We know what a “normal” Cleveland Orchestra spring season would look like: a big orchestra filling the spacious Severance Hall with large scale symphonic sound, with the aid of top soloists and guest conductors from around the world. Clearly, that’s not going to be the case this year: there were hopes that the pandemic would have subsided enough by now to re-open the hall, but those hopes have been dashed. But as CEO André Gremillet explained last month, the orchestra remains committed to bringing music to its community: that’s required a change of medium, a change of style and, to some extent, a change of personnel. Severance Hall regulars will mourn the loss of a live season, but each of those changes has upsides as well as the enforced downsides: The Cleveland Orchestra’s streaming platform, Adella, makes them visible to audiences far outside Ohio; the increased focus on smaller scale works promises to expand the listening range of audiences; bringing in more locally available artists has given us the chance to see some exciting names.
For the coming weeks, the Clevelanders will be releasing a newly filmed concert every Thursday, under the “In Focus” banner. The next of these, streaming from 25th March and entitled “Memory & Transformation”, illustrates the point about repertoire: in normal times, Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony in C minor, Op.110a receives a fraction of the number of performances of the composer’s more famous works, but it’s a fascinating piece that puts you through the emotional wringer, filled with mood swings that are extreme even by Shostakovich’s standards. The concert will conclude with the final movement of Messiaen’s Éclairs sur l’Au-Delà, another work that you won’t see in the concert hall all that often but one that displays the composer at the heights of religious ecstasy – a true vision of the beyond – as well as providing the Clevelanders with ample opportunity to show off the shimmer of their famed string sound.
Principal Conductor Franz Welser-Möst takes the baton for that concert, as he does for two further concerts in April and one in May. The first, on 8th April, takes the idea of a pipe instrument from the smallest to the largest scale: starting with Debussy’s beautifully ethereal Syrinx for solo flute and progressing by way of Toru Takemitsu’s Air through to Poulenc’s mighty Organ Concerto in G minor. The second, on 22nd April, entitled “Musical Magicians”, contains another exercise in expanding your musical mind: John Corigliano’s Conjurer, a concerto for percussion and strings which won Evelyn Glennie a Grammy in 2014. The piece takes the listener on a journey through the primary materials from which the percussionist’s arsenal is created: wood, metal and skin and will truly change your ideas about what these instruments can do and how they can be blended with string sound; Cleveland Orchestra principal percussionist Marc Damoulakis is tasked with conjuring up the magic. 20th May sees Welser-Möst tackle a pair of more frequently played pieces (although not necessarily juxtaposed in the same concert): Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A major and Berg’s Lyric Suite.
Cleveland’s newly promoted Associate Conductor Vinay Parameswaran impressed us in a concert in January that was focused on minimalism (and that’s still available on Adella). Parameswaran returns to the podium for a concert to be broadcast on 6th May entitled “Style and Craft”, which highlights the talents of composers from either side of the English Channel when they were very young, with Ravel’s Sonatine and Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge.
The Cleveland Orchestra’s videos are all hosted on Adella (https://adella.live). The free (aka “Basic”) subscription covers some archive video, a podcast entitled “on a personal note” and a small number of shorter videos (for example, you can see Reich’s Nagoya Marimbas, together with an introduction by Marc Damoulakis). For the “In Focus” series and other concerts (including “guest concerts” – one currently available is a Mitsuko Uchida recital), you’ll need a Premium subscription. This runs at US$34.99 (or £27.20) per month and gets you access to additional material such as short interviews with composers Rodion Shchedrin and John Adams on their works played in the Severance Hall concerts.
The In Focus programme is expected to continue at least until June; in July and August, the orchestra hopes to return to more normal activity in the summer in the shape of the summer season at Blossom Music Center.
You can see details of these and other upcoming streams from the Cleveland Orchestra here.
This preview was sponsored by the Cleveland Orchestra.
