiting professor at Juilliard and the Royal Academy of Music, writes wide-ranging regular blog posts for The Telegraph and articles for other publications, has published a book, The Bible as Prayer, writes poetry, and has given a solo exhibition of his paintings in London. Where do you even start?

Luckily Hough is an amiable, disarming conversationalist, exuding the air of a well-mannered English gentleman. (At one point, he enthused over a hat store in Chicago, recommending it as “a wonderful place, well worth seeing.”) He is extraordinarily genial, both in the sense of being friendly and displaying genius. And he is an engaging musician, who will perform Liszt’s First Piano Concerto with John Storgårds conducting The Cleveland Orchestra on July 26 at Blossom Music Center. [Read more…]

Feature: Cleveland Orchestra — an interview with Stanislaw Skrowaczewski

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by Daniel Hathaway

SkrowaczeswkiNote: Last Sunday, July 20, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski was scheduled to conduct The Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom. He cancelled due to illness late in the week and was replaced by the orchestra’s assistant conductor, Brett Mitchell. We spoke to Maestro Skrowaczewski on the Wednesday before his Blossom concert and are reprinting the concert preview as a feature.

In 1957, Polish conductor Stanislaw Skrowaczewski was one of the local hosts for The Cleveland Orchestra’s first European tour — an event which established the ensemble’s international reputation. It was also an important moment for Skrowaczewski, whose first meeting with George Szell in Warsaw launched his own career in the United States.

“It was just after I won first prize in Rome,” Skrowaczewski said in a telephone conversation from his home in the Minneapolis suburb of Wayzata. “That was important in Europe because it was the first international competition after the war, so it had a certain value. Szell knew it, and he knew a little of my composition, Symphony for Strings, which he thought was very well written. He asked if I would mind to play it with his orchestra in Cleveland next year. The arrangements were very simple.” [Read more…]

Preview: Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom — a conversation with violinist Karen Gomyo

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by Mike Telin

GOMYO-KarenClassical music under the stars continues this weekend at Blossom Music Center when conductor Bramwell Tovey leads The Cleveland Orchestra in a performance that includes Bizet’s Suite from Carmen and deFalla’s The Three-Cornered Hat. The concert, which begins on Saturday, July 19 at 8:00 pm, also marks the return of violinist Karen Gomyo to the Blossom stage for a performance of Saint-Saëns’s Violin Concerto no. 3.

Upon answering the phone in Switzerland, the extremely gracious Karen Gomyo immediately thanked me for calling her in Europe. No problem I tell her, I’m calling her on Skype. Gomyo uses our brief opening conversation to talk about all that is wonderful with modern technology, and how easy it makes our lives, as the perfect lead-in to talking about the Saint-Saëns concerto. “It’s funny because I read somewhere that Pablo Sarasate, just knocked on Saint-Saëns’s door and asked him for a concerto. That is unthinkable these days because, like you said, we have all these modes of communication. But I guess back in that time you could really just show up in person.” [Read more…]

Blossom Music Festival: A Conversation with Renaud Capuçon

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By Mike Telin

Capuçon-Renaud“I look forward to coming to Cleveland,” exclaimed French violinist Renaud Capuçon during a recent telephone conversation from his home in Paris. “I’ve been to the city before, but this is my debut with the orchestra, although I have heard them in Paris and in Lucerne with Franz Welser-Möst.”

On Saturday, July 5 at 8:00 pm at Blossom Music Center,Hans Graf will lead the Cleveland Orchestra in a concert featuring Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien and Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 “From the New World”. (Graf replaces Jaap van Zweden, who is being treated for a shoulder injury). The evening concludes with post-concert fireworks.

A gracious and humble conversationalist, Capuçon thanks me for calling him at exactly the appointed hour. Like many violinists, Capuçon began studying Sibelius’s concerto at an early age, in his case at 14. “My copy has 1990 written in the small writing of a kid, so I’ve kind of lived with it. It’s one of those pieces that is exactly connected to the soul of the composer. It’s like his second symphony. You have pictures in your mind coming straight at you.”   [Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra releases 2014 Blossom Schedule

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CLEVELAND, February 16

TCO@BlossomThe Cleveland Orchestra has announced the 2014 Blossom Music Festival season, a total of 18 concerts between July 3 and August 31, including 15 by The Cleveland Orchestra, two Blossom Festival Band concerts, and one concert by the Blossom Festival Orchestra. The complete schedule follows.

* Denotes fireworks following the concert, weather permitting
** Blossom Debut *** Cleveland Orchestra Debut

Thursday, July 3, 2014, at 8:00 p.m.*
Friday, July 4, 2014, at 8:00 p.m.*
Blossom Festival Band
Loras John Schissel, conductor

A Salute to America
Music by Bernstein, Gershwin, and John Philip Sousa, with Tchaikovky’s “1812” Overture and fireworks, weather permitting. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom — Pixar in Concert with Richard Kaufman (August 31)

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by Robert Rollin

Pixar-in-ConcertThe Cleveland Orchestra closed its Blossom Festival summer season on August 31 and September 1 with two performances of Pixar in Concert. I attended the Saturday performance, a delightful evening conducted by Richard Kaufman. Kaufman was for eighteen years music coordinator at MGM, supervising both film and television projects. He is now an active pops conductor.

Pixar, the most innovative animation company in recent years, has had a remarkable succession of hits since Toy Story (1995), and the evening concentrated on the quality film music that has helped usher in this new era. Several enormous screens projected the film visuals. Pixar’s skill has been in humanizing digital animation characters, whether children’s toys, monsters, fish, automobiles, insects, or rats, by giving them personalities, endearing expressions, and showing them in life and death struggles to fight the good fight simply to do what is morally right.

Kaufman skillfully coordinated the correlation of music with the films’ visual actions. Though a few musicians wore earphones providing click tracks to maintain ensemble, the large majority relied on Kaufman’s clear beat to stay together. [Read more…]

Preview: Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom:
two “Pixar in Concert” evenings —
a conversation with conductor Richard Kaufman

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by Mike Telin

Kaufman,-Richard---by-Eric-Stoner“I’ve been very blessed,” conductor Richard Kaufman says of his impressive musical career — most of which he has devoted to conducting and supervising music for film and television productions, as well as performing film and classical music in concert halls and on recordings. On Saturday, August 31, and Sunday, September 1, at Blossom Music Center, Richard Kaufman will lead The Cleveland Orchestra in Pixar in Concert. The production includes musical selections from A Bug’s Life, Brave, Cars and Cars 2, Finding Nemo, Monsters, Inc., Toy Story, Toy Story 2 and 3, Ratatouille, Up, and WALL·E along with video clips of each film. Both concerts will be followed by fireworks, weather permitting.

“I was part of the team that created the show at Disney and this weekend’s program is a montage of the 13 Pixar films’ music.” Kaufman points out that performing live to animation is not an easy task. “I have to say that I have played violin for many film scores but I think that playing for animation is by far the most challenging. In animation everything moves very quickly: you have to be able to turn on a dime. In the studio all the musicians use click-tracks but this weekend only part of the orchestra will be using click-tracks. And the fact that The Cleveland Orchestra is going to be playing this music on two summer evenings at Blossom is truly wonderful. It’s like all of the planets have aligned.” [Read more…]

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