by Timothy Robson
Few new works performed by The Cleveland Orchestra in recent memory have been as musically imaginative and sonically arresting as Caroline Shaw’s Watermark, which received its first Cleveland Orchestra performance at Blossom Music Center on Saturday evening, August 28. Pianist Jonathan Biss, for whom the piece was written, was the superb soloist, with associate conductor Vinay Parameswaran at the podium.
by Stephanie Manning
To Richard Kaufman, returning to Blossom this weekend to lead The Cleveland Orchestra in music by John Williams “is like winning the concert lottery.” The combination of a world-class orchestra, a beautiful venue, and fantastic music fills the conductor with enthusiasm for the two performances on September 4 and 5 at 7:00 pm.
“There’s something about doing a concert during the summer, especially at a place like Blossom, where everybody is just in a great mood,” Kaufman said during a recent phone interview. The program, “Salute to John Williams,” will feature that composer’s music from beloved films like Superman, Harry Potter, and Star Wars. Tickets are available online — fireworks will follow both performances.
“You know, the difficult part about putting together a John Williams concert is what not to do, because there are so many fantastic choices of music that audiences love,” Kaufman said. “So you put together the program knowing that you can’t play everything.” Nevertheless, he’s confident that there’s something for everyone, from the “Flight to Neverland” from Hook to the “Flying Theme” from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
by Mike Telin
Having performed on three occasions with CityMusic Cleveland, Japanese violinist Sayaka Shoji is no stranger to Northeast Ohio audiences. But when she returns to Cleveland this Sunday, August 22, it will be to make her debut with The Cleveland Orchestra, performing Brahms’ sublime Violin Concerto.
“I’m excited and very happy that this is happening,” Sayaka Shoji said by telephone from her home in Paris. “It was programmed last year, and of course we all had a difficult period, but they re-programmed it and I am very grateful.”
Under the direction of Jahja Ling, the 7:00 pm all-Brahms program also includes Symphony No. 3. Tickets are available online.
When asked why she thinks the concerto is one of the greatest in the repertoire, the violinist said it is partly because Brahms was a demanding, self-critical composer. “He also collaborated on the piece with his friend Joseph Joachim. And the result of that intensive collaboration is what makes it a jewel.”
by Peter Feher
From the podium, Herbert Blomstedt is always proving that there are new insights to be found in even the most well-trod pieces.
The 94-year-old Swedish American conductor, whose big American post was with the San Francisco Symphony several decades ago, returned to Blossom Music Center on Sunday, August 1, with the kind of austere program only he can pull off.
by Peter Feher
The stage was packed at Blossom Music Center on Sunday, July 18. The pops program of American songbook standards — part Broadway, part Hollywood, and part jazz — called for a full orchestra, plus a rhythm section up front and a row of saxophone players off to the side. This is music that can work with just piano and singer, but after months of pandemic-adapted performances, it was great to see a full-scale production.
by Cait Winston
In his remarks before the July 28 Kent Blossom Music Festival concert, featuring members of The Cleveland Orchestra, Kent State University president Todd Diacon noted that while the past year has not been easy, “It has been made easier by the arts.” This statement was ratified by the performances that followed, where the freedom and passion in the musicians’ playing created a restorative sense of joy and optimism.
by Timothy Robson
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.
by Mike Telin
It’s fascinating how many people can recall the event that planted a career bug inside of them. For Rafael Payare, that event occurred while on tour in Italy as a member of the horn section of the National Children’s Orchestra of Venezuela. “This Italian maestro, Giuseppe Sinopoli, came. He spoke no Spanish and communicated only with his energy,” Payare recalled during a recent telephone conversation. “But he changed the sound of the orchestra in the first minute of rehearsal and that really impressed me. I thought, wow, when I am old and my hair is all white, I would love to be a conductor. So that is how the conducting bug got into me.”
On Sunday, July 25 at 7:00 pm at Blossom Music Center, Rafael Payare will make his Cleveland Orchestra debut with a program that features Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 with Stefan Jackiw as soloist and Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 (“From the New World”). Tickets are available online.
by Jarrett Hoffman
One grant, given to two organizations, presenting three artists-in-residence, joined by over one hundred guest artists, in nine videos designed to increase awareness around an array of social and cultural issues.
