by Daniel Hathaway
A long line at the Will Call window at Severance on Saturday evening, February 19 meant that a number of Cleveland Orchestra patrons missed hearing Guillaume Connesson’s Flammenschrift, the first item on Stéphane Denève’s program.
By way of consolation, soprano Fatma Said’s luminous singing in Maurice Ravel’s Shéhérazade made up for the delay.
Drawn to the exoticism of The Arabian Nights, in 1904 Ravel wrote both an overture and a three-movement song cycle on poems by Tristan Klingsor. We heard the song cycle, which Caroline Rae described in a Philharmonia Orchestra essay: [Read more…]
Venezuelan-born conductor Rafael Payare made his debut with The Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom Music Center on Sunday, July 25. Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 featured Stefan Jackiw as soloist, and the program concluded with Antonín Dvořák’s evergreen “New World” Symphony. Payare is the music director of the San Diego Symphony and music director-designate of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal.
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There were unexpected changes in July 19th’s Summers@Severance concert due to the illness of previously announced conductor Pablo Heras-Casado and the substitution of Swiss conductor Thierry Fischer, who is currently music director of the Utah Symphony. This necessitated a change in program as well: Debussy’s 
