by Daniel Hathaway
If The Cleveland Orchestra’s recent performance of Gustav Mahler’s third symphony were a restaurant, it would deserve the maximum three stars in the Michelin Guide (“exceptional…worth a special journey”). Franz Welser-Möst, the Orchestra, two of its choruses, and mezzo-soprano Kelley O’Connor took a captivated audience on a 95-minute journey into Mahler’s magic world on Thursday evening, October 5, the first of a pair of performances that weekend at Severance Hall, and an experience audiences in Paris and Vienna can look forward to during the Orchestra’s October tour. [Read more…]
The Cleveland Orchestra crossed Wade Lagoon on Sunday afternoon, September 27 to launch two ships on important missions with a single concert. One order of business was to crack a musical champagne bottle across the bow of the Milton and Tamar Maltz Performing Arts Center at The Temple-Tifereth Israel. The newly renovated University Circle landmark will continue to serve as a space to celebrate major religious holidays and life events while also providing Case Western Reserve University with the first stage in the creation of a long-needed performing arts facility. 
“Daphne” means “Laurel” in Greek, and Ovid’s tale in Metamorphoses of how a river nymph came to be transmogrified into a sacred tree has all the elements that an opera composer could wish for: a sylvan setting, gods meddling in human affairs, passion versus purity, jealousy that leads to murder, a drunken orgy, and an ennobling ending. Jacopo Peri took on the story in 1597 (one of several operas he wrote, now mostly lost), as did Marco da Gagliano (1608), Heinrich Schütz (1627, his only opera, entirely lost), Alessandro Scarlatti (1700) and, most recently, Richard Strauss (1938). 
It’s all about the holidays this week at Severance Hall. On Wednesday, December 17 at 7:30 pm, Brett Mitchell will lead The Cleveland Orchestra and renowned Cape Breton fiddler Natalie MacMaster in “Christmas in Cape Breton,” a special show that mixes folk and Celtic styles with Holiday favorites and Nova-Scotian jigs.
Pietism and fatalism inspired the disquieting poetic images that soprano Yulia Van Doren and the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus presented in works by Johann Sebastian Bach and Johannes Brahms last Thursday night in Severance Hall. Those depressing thoughts might have put a damper on the proceedings, had not the music in both cases been so appealing. 
On Friday evening, October 17, a standing-room only crowd gathered in the sanctuary of Saint John’s Cathedral to hear the magnificent Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus under the direction of Franz Welser-Möst in a free concert that featured Bach’s Missa Brevis, BWV 232. 
As Johann Sebastian Bach neared the end of his career, he took care to put his musical legacy in order, making archival-quality copies of Passions and completing what his son, C.P.E. Bach, called his “grosse catholische Messe.” 
In conjunction with performances of J.S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor (October 16 and 18) and one of his solo cantatas by soprano Yulia van Doren (October 23, 24 & 24), The Cleveland Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra Chorus and Youth Chorus will offer a free concert of the Kyrie and Gloria from the Mass at St. John’s Cathedral in downtown Cleveland on Friday, October 17 at 8:00 pm, and a “Make Music! Marathon” at Severance Hall on Saturday afternoon, October 18.