by Mike Telin
“It’s one of those extraordinary works,” American soprano Julia Bullock said about Benjamin Britten’s settings of French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations during a recent interview.
“It was the combination of the lyrics and the freshness of the musical material that struck me initially. While I didn’t grasp on the first listening everything that Rimbaud was articulating, there was this undeniable feeling of rebellion that I was drawn to right from the start.”
On Thursday, November 12 at 7:30 pm, in Mandel Concert Hall, Bullock will make her Cleveland Orchestra debut, joining British conductor Jane Glover for Benjamin Britten’s Les Illuminations in a program titled “Royal Illuminations.”
The playlist includes George Frideric Handel’s Suites from Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks, and the first performance of Stacy Garrop’s Spectacle of Light. Program annotator Ellen Sauer Tanyeri writes, “Seldom is a program so thematically interwoven as this, where celebratory images of flowing water and dazzling light radiate outward from an evocative song cycle on French poetry.”
It’s difficult to believe that it was in April of 2014 that the inimitable British pianist Imogen Cooper last appeared with The Cleveland Orchestra. Interestingly, it was Dame Jane Glover who was on the podium for that engagement. 
It seems like every orchestra will be doing its version of Mozart in the great outdoors this summer, an old-fashioned program that has recently found new life. The combination of open-air venue, fewer musicians on stage, and repertoire at the ready seems to satisfy the pandemic equation.
