by Nicholas Jones
Friday’s Cleveland Orchestra program, the first of 2015’s three Summers@Severance concerts, opened with Olivier Messiaen’s Hymne, composed in 1933. The score was lost during the war and reconstructed from memory by the composer in 1947. The original title (Hymne au Saint-Sacrement) indicated explicitly that it was an act of reverence to the Holy Eucharist of the Catholic Mass, and it apparently represents that ritual. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Except for special events like Oberlin’s Cooper Competitions, Severance Hall usually takes a summer break while The Cleveland Orchestra is off performing at Blossom Music Center. Last year, in response to burgeoning summer activity among other University Circle institutions, the Orchestra’s administration planned three Friday evening performances on its home turf. As chief marketing officer Ross Binnie said in an interview for this publication last July, “The change is so dramatic and the area is really buzzing with life now on a year-round basis. So it seemed an oversight not to have our doors opened as well to anyone wants to come to hear our concerts indoors in a relaxed atmosphere in the summer.”
This summer, Severance Hall will again resound with three concerts by The Cleveland Orchestra — on July 10, August 7, and August 21 at 7:00 pm — plus a bonus performance on August 28 at 8:00 pm by Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.
Music director Franz Welser-Möst will lead the opening performance, which revisits two works the Orchestra played during that busy week in May when the League of American Orchestras was visiting Cleveland for its annual conference. On July 10, Olivier Messiaen’s Hymne and Richard Strauss’s Symphonia domestica will share the program with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4, with Igor Levit as the featured soloist. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Franz Welser-Möst led the apparently indefatigable musicians of The Cleveland Orchestra in the third of four challenging, all-in-a-row concerts on Friday evening, May 29, major attractions on the agenda for the League of American Orchestras Cleveland meeting. Olivier Messiaen’s dazzling Chronochromie and Antonín Dvořák’s infrequently performed fifth symphony made different but compelling connections to the natural world, while Messiaen’s theologically-infused Hymne opened a portal to the heavenly realms. [Read more…]
by Jeremy Reynolds
At Severance Hall on Thursday, May 28 on a stage still covered in tarps to protect the artificial grass used in the production of Strauss’s Daphne (May 27 and 30), the Cleveland Orchestra gave a spirited performance of another of the canon’s great nature-inspired works: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, “Pastoral.” The second half of the program featured Richard Strauss’s Symphonia Domestica, Opus 53. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
“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). [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Franz Welser-Möst returned to the Severance Hall podium on Thursday, May 14 to lead The Cleveland Orchestra in a dynamic concert of music by Paul Hindemith, Jörg Widmann and Antonín Dvořák. Though the marketing department successfully advertised Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony as the main attraction (resulting in a large turnout for a Thursday evening), Christian Tetzlaff’s riveting performance of Widmann’s Violin Concerto was the most musically intriguing entry on the program, with The Orchestra’s reading of Hindemith’s Concert Music for Strings and Brass not far behind. [Read more…]
by Jarrett Hoffman
A good party doesn’t sit. It moves — from room to room, topic to topic, different people getting to tell their good joke.
Now imagine a party like that, but in a palace. Think golden handrails, spacious rooms, drinks poured and legs dancing, and good music. Think Gatsby.
Or think Severance Hall on Friday night, May 15th. The Cleveland Orchestra’s last Fridays@7 concert of the season featured four musical acts in four rooms, including one last party in the gilded Grand Foyer.
by Mike Telin
Now that the first spring flowers are poking their heads out of the ground, it’s a good time to look ahead to The Cleveland Orchestra’s busy schedule of events for April and May. And who is in a better position to talk about that than Ross Binnie, the orchestra’s chief marketing officer?
“We’ve got a little bit of classical for everybody — that’s my motto for the spring season,” Binnie said during a lively telephone conversation. “If I had to point at a project that I am really looking forward to, I think that the opera, Strauss’s Daphne, conducted by Franz Welser-Möst on May 27 and 30, is going to be really interesting. The director, James Darrah, has a real gift for bringing these works to life.” Although many details are still being worked out, the opera will be costumed and have staged elements. [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…]