by Mike Telin

“My Cleveland Orchestra debut, yes it’s very exciting for me,” conductor Marc Albrecht said during a recent telephone conversation. “And I think it’s an interesting program too.” Beginning on Thursday at 7:30 pm in Severance Hall, The Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of Marc Albrecht will present three performances featuring Mahler’s Blumine and Songs of a Wayfarer with mezzo-soprano Alice Coote*, as well as Brahms’s Piano Quartet arranged by Arnold Schoenberg.

Marc Albrecht was born into an artistic family in Hanover, Germany, although finding his own musical voice was always important to him. And it was the late Claudio Abbado who helped him do that. You can read about all of his professional accomplishments here, but let’s proceed to the conversation, because Marc Albrecht is fascinating. We reached him in Amsterdam and began by asking him about this weekend’s program.

Marc Albrecht: I’m very fond of Schoenberg’s arrangement of Brahms’s Quartet in g minor. I’ve known it for many years and conducted it several times. It’s a miracle what Schoenberg does with it. He knew it so well because he was a talented cellist and had played the original version several times. So he knew it backwards and forwards. Later in America, where he had immigrated to escape the Nazis, he was desperately in search of work and it was there that he started to write this so called ‘Symphony No. 5’. [Read more…]