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Cleveland Orchestra & Chorus plus Bartók with Uchida (May 16)

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by Daniel Hathaway

The Cleveland Orchestra Chorus and pianist Mitsuko Uchida were featured in Thursday evening’s concert at Severance Hall on May 16, the chorus in Schubert’s great Mass in E-flat, the pianist in Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto — works that came at the very end of each composer’s time on earth. At some 50 minutes in duration, Schubert’s setting is as difficult to imagine performing in a church context as Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. Even the most imaginative ecclesiastical choreographers would be hard-pressed to match such extended music with liturgical actions. (Is there enough incense in Vienna?) [Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra & Chorus: Messiah with Jane Glover (Dec. 6)

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by Nicholas Stevens

As ClevelandClassical reported last week, the performances of Handel’s Messiah that Jane Glover led with the Cleveland Orchestra this past weekend marked her hundredth through hundred-and-third times conducting the oratorio. The world can only have a handful of definitive Messiah masters at any given time, and in our moment, she certainly belongs among them. As the Orchestra’s performance under Glover on Thursday, December 6 demonstrated, status as an expert confers a certain privilege: that of taking risks with a perennial favorite. [Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra: Jane Glover celebrates her 100th Messiah performance

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by Daniel Hathaway

Although she didn’t set out to make her appearance with The Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus this week one for the record books, British conductor Jane Glover will reach her century mark of Messiah performances on Thursday evening, December 6 at Severance Hall, the first of four presentations of Handel’s oratorio through Sunday, December 9.

I reached Glover by telephone in London late last week during her quick trip home between engagements. “I was in Chicago doing the Christmas Oratorio until Tuesday,” she said. “I got back here on Wednesday morning and have had four days to turn around, and I’ll be coming back on Sunday. I’m so looking forward to Messiah in Cleveland. It’s going to be a high point of the year.”

I wanted to chat with the conductor about her personal approach to George Frideric Handel’s most famous oratorio, but I began by asking whether these concerts were to be her third or fourth engagements with the Orchestra.

Jane Glover: It will be my third appearance with The Cleveland Orchestra. I’m thrilled because it’s my favorite orchestra on the planet.

Daniel Hathaway: I believe I read an interview in which you said you’d already led 100 performances of Messiah.

JG: Actually, the first performance with Cleveland will be number 100. Last year I had a couple in the book that I had to cancel because something clashed with them. [Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra & Chorus: Mahler’s Second Symphony (Oct. 4)

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by Daniel Hathaway

On Thursday, October 4, in a nearly-full Severance Hall and on a stage so packed with musicians that percussionists had to navigate sideways to change instruments, Franz Welser-Möst led The Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus in a strategically- paced performance of Gustav Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony as remarkable for its vast dynamic range as for its sonic magnificence. [Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra Prometheus Project II: Beethoven’s Ninth at Severance (May 17)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Cleveland Orchestra, BeethovenThe Cleveland Orchestra’s Centennial Season came to a festive conclusion at Severance Hall on Thursday, May 17. After performing the first eight of Beethoven’s symphonies in four concerts between May 9 and 13, Franz Welser-Möst led the Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra Chorus (prepared by Lisa Wong), and soloists Erin Wall, Jennifer Johnston, Norbert Ernst, and Dashon Burton in a blazing account of “The Ninth,” the final performance in Welser-Möst’s deeply philosophical Prometheus Project. (Read David Kulma’s reviews of the earlier concerts here.) [Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra: “The Ecstasy of Tristan & Isolde” — a three-concert festival

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by Daniel Hathaway

TCO Messiaen FWMThe first of two festivals capping off The Cleveland Orchestra’s centennial season was based around Richard Wagner’s groundbreaking version of the Tristan and Isolde legend. Culminating on April 29 with the third performance of his four-hour-long opera (Wagner called it “eine Handlung”), the festival also included a performance of Messiaen’s transcendent Turangalîla- Symphonie, and a concert titled “Divine Ecstasy,” a gathering of works that translate the notion of love-intoxication into the spiritual realm. [Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra & Chorus in Haydn’s The Seasons (January 20)

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by Daniel Hathaway

TCO Seasons Whole StageJoseph Haydn’s two great oratorios, The Creation and The Seasons, came along late in his life after the composer had visited London and was impressed by Handel’s large dramatic works for chorus and orchestra. After bravely performing a stripped-down version of The Seasons on Thursday — two of the soloists were ailing — Franz Welser-Möst led The Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus in an enthralling performance of the complete oratorio on Saturday evening. [Read more…]

Stravinsky’s Threni at Severance Hall: a conversation with Patrick Dupré Quigley

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by Daniel Hathaway

Patrick-Dupre-QuigleyThis week’s pair of Cleveland Orchestra concerts led by music director Franz Welser-Möst will be devoted to works in a variety of styles by Igor Stravinsky. One of the most challenging is Threni: Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah, a piece the composer premiered at the Venice Biennale in September 1958. Threni will be performed on Thursday, March 16 and Saturday, March 18 by The Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus and the Miami-based chamber chorus Seraphic Fire, now in its fifteenth season.

We spoke by telephone last week with Seraphic Fire’s founder and artistic director Patrick Dupré Quigley, who was already in Cleveland on another assignment with the Cleveland Orchestra. [Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra & Cleveland Orchestra Chorus in Haydn & Duruflé with Matthew Halls (Nov. 17)

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by Daniel Hathaway

TCO&COCMaurice Duruflé’s Requiem is probably one of the best-beloved and most-performed choral works of the 20th century, but for reasons of economy, it’s most frequently heard in the composer’s reduction for organ, strings, and optional trumpets, harp and timpani — or even in the version for voices and organ alone. On Thursday evening, November 17 at Severance Hall, a stage full of Cleveland Orchestra musicians joined the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus under the baton of Matthew Halls to bring the full tonal spectrum of Duruflé’s Gregorian-fueled masterpiece to life. [Read more…]

Ross Binnie talks about The Cleveland Orchestra’s fall season

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by Mike Telin

binnie-rossAs The Cleveland Orchestra gears up to launch its fall Severance Hall season, we caught up with Ross Binnie, the Orchestra’s Chief Marketing Officer, and asked him to give his insights into the array of programs. He described them as “a blend of the curious and the familiar which will be wonderful for the audiences.”

The season kicks off on September 29 and 30 when Franz Welser-Möst leads performances of Ives’s Symphony No. 3 (“The Camp Meeting”) and Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2. And organist Paul Jacobs (below) will make his Cleveland Orchestra debut as soloist in Copland’s Symphony for Organ and Orchestra. [Read more…]

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