Blossom Music Festival 2015

S U M M E R

H O M E

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THE CLEVEL AND ORCHESTR A

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BLOSSOM MUSIC FESTIVAL P R E S E N T E D

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thursday July 2 friday July 3

AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL The Cleveland Orchestra Thomas Wilkins, conductor Nathan Gunn, baritone A fireworks display by American Fireworks Company will take place immediately following these concerts, weather permitting.

2O15

BLOSSOM MUSIC FESTIVAL

Thursday evening, July 2, 2015, at 8:00 p.m.

Friday evening, July 3, 2015, at 8:00 p.m.

THE CLEVEL AND ORCHESTRA T H O M A S W I L K I N S , conductor

\a merica THE BEAUTIFUL The Star-Spangled Banner

words by francis scott key (1779-1843) to the tune of the “Anacreontic Song” by John Stafford Smith (arranged for orchestra by Walter Damrosch) the audience is invited to sing along

Fireworks: A Celebration by jerry

goldsmith

(1929-2004)

Overture to Girl Crazy

by george

gershwin

(1898-1937)

Pavanne from American Symphonette No. 2 by morton

gould

(1913-1996)

“Flight to Neverland” from Hook by john

williams

(b. 1932)

Candide: Suite for Orchestra by leonard

bernstein

(1918-1990)

INTERMISSION

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Concert Program: July 2-3

2015 Blossom Festival

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 2

American Salute by morton

gould

Old American Songs

by aaron

copland (1900-1990)

1. The Boatmen’s Dance (Minstrel Song) 2. The Dodger (Campaign Song) 3. Simple Gifts (Shaker Song) 4. Long Time Ago (Ballad) 5. I Bought Me a Cat (Children’s Song) with NATHAN GUNN, baritone

America the Beautiful

melody by samuel ward (1847-1903) to words by katharine lee bates (1859-1929) (arranged for orchestra by Carmen Dragon)

Overture: The Year 1812

by pyotr

ilyich tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Friday’s concert is dedicated to Mr. and Mrs. Douglas A. Kern in recognition of their extraordinary generosity in support of The Cleveland Orchestra’s 2014-15 Annual Fund.

With these concerts, The Cleveland Orchestra gratefully honors the FirstEnergy Foundation for its generous support.

Media Partners: Northeast Ohio Media Group and WKSU 89.7.

A fireworks display by American Fireworks Company will take place immediately following the concert, weather permitting.

The 2015 Blossom Music Festival is presented by The J.M. Smucker Company.

Blossom Music Festival

Concert Program: July 2-3

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Thomas Wilkins American conductor Thomas Wilkins has served as music director of the Omaha Symphony since 2005. In 2011, he became principal guest conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra; he was named principal conductor last year. He is also the youth concert conductor for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Wilkins made his Cleveland Orchestra debut in 2001. He returns this week for the Orchestra’s free community concert in downtown Cleveland on Wednesday, followed by these concerts opening the 2015 Blossom Music Festival.

A native of Norfolk, Virginia, Thomas Wilkins is a graduate of the Shenandoah Conservatory of Music and the New England Conservatory of Music. Among conducting jobs, he has served as resident conductor of the Detroit Symphony and of the Florida Orchestra, and associate conductor of Virginia’s Richmond Symphony. He has also taught as a member of the music faculties of North Park University in Chicago, the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, and Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

As a guest conductor, Thomas Wilkins has led the orchestras of Atlanta, Baltimore, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Columbus, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, New Mexico, Rochester, Utah, and Washington D.C., and makes regular appearances with the Indianapolis Symphony, New Jersey Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, and the San Diego Symphony. Last season, he conducted the National Symphony Orchestra for a two-week festival of American music and dance, and also collaborated with cellist Yo-Yo Ma at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts. Recent and upcoming engagements include debuts at Chicago’s Grant Park Music Festival and with the New York Philharmonic.

Mr. Wilkins’s commitment to the larger community is demonstrated by his membership on the boards of the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce, Charles Drew Health Center in Omaha, Center Against Spouse Abuse in Tampa Bay, and the Museum of Fine Arts and the Academy Preparatory Center in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Thomas Wilkins currently serves as board chair of the Raymond James Charitable Endowment Fund and as national ambassador for the World Pediatric Project based in Richmond, Virginia, which provides children throughout Central America and the Caribbean with critical surgical and diagnostic care. In 2014, he received the Outstanding Artist award at the Nebraska Governor’s Arts Awards for his significant contribution to music in the state.

Thomas Wilkins resides with his wife, Sheri-Lee, and their twin daughters, Erica and Nicole, in Omaha.

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Conductor

2015 Blossom Festival

Nathan Gunn American baritone Nathan Gunn is acclaimed in repertoire from concert halls to opera theater, from Broadway musicals to premiering new music. The Grammy Award winner first sang with The Cleveland Orchestra in 1998, in Bach’s Mass in B minor, and in 2000, in Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion. He appears this week, on Wednesday singing in the Orchestra’s free community concert in downtown Cleveland, followed by these concerts opening the 2015 Blossom Music Festival.

