by Daniel Hathaway
This article was originally published on Cleveland.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio — In 1897, a year before Richard Strauss wrote his shamelessly autobiographical tone poem, Ein Heldenleben, Antonín Dvořák completed his Heldenlied (Hero’s Song), a more generalized ode to Courage that ended and gave its title to The Cleveland Orchestra’s program at the Mandel Opera and Humanities Festival at Severance Music Center on May 22.
The Dvořák work joined Adolphus Hailstork’s Epitaph for a Man Who Dreamed, Grażyna Bacewicz’s Symphony No. 4, and the world premiere of Jüri Reinvere’s Concerto for Violin, Harp, and Orchestra on a brilliantly played, fascinating playlist of rarely performed works that invited introspection and earned their performers the kind of wild ovations usually reserved for old warhorses.
Hailstork wrote his Epitaph in 1979 in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights hero who was assassinated in Memphis in 1968. It takes its title from Dr. King’s I Have a Dream Speech, delivered during the March on Washington in 1963. [Read more…]
On February 9, concertgoers approaching Severance Music Center likely noticed the dramatic lighting choices — the building had been lit up in a deep red. With Mahler’s Fifth Symphony on the program, it felt fitting. The composer’s intense and passionate works are popular with both musicians and audiences, and an unsurprisingly crowded house packed Mandel Concert Hall for the occasion. Not only was the music guaranteed to generate interest, but so was the conductor: young Finnish phenom Klaus Mäkelä, in his second consecutive week this season with The Cleveland Orchestra.
