by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Happening today: two organists help the Church of the Covenant conclude the season for the Tuesday Noon series, and the Lev Aronson Cello Festival pairs music with film
•Interesting read: a profile of Cleveland Orchestra principal horn Nathaniel Silberschlag in The New York Times
•Almanac: George Szell, Jaime Laredo, and Prince
by Daniel Hathaway
Are you a big George Szell fan? Do you have 88 hours you’d like to devote to binge listening? Do you have room on your shelf for over a hundred CDs weighing 12.4 pounds? Are you interested in exploring monophonic recordings that have never appeared in digital form? If so, you’ll be delighted to know that a boxed set of the complete recordings George Szell made for Columbia Masterworks will be released by Sony Classical on August 10.
The 106 discs preserve 92 recordings remastered from original analogue tapes, including Szell’s performances with The Cleveland Orchestra from 1946 through 1969, as well as his collaborations with the New York Philharmonic and the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. Among the featured soloists are Robert Casadesus, Rudolf Firkušný, Leon Fleisher, Gary Graffman, Vladimir Horowitz, Rudolf Serkin, Zino Francescatti, Isaac Stern, Joseph Szigeti, Pierre Fournier, Leonard Rose and Judith Raskin. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
With less than two weeks to go before students in the 50th Kent/Blossom Music Festival descend on the Kent State University campus for five weeks of rehearsals, master classes, and coachings, festival director Ricardo Sepulveda is close to solving the annual puzzle of scheduling daily activities for 43 students and 30 faculty members — mostly from The Cleveland Orchestra. “It keeps me up at night,” he said in a recent telephone conversation.
This summer’s students (16 of whom are international, hailing from Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Japan, and Colombia) will arrive on July 1 and begin their experience with a dinner for participants, faculty, donors, and host families who will house eight of the students. “Rehearsals, coachings, and lessons start right up the next day,” Sepulveda said.
Recruitment began in mid-winter. “I changed the process a bit, shortening it to end before the first of March. Instead of print, we did online promotion using the Violin Channel and Facebook, which allows us to reach people faster,” he said, noting that the Festival is now old enough that it’s fun to see students of former students applying. Once they settle in at Kent, there are busy days ahead. [Read more…]
Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, who defected to the United States from his native Poland in 1960 and led the Minnesota Orchestra for 19 years, died on February 21 in Minneapolis.
Invited by George Szell to guest conduct The Cleveland Orchestra in 1958, Skrowaczewski last appeared with the Orchestra at Severance Hall in August, 2015. The New York Times obituary quotes from ClevelandClassical.com’s interview with the conductor in 2014 before he was scheduled to lead a Blossom Festival concert (he cancelled due to illness).
by Daniel Hathaway
In 1957, Polish conductor Stanislaw Skrowaczewski was one of the local hosts for The Cleveland Orchestra’s first European tour — an event which established the ensemble’s inter-national reputation. It was also an important moment for Skrowaczewski, whose first meeting with George Szell in Warsaw launched his own career in the United States.
On Friday, August 7 at 7:00 pm, Skrowaczewski will return to Severance Hall to conduct the Orchestra in a program that features Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. He was scheduled to lead this program at Blossom last summer but was forced to withdraw at the last moment. This preview was written for that occasion and has been revised and reposted. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Note: Last Sunday, July 20, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski was scheduled to conduct The Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom. He cancelled due to illness late in the week and was replaced by the orchestra’s assistant conductor, Brett Mitchell. We spoke to Maestro Skrowaczewski on the Wednesday before his Blossom concert and are reprinting the concert preview as a feature.
In 1957, Polish conductor Stanislaw Skrowaczewski was one of the local hosts for The Cleveland Orchestra’s first European tour — an event which established the ensemble’s international reputation. It was also an important moment for Skrowaczewski, whose first meeting with George Szell in Warsaw launched his own career in the United States.
“It was just after I won first prize in Rome,” Skrowaczewski said in a telephone conversation from his home in the Minneapolis suburb of Wayzata. “That was important in Europe because it was the first international competition after the war, so it had a certain value. Szell knew it, and he knew a little of my composition, Symphony for Strings, which he thought was very well written. He asked if I would mind to play it with his orchestra in Cleveland next year. The arrangements were very simple.” [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
Autograph Book: Leon Fleisher’s debut at Severance Hall (Cleveland Orchestra Archives)
George Szell made his first appearance as music director of The Cleveland Orchestra on October 17, 1946, opening the ensemble’s twenty-ninth season with Weber’s Oberon Overture, Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, Strauss’s Don Juan and Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.
One week later, on October 24 and 26, Szell welcomed his first soloist to the stage when 18-year-old Leon Fleisher played the Schumann concerto with the orchestra on a program that included Brahms’s second symphony, Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture and Britten’s Three Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes.
On October 25, Plain Dealer critic Herbert Elwell wrote, “The second symphony program of the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell last night at Severance Hall was another stimulating evening of vigorous and enjoyable music making to which the young American pianist, Leon Fleisher made a splendid contribution by his brilliant playing of the Schumann Concerto.”
Elwell went on to say, “No pianist could have been supplied with a more expressive or closely woven instrumental backdrop than that provided by Szell and it often seemed as though piano and orchestra were so intimately inter-related as to be one.”
That opening concert marked the beginning of what has become the longest relationship of any visiting artist with The Cleveland Orchestra. [Read more…]