Recipient of the first Beverly Sills Artist Award and the Pittsburgh Opera Renaissance Award, Mr. Gunn is also a winner of the 1994 Metropolitan Opera National Council Competition. He is an alumnus of the Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artists Program and the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where he now teaches voice and serves as general director of the Lyric Theater@Illinois. The Indiana native also serves as artist-in-residence at the University of Notre Dame.

Nathan Gunn has appeared with the opera companies of Chicago, Dallas, Houston, San Francisco, and Seattle, and those of London, Madrid, Munich, Paris, and Vienna, as well as with Glyndebourne Opera and the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie. An advocate of new music, Mr. Gunn created roles in Mark Adamo’s The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, Daron Hagen’s Amelia, André Previn’s Brief Encounter, Peter Eötvös’s Love and Other Demons, and Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy. He has performed in the premieres of Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain and Iain Bell’s The Harlot’s Progress. Nathan Gunn is director of the American Repertoire Council at the Opera Company of Philadelphia.

In concert, Mr. Gunn has appeared with orchestras throughout North America and Europe, including those of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Minnesota, New York, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco. A frequent recitalist, he has performed in many major North American venues and at London’s Wigmore Hall and the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie.

Mr. Gunn recently sang in Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel with the New York Philharmonic, as well as in Kern & Hammerstein’s Show Boat at Carnegie Hall and with Lyric Opera of Chicago. He has also appeared in concerts with Kelli O’Hara and Mandy Patinkin, and at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Nathan Gunn’s discography includes a solo album, Just Before Sunrise (Sony/ BMG Masterworks), Britten’s Billy Budd (Virgin Classics), which won a 2010 Grammy Award, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Allegro (Sony’s Masterworks Broadway), Britten’s Peter Grimes (LSO Live!), and Rossini’s The Barber of Seville (Sony Classics).

For more information, visit www.nathangunn.com.

The Cleveland Orchestra

Soloist

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america

THE BEAUTIFUL

Jerry

GOLDSMITH

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M U S I C H A S L O N G B E E N recognized as a powerful tool for patriotic expression. And, of course, there is nothing quite like a hearty march for getting feelings of national pride beating in our hearts and minds. Songs and dances, or works for stage and screen can also serve the purpose by reminding listeners of the facets of a nation’s personality that such music represents.

Whether it’s the vibrant urban character of jazz or the downhome timeless spirit of Appalachian songs, many memorable works become the sound of America itself.

Add a singular Russian work for dramatic effect — and because it’s become traditional over the past half century to include it — and everything is set for a festive evening.

Oh, and food, and something to drink, a clear sky and, yes, fireworks (!) at the end, to round out the evening and the feelings of all the good ideas that these United States can represent.

The Star-Spangled Banner: Our national anthem began as words, famously jotted down by lawyer Francis Scott Key (1779-1843) in Baltimore harbor during the American War of 1812 (not to be confused with the conflict between Russia and France the same year, which inspired Tchaikovsky). It was soon pointed out that the rhythm and meter of Key’s words matched the rhythm and meter of the old British song “To Anacreon in Heaven” (it is likely that Key even have had this very tune in mind) — and the match was made. Thus was this song of American pride born. It was used by parts of the military for official occasions for many decades, but Congress didn’t formally name it as our official national anthem until 1931.

Fireworks: A Celebration: Born in Pasadena, Jerry Goldsmith (1929-2004) was one of the great old men of film and television music. Among his most famous titles are Twilight Zone, Planet of the Apes, Patton, several Star Trek films and television series, and The Omen, for which he received an Academy Award in 1976. A man so busy with music for the screen will not often have time to delve into concert music, but Goldsmith occasionally indulged

About the Music

Blossom Music Festival

what had been his original musical interest. His Fireworks: A Celebration was written for Los Angeles in 1999. Bold and bright from beginning to end, it features a quantity of prominent brass and brilliant splashes of percussion, as well as an unhesitating propulsive energy that suits the music perfectly to its title.

Overture to Girl Crazy: Born in Brooklyn to Eastern European Jewish immigrants, George Gershwin (1898-1937) was a quintessential American composer. Largely self-taught in music, he wrote many tunes that became part of what has come to be called the Great American Songbook — standards of grit, love, despair and happiness that defined the rising American spirit of the 20th century. Two of these widely beloved songs — “Embraceable You” and “I Got Rhythm” — come from the 1930s Broadway show Girl Crazy. Its overture captures the irrepressible spirit found in much of Gershwin’s best music, and, therefore, an equally powerful American energy.

Pavane from American Symphonette No. 2: Having begun his career as a pianist at Radio City Music Hall, Morton Gould (1913-1996) soon established himself as conductor, composer, and arranger on CBS radio. It was a time of jingles and theme songs, but Gould made the most of it, bringing a high degree of craft to what had been a venue for mostly light music. His American Symphonette No. 2, dating from 1938, was composed for a radio series with which Gould was working at the time.

