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Preview: Cleveland Orchestra: guest conductor Fabio Luisi talks about Mahler, Schumann and working at The Met

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by Mike Telin

LUISI-FabioIn the middle of the season that saw his sudden elevation to principal conductor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York during the long indisposition of James Levine, Fabio Luisi made an impressive debut with The Cleveland Orchestra. He returns to open the Severance Hall season this weekend with three performances featuring Mahler and Schumann symphonies and Beethoven’s fifth piano concerto with Hélène Grimaud, an artist Luisi has known and worked with for many years.

We spoke with Fabio Luisi by telephone earlier this month, just before his debut with the Czech Philharmonic in the Verdi Requiem. “I’m looking forward to my return to Cleveland,” he said at the beginning of our conversation. “The orchestra played so beautifully during my debut concert two seasons ago.”

The concerts on Thursday and Saturday evenings will feature Mahler’s fourth symphony. “I have a long relationship with Mahler’s music,” he said. “It’s something that touches my heart and soul. It is something very special to me.” When asked when he first discovered Mahler, he quickly responds, “I can tell you quite precisely. I was fifteen years old in Genoa, the town of my birth. I was a student and I went to a concert with my girlfriend of that time and it was Mahler’s Symphony #5. It was such a discovery for me because I had never heard a Mahler symphony before and this huge amount of sound and the differences of moods astonished me. And from then on I was a Mahler addict.” [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…]

Review: Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom with David Afkham & Martin Helmchen (August 24)

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by Nicholas Jones

AFKHAM-DavidSaturday’s Cleveland Orchestra concert at Blossom took its lead from the young – two guest artists barely thirty, and two composers even younger.

The brilliant German conductor David Afkham, returning to Blossom where he debuted in July of 2011, brought fire and freshness to a familiar program of music by Beethoven and Schubert. A former Dudamel conducting fellow, Afkham shares with his mentor a focus on the details coupled with an unflagging sense of the big picture.

The opening piece was Beethoven’s stormy “Coriolanus” overture (in C minor: the rest of the program moved to the sunnier key of C major). While there was a little rhythmic uncertainty as the piece began, the conductor soon established control. Afkham has a sure hold on how important contrast is to Beethoven: the overture unmistakably showed the contrast between the angular theme that depicts the overbearing Roman general with its abrupt leaps and terrifying silences, and the gentler tune usually associated with the pleadings of Coriolanus’s mother. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland International Piano Competition — Final rounds with The Cleveland Orchestra (August 9 & 10)

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by Daniel Hathaway

CIPC-Severance-SteinwayRoger Mastroianni’s photo captured the mood of expectation as the final four pianists in the Cleveland International Piano Competition waited their turns to perform concertos with Stefan Sanderling and The Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall on Friday and Saturday evenings — the last stop on the way to the top.

Two of the contestants chose Tchaikovsky’s first concerto, performances which were wisely distributed between the two evenings. François Dumont was up first on Friday, Jiayan Sun first on Saturday, and if cataloging the differences between their interpretations didn’t amount to comparing apples to oranges, it was at least an exercise in distinguishing between McIntoshes and Galas. Both performers brought abundant technique, fine musicianship and a clear game plan to their tasks. Choosing between them was a matter of taste, and a task we were happy to leave to the jury.

[Read more…]

Preview: Joffrey Ballet to recreate 1913 Rite of Spring at Blossom this weekend

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by Mike Telin

Sacre-1913In his book, First Nights, Harvard professor Thomas Forrest Kelly begins his description of the premiere of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps on May 29, 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris with reflections by its ballet master and a famous composer who happened to be in the audience.

I think the whole thing has been done by four idiots: First, M. Stravinsky who wrote the music. Second, M. Roerich who designed the scenery and costumes. Third, Mr. Nijinsky who composed the dances. Fourth, M. Diaghilev who wasted money on it. —Enrico Cecchetti

The choreography is ridiculous, the music sheer cacophony. There is some originality, however, and a certain amount of talent. But taken together, it might be the work of a madman. —Giacomo Puccini

This Saturday and Sunday, August 17 and 18 at 8:00 pm at the Blossom Music Center, Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet will join The Cleveland Orchestra, Tito Muñoz, conducting, in Robert Joffrey and Millicent Hodson’s 1987 recreation of Nijinski’s original choreography for The Rite of Spring. The score will be played in a reduced orchestration for stage performances by noted conductor Jonathan McPhee published by Boosey & Hawkes (the only reduction to be authorized by the Stravinsky Trust). [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom with Bramwell Tovey & Mark Kosower (August 4)

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by Nicholas Jones

KosowerIt was no doubt the beautiful weather that drew many of the ample lawn crowd to Sunday evening’s Blossom concert with the Cleveland Orchestra and guest conductor Bramwell Tovey. The musical appeal, though, was surely the evening’s featured work, Gustav Holst’s justly famous suite The Planets.

