by Mike Telin
A highlight of each Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra season is the concert featuring the annual concerto competition winner. On Saturday, May 5 at 8:00 pm at Severance Hall, trumpeter Charlie Jones will join his COYO colleagues in a performance of Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto under the direction of Vinay Parameswaran. The program will also include Beethoven’s Overture to Coriolan, Danielpour’s Toward a Splendid City and Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra. Tickets are available online.
A resident of Hinckley, Jones is a senior at Cuyahoga Valley Christian Academy. The eighteen-year-old has been a member of COYO’s trumpet section since the 2015-16 season. In addition to his orchestra duties, he has played with the ensemble’s brass quintet since 2016. In the fall, Jones will be attending the New England Conservatory and studying trumpet performance with Steven Emery.
We caught up with Charlie Jones by telephone and began our conversation by asking him why he chose Haydn’s concerto.
Two big works more than filled The Cleveland Orchestra’s Thursday evening program on April 5, one of them a standard concerto that crosses all international boundaries, the other a Czech symphony receiving only its third performance by the Orchestra, all three of those led by Czech conductors.
“I look forward to being back in town,” cellist 
Conductor Nikolaj Znaider and pianist Yefim Bronfman brought two grand works with them to their guest appearances with The Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall on Thursday evening, March 1. Beethoven’s well-known Fifth Piano Concerto and Elgar’s lesser-known Second Symphony gave both the soloist and the orchestra ample opportunity to fill the house with magnificent music on a blustery, snowy evening that left an unusual number of seats unoccupied.
“When I think of introducing the classical music that we love to young kids, 
According to Wikipedia, in the early decades of the 20th century there were as many as 7,000 organs installed in movie theaters in the United States for the purposes of entertaining audiences before and between shows and, especially, for accompanying silent films. The theaters have, alas, mostly vanished, the organs either destroyed or re-installed elsewhere, and the skills for accompanying silent films have been lost. That is why organist Todd Wilson’s performance on Friday night at Severance Hall accompanying the 1923 American film The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring Lon Chaney was such a brilliant feat of musical invention, theatricality and stamina.