by Daniel Hathaway
Originally posted on Cleveland.com
The Cleveland Orchestra will perform a series of heartwarming holiday concerts for the whole family through Dec. 23. (Photo by Roger Mastroianni). Roger Mastroianni
Dear Predictive Chatbot (or Siri, or Cortana, or other AI digital assistant),
How long should I wait before asking you to play me holiday music in December?
Dear Consumer,
It depends. It used to be proper to wait until the Thanksgiving dishes had been washed and put away (for the mercantile launch date, ask me about Black Friday). But for some chain stores, Christmas goods begin appearing soon after the Fourth of July, when letters to the editor decrying the commercialization of the holidays also begin to proliferate.
Now I see from my GPS that you’re writing from Cleveland. It’s a safe bet to hold off on the Noëls and Fa-la-la-la-las until The Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus launch their Holiday Concerts. This year there are 14 of them, and my data suggest that these events are regarded by the local population as the true beginning of the Holiday season. Let the celebrations begin!
“What gets me excited about holiday concerts? Honestly, everything about them,” conductor Brett Mitchell said during a telephone conversation. “Every performance is for the audience, but these concerts really are for them. There’s so much opportunity for banter, and every crowd feels different.”
The stage was packed at Blossom Music Center on Sunday, July 18. The pops program of American songbook standards — part Broadway, part Hollywood, and part jazz — called for a full orchestra, plus a rhythm section up front and a row of saxophone players off to the side. This is music that can work with just piano and singer, but after months of pandemic-adapted performances, it was great to see a full-scale production.
“They are iconic,” Capathia Jenkins says of the pop and jazz standards that make up the 
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