by Daniel Hathaway
Last Thursday evening at The Cleveland Orchestra’s season opener in Severance Hall, music director Franz Welser-Möst was honored with the Orchestra’s twenty-third annual Distinguished Service Award. On Friday, an uncommonly hot evening for September, he deserved a medal for leading the ensemble in full concert dress while his colleagues played in shirtsleeves in Oberlin’s steamy Finney Chapel, surely one of the only major concert halls in Northeast Ohio not to offer climate control. (Photo from an earlier performance). [Read more…]
The days become shorter and hotter. School resumes. Vacationers unpack. We all know how this part of the summer feels: at once hazy and pell-mell, static and sped up. Northeast Ohioans can celebrate the fact that, for the fifth year running, The Cleveland Orchestra is inviting listeners into its cool urban home for the Summers@Severance series. In the second of three concerts, conductor Vasily Petrenko made good on the Orchestra’s new vow to tell “stories…without a single word,” through music born of travel and migration.
On Sunday, August 5 at Blossom Music Center, The Cleveland Orchestra played a concise and musically satisfying program of works by three Czech composers: Smetana, Janáček, and Dvořák. British conductor Michael Francis led the stylish performance. With the temperature hovering around a sweltering and humid 87 degrees at concert time, the male members of the orchestra sensibly doffed their usual white dinner jackets for shirtsleeves. Even the tree-surrounded — and usually cooler — Blossom grounds failed to provide much relief from the midsummer heat.
The lawn and pavilion of Blossom Music Center hosted an immense crowd on the evening of July 29 for The Cleveland Orchestra’s performance of Mozart’s 
On Sunday, July 3, I attended the second of two pre-Fourth of July concerts at Blossom, performed by the Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of Johannes Debus. The open air pavilion was a picture perfect setting and the weather was ideal.
Among the more important activities during the four-month Violins of Hope Cleveland project are the extensive educational activities being offered to schools and students by a number of area institutions. On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday (December 2 – 4) at 10:10 am and 12:10 noon, associate conductor Brett Mitchell and The Cleveland Orchestra — in conjunction with graduate students from the Case Western Reserve University / Cleveland Play House MFA Program in Acting — presented six engaging, hour-long concerts that unflinchingly presented the events of the Holocaust in music, mime, and words. 