The sum of those numbers is a virtual series presented by the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society and El Comité Mexicano de Cleveland (Mexican Committee of Cleveland) through funding from the Cleveland Foundation’s Creative Fusion program. The series is ongoing: six videos have been released since early June — watch them here — with three still to come beginning on Friday, July 30.
First, some background about Creative Fusion in general, and in particular the 2020 edition, delayed twelve months due to the pandemic. The program invites artists from around the world to participate in residencies in Cleveland, and since 2016, each year has been designed around a different theme.
The 2020 edition, titled Contar, was to be centered in Clark-Fulton, which contains the La Villa Hispaña neighborhood, known as an emerging cultural, social, and economic hub for the Hispanic community. The dual meanings of contar — Spanish for both “to count” and “to tell” — were tied into the 2020 Census.
by Stephanie Manning
TONIGHT IN-PERSON AND ONLINE:
The Oberlin-Como Piano Festival begins tonight at 7:00, presented online as part of Oberlin’s Stage Left Series. The Day 1 program, Piano Concerti of Beethoven and Brahms, will include an interview with Yefim Bronfman followed by performances and master classes with Anastasia Vorotnaya, Xiaoyu Liu, Leonardo Pierdomenico, and Yangrui Cai. Tune in here, and learn more about the festival in this preview article.
And at 8:00 in Cleveland Heights, Apollo’s Fire will feature harpsichordist Jeannette Sorrell and violinists Olivier Brault, Alan Choo, and Emi Tanabe in an energetic program of Bach, Vivaldi, and Telemann. Tickets are available here.
IN THE NEWS:
The Cleveland Institute of Music is welcoming three new members to the conservatory faculty (pictured). They are violinist Philip Setzer of the Emerson String Quartet and two Cleveland Orchestra musicians: assistant concertmaster Jessica Lee and principal horn Nathaniel Silberschlag. All are recruiting students for 2022-23, and Silberschlag will co-teach with CIM’s head of the horn department and Cleveland Orchestra principal horn emeritus, Richard King.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg was obsessed with the number thirteen — notable, then, that he died on this day in 1951, a Friday the 13th, at the age of 76 (7+6 = 13). For a concise introduction to his life and works, check out this ten-minute YouTube video by Samuel Andreyev.
Schoenberg is best known for his use of a compositional technique called twelve-tone serialism, which can create a dissonant or “scary” sound. Learn more about this system and its evolution in this article in The New York Times. Even before he finalized the technique, Schoenberg embraced atonality in his earlier works, such as Pierrot Lunaire. Listen (and watch) a fantastic performance by the Israeli Chamber Project on YouTube here.
Despite Schoenberg’s lasting association with serialism, many of his works also incorporated classical forms and techniques. A great example is his Piano Concerto, which soloist Kirill Gerstein performed with The Cleveland Orchestra in 2017. In our preview for that performance, we interviewed Gerstein, who explained that “there’s a lot of dance in the concerto. There’re some waltzes, some gavottes, and some marches — really traditional musical references.”
The Cleveland Orchestra will perform Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto again on February 24-26, 2022 — this time with pianist Mitsuko Uchida. Franz Welser-Möst will conduct the program, which also includes Brucker’s Symphony No. 9.
Just like Schoenberg’s music itself, the story behind the Piano Concerto is complicated. He was commissioned to write it by one of his students at UCLA, Oscar Levant, who thought it would be a short composition — but Schoenberg fleshed it out into four movements, charging Levant an exorbitant sum which he then refused to pay. Though Levant eventually relented, it was another student of Schoenburg, Eduard Steuermann, who premiered the work in 1944.
And on this date in 1762, Benjamin Franklin announced the creation of a new instrument (pictured). Inspired by the sounds produced by swirling a wet finger around the rim of a wine glass, Franklin worked with a glassmaker to create a series of spinning glass bowls he named the armonica. The instrument became so popular that it was featured in compositions by Beethoven, Mozart, and Donizetti, but it was largely forgotten by the 1820s.
Franklin ultimately made no money from the construction of more than 5,000 armonicas, because he refused to patent or copyright any of his inventions. He explained the reason why in his autobiography:
“As we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.”