by Daniel Hathaway
Sooner or later, every orchestra has to come to terms with the Most Famous Symphony of Them All — Beethoven’s Fifth — and for Daniel Reith and the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra, that moment arrived at Severance Music Center on Sunday afternoon, November 12.
The challenges begin right at the beginning with the famous four-note motive that sounds so straightforward, but getting a stage full of musicians to play it together with the precise stops and starts that the composer writes into the score is anything but easy. “Just make any gesture at the beginning,” one conductor counseled a student, advice that works like magic the first time around, but then things get complicated. [Read more…]
What are the duties of an assistant conductor of a major orchestra? “Every day is an experience,” Daniel Reith said during a recent telephone conversation. Since assuming that position with The Cleveland Orchestra this season, Reith has had a lot on his plate. In addition to his involvement with numerous educational activities, he has led the Orchestra’s family concerts and the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Concert. Earlier this month he stepped in on very short notice for an ailing Klaus Mäkelä to lead three subscription concert performances.
“When I was ten or eleven, my father was going to an MLK march. He asked me if I wanted to go and I didn’t. And that has been a regret of mine for a very long time,” Peter Lawson Jones recalled during a recent telephone conversation. “But this night will celebrate all that Dr. King did and I look forward to being part of it.”