Though there were no projected visuals to accompany this early “space music,” Cleveland’s NASA Glenn Research Station – many of whose employees were in attendance – installed a mock-up of the Mars rover and other astronomical displays near the entrance.

Holst’s suite, written over several years during and just after World War I, is actually less about the planets as NASA knows them than about their supposed astrological qualities. As in a baroque suite, each of the seven movements is a mood piece of its own. We encounter at each new turn a different affect – bellicose (Mars), delicate (Venus), officious (Mercury), expansive (Jupiter), exhausted (Saturn), bizarre (Uranus), and finally mystical (Neptune). [Read more…]

Preview: Cleveland Orchestra — a conversation with violin soloist Ray Chen

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by Mike Telin

CHEN-RayOn Sunday, August 11 beginning at 7:00 pm the sounds of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons will fill the Blossom Music Center grounds when violinist Ray Chen makes his debut with The Cleveland Orchestra. The concert under the direction of Jahja Ling also features Rossini’s Overture to The Thieving Magpie and Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3.

Born in Taiwan and raised in Australia, Ray Chen studied at the Curtis Institute of Music. Following wins at the Yehudi Menuhin (2008) and Queen Elisabeth (2009) competitions, Chen’s international career has been on a fast track forward. You can read about his accomplishments and numerous other interests on his website.

But let’s get directly to our conversation. We reached Ray Chen by telephone in Germany where he had just finished a recording session for his third, all-Mozart album with Christoph Eschenbach and the Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra. 

Mike Telin: Congratulations on your Cleveland Orchestra debut

Ray Chen: Thanks! I’m really excited. I went to the Encore School for Strings in 2006 and 2007 and I attended some concerts at Blossom. I remember hearing Christian Tetzlaff play the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and the second half was Scheherazade. That is a strong memory — sitting on the lawn — because as students we weren’t going to pay for pavilion seats. So I am really excited because there is more of a personal connection when you go back to the places you have been as a student. And to be able to be on the other side is fantastic. [Read more…]

Review: Karabits makes Cleveland Orchestra debut with Shaham in Tchaikovsky violin concerto (August 3)

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by Timothy Robson

Shaham,-Gil---by-Christian-SteinerThe rising young Ukrainian-born conductor Kirill Karabits made his Cleveland Orchestra debut on Saturday evening, August 3, at Blossom Music Center, in an all-Russian program. Gil Shaham was the soloist in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35. It was a beautiful summer’s eve, and there was a large audience enjoying the fresh air on the lawn, as well as in the Blossom pavilion.

Mr. Karabits opened the concert with an energetic reading of Glinka’s Overture to Ruslan and Ludmila. The momentum never lagged, even in the more lyrical moments of the five-minute curtain raiser, whose eponymous opera is almost never performed in the West. Mr. Karabits was a model of efficiency in his conducting, with minimalist baton movements, nods and flicks of his fingers to communicate his directions.

In an interview last week with ClevelandClassical’s Mike Telin, Gil Shaham expressed his enthusiasm for performing the Tchaikovsky concerto, one of the enduring favorites of the romantic violin repertoire. His enthusiasm was apparent in his performance at Blossom. His playing and stage presence showed his total involvement with the music. [Read more…]

Preview: Barber’s cello concerto at Blossom — a chat with Cleveland Orchestra soloist Mark Kosower

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by Mike Telin

KosowerFor reasons unknown, Samuel Barber’s Cello Concerto in A minor has never garnered the attention that is enjoyed by the composer’s violin concerto. But on Sunday, August 4 beginning at 7:00 pm at Blossom Music Center, Cleveland Orchestra principal cellist Mark Kosower hopes to do his part in changing that when he performs the Cleveland Orchestra premiere of the work. The concert, under the direction of Bramwell Tovey, also includes Walton’s The Spitfire: Prelude and Fugue and Holst’s ever popular The Planets.

We spoke with Mark Kosower by telephone and began by asking him why he decided to perform Barber’s concerto.

Mark Kosower: I’ve always had an affinity for the piece ever since I learned it back in 1996. It was a piece I came across in 1995 and I immediately fell in love with it. The combination of the beautiful lyricism of the writing combined with motoric and rhythmic drive make the piece really exciting from beginning to end. [Read more…]

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