by Nicholas Jones
Some music makes you yearn; some makes you cry; some makes you think. And some music just makes you glad to be alive. At The Cleveland Orchestra’s final Summers@Severance concert of the season last Friday, August 12, joy radiated from just about every aspect of the music.
by Daniel Hathaway
Three-quarters of their final score had already been totted up when the four finalists in the 2016 Cleveland International Piano Competition made their last lap around the track at Severance Hall on Friday and Saturday evenings, August 5 and 6. Handsome cash prizes were waiting at the end, but appearing with Bramwell Tovey and The Cleveland Orchestra was its own distinguished reward. (Photo: CEO Pierre van der Westhuizen welcomes the audience.) [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
Poor Victor Herbert, the Irish-born, German-trained cellist, conductor, and composer, has gotten the short end of the music history stick. In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century he was one of the most acclaimed American musical figures, both as a performer and as a composer of concert works — as well as a successful grand opera (Natoma, 1911) which starred soprano Mary Garden and a young Irish tenor making his operatic debut, John McCormick. [Read more…]
by Neil McCalmont
On Sunday evening, July 17, The Cleveland Orchestra celebrated the centenary of the National Parks Service with an Americana-themed concert titled “An American in Paris” at Blossom Music Center — their own venue located in Cuyahoga Valley National Park. The night’s program consisted of works by Ravel, Copland, and Gershwin conducted by Bramwell Tovey, with guest pianist Javier Perianes.
by Daniel Hathaway
English music doesn’t appear very often on American symphony orchestra programs — except when English conductors make guest appearances. Michael Francis brought along Edward Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony for his Blossom Music Festival visit. On Saturday evening, July 16, he paired engaging Britannic music both urban and bucolic with Mozart’s 21st concerto featuring Australian pianist David Fung. [Read more…]
by J. D. Goddard
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.
The evening opened with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, inspired by Tales of the Arabian Nights. The composer called it “A kaleidoscope of fairy-tale images,” [Read more…]
by Neil McCalmont, Mike Telin, & Daniel Hathaway
On August 25, one hundred years ago, President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the Organic Act of 1916 that established the National Park Service, building on the conservationist legacy pioneered in 1872 with the creation of the first National Park at Yellowstone.
Since 1933, the Service has also managed National Memorials, Military Parks, Cemeteries, and Historical Areas. A latecomer to the national parks family in 2000, Cuyahoga Valley National Park is the only national park in the state of Ohio, a large chunk of land that includes sites not owned by the federal government — including the Blossom Music Center. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Jones
Two Romantic meditations on death comprised the first of this year’s Cleveland Orchestra Summers @Severance programs last Friday evening — Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration and Johannes Brahms’s A German Requiem — both works of ambitious scope and seriousness, led by music director Franz Welser-Möst.
The Romantics knew how to face death. John Keats declared himself “half in love with easeful death.” “Death is the mother of beauty,” asserted Wallace Stevens, that modernist poet with a Romantic soul. [Read more…]
by Neil McCalmont
Summer time is a funner time, and what could be more fun than putting together a picnic and heading off to Blossom Music Festival for wonderful weather and music performed by The Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of Franz Welser-Möst?
On the evening of Saturday, July 9, thousands of listeners gathered in the pavilion, and on the lawn in the Blossom Bowl, spreading their blankets, reclining in their lawn chairs, and soaking up the warm summer night with their loved ones. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
What may be the largest group of Cleveland cultural institutions ever to circle their wagons around a single project will come into play this fall when Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Institute of Music, The Cleveland Orchestra, Facing History and Ourselves, Ideastream, the Jewish Federation of Cleveland, and the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage join together to present Violins of Hope Cleveland.
Four months of concerts, exhibitions, screenings, lectures, theatrical productions, and educational offerings will center around the extraordinary collection of violins amassed by Tel Aviv violinmaker Amnon Weinstein, instruments that managed to survive the Holocaust.
Weinstein, who emigrated from Eastern Europe to open a violin shop in Palestine in 1938, learned after World War II that some four hundred of his family members had perished under the Nazis. Later, he heard a heartfelt account from a survivor who had brought an instrument in for restoration of what the violin and its music had meant to Jews during those horrific days. In 1996 — and now recognized as one of the finest violinmakers in the world — Weinstein decided to put out a call for Holocaust-era violins. To date, he has restored nearly fifty such instruments to playing condition, a collection he dubbed “Violins of Hope.” [Read more…]