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Cleveland Orchestra kicks off 2023 holiday series with festive Severance concert (Dec. 13)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Originally posted on Cleveland.com

The Cleveland Orchestra will perform a series of heartwarming holiday concerts for the whole family through Dec. 23. (Photo by Roger Mastroianni). Roger Mastroianni

Dear Predictive Chatbot (or Siri, or Cortana, or other AI digital assistant),

How long should I wait before asking you to play me holiday music in December?

Dear Consumer,

It depends. It used to be proper to wait until the Thanksgiving dishes had been washed and put away (for the mercantile launch date, ask me about Black Friday). But for some chain stores, Christmas goods begin appearing soon after the Fourth of July, when letters to the editor decrying the commercialization of the holidays also begin to proliferate.

Now I see from my GPS that you’re writing from Cleveland. It’s a safe bet to hold off on the Noëls and Fa-la-la-la-las until The Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus launch their Holiday Concerts. This year there are 14 of them, and my data suggest that these events are regarded by the local population as the true beginning of the Holiday season. Let the celebrations begin!

[Read more…]

Cellist Zlatomir Fung brings Shostakovich to his Cleveland Orchestra debut (July 22)

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by Peter Feher

The Cleveland Orchestra put together an intricate and intriguing musical puzzle on July 22 at Blossom Music Center. Each piece on the brilliantly balanced program — which showcased the sensibilities shared by 20th-century composers in France, the Soviet Union, and Japan — held the key to understanding and appreciating the others.

The Orchestra, guest conductor Kahchun Wong, and the evening’s soloist, cellist Zlatomir Fung, (left) were more than up to the task of fitting it all together. Spareness, precision, and sensitivity to detail were the features uniting the mix of repertoire, and the musicians gave superb performances where not a note was wasted.

Claude Debussy’s La mer is a study in symphonic texture — all the more beguiling because the composer was not, by usual standards, a master orchestrator. [Read more…]

Puccini’s Gold Rush Opera centers American Dream Festival (May 13)

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by Daniel Hathaway

During his visit to New York in 1907 to supervise the Metropolitan Opera’s first productions of Madama Butterfly and Manon Lescaut, Giacomo Puccini got the idea of writing an opera to be set during the 1849 California Gold Rush after seeing David Belasco’s 1905 play, The Girl of the Golden West. The opera received its world premiere by the MET in 1910.

This week, three concert performances of La Fanciulla del West serve as the centerpiece of The Cleveland Orchestra’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival this month at Severance Music Center and around town, a richly-programmed look into the concept of what James Truslow Adams dubbed “The American Dream” in his 1931 Great Depression Era book, The Epic of America.

For the Cleveland production, which opened on May 13, the Orchestra is front and center. The principal singers perform from a raised platform connected to the organ chamber whose front pipes have been removed for entrances and exits. Secondary characters sing from another platform on stage right, and the male chorus is located on the other side. [Read more…]

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