by Daniel Hathaway
A large and conspicuously intergenerational audience — unusually so for a Thursday evening — gathered at Severance Hall for The Cleveland Orchestra concert on March 12. Did they turn out in droves to hear guest conductor Fabio Luisi lead Beethoven’s seventh symphony? Or to hear Jean-Yves Thibaudet play Liszt’s second piano concerto? Maybe both. Whatever drew the crowds in, they experienced a distinguished evening of music. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Cleveland, March 1, 2015 — Under the direction of Franz Welser-Möst, The Cleveland Orchestra will begin its 98th season on September 24 with the first of three of Richard Strauss’s large tone poems, An Alpine Symphony. Also sprach Zarathrustra and Ein Heldenleben will follow later in the year.
Welser-Möst is also scheduled to conduct performances of such larger works as Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and The Miraculous Mandarin, and excerpts from Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung and Tristan und Isolde.
Distinguished guest conductors returning to the Severance Hall podium will include music director laureate Christoph von Dohnányi, Herbert Blomstedt, Lionel Bringuier, Alan Gilbert, Jane Glover, Gianandrea Noseda, Vladimir Jurowski and Antonio Pappano. Andrés Orozco-Estrada and Antoni Wit will lead the orchestra for the first time. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Electrifying keyboard playing opened and closed Saturday evening’s Cleveland Orchestra concert at Severance Hall (February 21). At the outset, organist Paul Jacobs treated the large audience to an alluring taste of the organ music of Johannes Brahms, plus a thrilling performance of one of Johann Sebastian Bach’s most handsomely-constructed preludes and fugues. At the end, pianist Yefim Bronfman joined Franz Welser-Möst and the Orchestra in a reading of Brahms’s first concerto so magisterial that future pianists probably need not apply. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The program notes mentioned that Johannes Brahms and Hans von Bülow enjoyed programming Brahms’s piano concertos, deciding at the last moment who would conduct and who would play piano. Some feat that, but Yefim Bronfman may top it this weekend when he plays both concertos in pairs of concerts over four days with Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The music of Jan Sibelius is a conundrum for many conductors and soloists. Make it sound too German or too Russian and its special qualities go missing in action. Spanish guest conductor Juanjo Mena was on the right track with Sibelius’s seventh symphony on Thursday evening at Severance Hall, while guest violinist Alina Ibragimova made something entirely her own of Sibelius’s violin concerto. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Brahms lovers (unless they particularly dote on his symphonies) will be ecstatic about what The Cleveland Orchestra is offering this weekend: two sets of concerts, each featuring the powerhouse pianist Yefim Bronfman in one of the two concertos, supplemented with other works by the celebrated nineteenth-century composer.
And in a first-ever occurrence, New York organ virtuoso Paul Jacobs will have the Severance Hall stage all to himself for the first half of the concerts on Saturday, February 21 at 8 and Sunday, February 22 at 3. Jacobs will “open” for the Orchestra with selections from the organ music of Brahms and Johann Sebastian Bach, played on Severance Hall’s 94-rank Norton Memorial Organ, built in Boston by the Ernest M. Skinner Co. in 1931, and restored and relocated by Ohio’s Schantz Organ Co. during the recent Severance Hall renovation. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
On Friday, February 13, assistant conductor Brett Mitchell will lead The Cleveland Orchestra in a live performance of Bernard Herrmann’s score to Vertigo, coordinating the music with a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 psychological thriller.
By now, Mitchell is an old hand at making live music match up with events on the big screen. He led the Orchestra in Herrmann’s score to Psycho last April, and in selections from both the 1940 and 2000 versions of Walt Disney’s Fantasia last December. Those projects resonate with Mitchell’s earliest musical experiences.
“When I was a little boy, I didn’t attend orchestral concerts,” he said in a recent telephone conversation. “What I was listening to was the music to the films I was watching. John Williams was a huge influence on me early on. I was born in 1979, so I grew up watching Star Wars, Superman, Indiana Jones and all the rest. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Though The Cleveland Orchestra marketed last weekend’s concerts as “Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony,” Finnish guest conductor Hannu Lintu, Israeli violinist Vadim Gluzman and the ensemble pulled off a hat trick. All three works on Thursday evening’s program were equally infused with personality and burned themselves indelibly into memory. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Czech musicians were highlighted on the first half of last weekend’s Cleveland Orchestra programs, including guest conductor Jakub Hrůša and composers Leoš Janáček and Antonín Dvořák, but it was Russian music scored by a Frenchman that brought down the house after intermission — or should we say, knocked the paintings right off the walls? [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
It goes without saying that it takes talent and hard work to have an international concert career. However, being at the right place at the right time doesn’t hurt. For the celebrated violinist Vadim Gluzman, his good fortune came when he met violinist Issac Stern as a teenager, quite by accident. In an article titled “The accidental virtuoso,” Gluzman recalled the off-chance meeting with Stern: “I made my way to Jerusalem, and at the JMC I told the receptionist I wanted to play for Isaac Stern. And she said: ‘Welcome to the club! You should have arranged this a couple of years ago.’”
Gluzman had the impression his quest was hopeless, but at that very moment Stern himself walked in. The receptionist explained the situation. To Gluzman’s surprise, instead of sending him away, Stern said, ‘Go and warm up and I’ll give you five minutes.’ “So I went,” Gluzman said, “…and he was with me for about two hours. And at the end of that, I had a new violin waiting for me in Tel Aviv, a scholarship and the possibility to work with him whenever I could.” [Read more…]