by Daniel Hathaway
While half of The Cleveland Orchestra was busy downtown providing incidental music for The Good Peaches at the Cleveland Play House on Thursday evening, April 14, the rest of the ensemble played a scintillating concert of music by Haydn and Mozart uptown at Severance Hall under guest conductor Jane Glover, featuring principal flute Joshua Smith and harpist Yolanda Kondonassis. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
Music from the Classical era will be on tap when guest conductor Jane Glover makes a return visit to Severance Hall. On Thursday, April 14 at 7:30 pm, she will lead The Cleveland Orchestra in performances of Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 6 (“Le Matin”) and Wolfgang Amadè Mozart’s Concerto for Flute and Harp and Symphony No. 39.
Mozart’s pieces will be featured during the Orchestra’s Fridays@7 Series on April 15, and the full program will be repeated on Saturday, April 16 at 8:00 pm. On Sunday, April 17 the Orchestra will travel to Finney Chapel for a 4:00 performance on the Oberlin Artist Recital Series. [Read more…]
by Christine Jay
Can you successfully bring bar music into the concert hall? Cleveland Orchestra principal flutist Joshua Smith and Ensemble HD say, yes we can. Presented by the Rocky River Chamber Music Society on February 1 at the West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church, the ensemble performed their concert titled “Cabaret : Between Two World Wars.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Ensemble HD, a group of Cleveland Orchestra musicians and friends headed up by principal flute Joshua Smith, garnered a lot of publicity a few years ago when the musicians played at Happy Dog in Gordon Square — a tavern famous for its hot dogs with fifty toppings. The ensemble will be featured on the next Rocky River Chamber Music Society concert on Monday, February 1 at 7:30 pm at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church.
For that free concert, Smith will join fellow Ensemble HD members (oboist Frank Rosenwein, violinist Amy Lee, violist Joanna Patterson, cellist Charles Bernard, and guest pianist Christina Dahl) in music that dates from between the 20th century’s World Wars. We caught up with Joshua Smith in Miami, where the Orchestra was continuing its residency in the sunny south, to ask about Ensemble HD’s forthcoming program. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Jones
In the closing movements of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, the full brass section makes a spectacular entrance. In 1830, it must have seemed a sound that had never been heard before. Even in the jaded 21st century, it has a startling sonic complexity — at times as metallic as a locomotive’s firebox, and at others as smooth as the oiled bearings that drive the machine. [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
An elemental legend set to music by an imaginative composer, and performed by an exacting conductor, a first-class orchestra, a responsive, adaptable chorus, and four veteran soloists made The Cleveland Orchestra’s performance of Hector Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust on Thursday evening, May 7 an unforgettable experience. May the houses for the two remaining concerts on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon be packed to the rafters — a concert this gripping happens only once in a great while. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
A full evening devoted to the music of Joseph Haydn is sure to be filled with sophisticated musical rhetoric, and at least a good handful of surprises. Last Thursday evening at Severance Hall, visiting British conductor Matthew Halls and The Cleveland Orchestra dug deeply into the fabric of an overture and a symphony, and with the help of the fastidiously exciting pianist Marc-André Hamelin, into one of the Austrian master’s piano concertos. Though the fourth work was obviously not by Haydn, its performance by duo hornists Richard King and Jesse McCormick would have deeply impressed whoever actually wrote it. [Read more…]