Gould himself attested that the “ette” of its title referred not just to the work’s short length, but also to the popularity at the time of such home design features as kitchenettes and dinettes.

The dance-like Pavane is the middle movement of this threemovement work. Some may recognize it from its subsequent appearance in the repertoire of bandleader Glenn Miller.

“Flight to Neverland” from Hook – Of current American composers, none has produced more immediately familiar music than John Williams (b. 1932). His hundreds of film scores have an unsurpassed international following, and continue to appear in the theater — and on lists of Oscar nominations — with impressive regularity. Steven Spielberg’s 1991 reworking of the Peter Pan story, Hook, starring Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman, was further enhanced by Williams’s evocative score. Flight to Neverland vividly captures the magic and mystery of the adventure.

Candide: Suite for Orchestra: — If any composer could challenge Gershwin’s place as the ultimate American man of music, that person might well be Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990).

Blossom Festival 2015

About the Music

George

GERSHWIN

Morton

GOULD

John

WILLIAMS

7

Leonard

BERNSTEIN

Aaron

COPLAND

Katharine Lee

BATES

8

For nearly five full decades, Bernstein was the most familiar face and most communicative musical talent to come from the United States. His 1956 opera Candide borrowed its story from the French writer Voltaire. The music is pure Bernstein — lively and lyrical, witty and poignant (often juxtaposed in the same phrase). Bernstein’s musical imagination rarely stood still for long; the same can be said for this orchestral suite of the opera’s most memorable melodies.

American Salute: Written in a burst of patriotic fervor during World War II, Gould’s American Salute is a set of variations upon the Civil War song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” That simple statement disguises the actual complexity of the piece. Although the theme itself is an uncomplicated march, there is much that an inspired composer, such as Gould, can make of it, altering its rhythms in one fashion or another. In places, he even juxtaposes two sections of the orchestra against one another, both setting Johnny on the march, but each with different elaborations upon that melody. Good and inventive fun for Fourth-of-July celebrations and contemplations of war’s costs and sacrifices, honor and victory.

Old American Songs, Set One: Like his slightly older colleague Gershwin, Aaron Copland (1900-1990) was a first generation American, son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants and growing up in Brooklyn. Despite those common backgrounds, each man took a different path within their musical writings.

Gershwin rapidly joined the high energy circles of jazz, whereas Copland pursued the more orderly world of classical music. That fact, however, did not prevent Copland from flavoring his works with an American accent. He conscientiously researched the roots of American folksongs, so as to evoke them in his works; one of the legacies of those studies is the Old American Songs, two sets of five songs each, the first composed in 1950. Tonight, we hear the first set, with several recognizable songs — and some good humor, reflection, and cheer.

America the Beautiful: Because of the combative text and challenging vocal range of our official national anthem, several other songs were considered as alternates before Congress. Among these was America the Beautiful. As with The StarSpangled Banner, America the Beautiful arose from matching an inspired text to a pre-existing melody. The melody was by the American churchman Samuel Ward (1847-1903), while the text was written by Wellesley English professor Katharine Lee Bates About the Music

2015 Blossom Festival

(1859-1929), who, in 1893, and with the assistance of guides and horses, reached the 14,115 foot summit of Colorado’s Pikes Peak.

The visual contrast of “purple mountains majesty” and “fruited plains” caught Bates’s fancy, and that of many millions of Americans since. Even in orchestral form, the words run through our minds and bring special meaning to this piece.

1812 Overture: Tchaikovsky’s work has nothing to do with British ships in Baltimore harbor, but a great deal to do with Napoleon’s army at the gates of Moscow. The work was composed for a 70th anniversary commemoration of the French defeat, as much by the Russian winter as by the Russian artillery.

Tchaikovsky borrowed melodic elements from a Russian hymn pleading for God’s intervention, a tambourine-flavored Russian folk dance for two evening campfire scenes, fragments of La Marseillaise (which did not, in fact, gain official status as the French anthem until after Napoleon’s time), and the Tsar’s own hymn of royal authority. In its original version, intended for an outdoor performance in one of Moscow’s grand public squares, Tchaikovsky included cannons, church bells, and a large chorus; of the overall effect, he observed in a letter to a friend, “it will be loud.” As the chorus lines are doubled in the orchestra, voices are often omitted in performance, and even without them, the 1812 Overture has become a traditional staple of Fourth-of-July concert in the United States and makes for a magnificent conclusion to any patriotic program.

Pyotr Ilyich

TCHAIKOVSKY

—Betsy Schwarm © 2015 Betsy Schwarm spent twenty years as a classical radio announcer and producer. She teaches music at Metropolitan State College of Denver, and has served as recording engineer for Colorado’s Central City Opera.

Blossom Music Festival

ABOVE Napoleon retreating from Moscow after the Battle of Borodino in 1812, in a painting by Adolf Northern from the mid-19th century.

About the Music

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10

1918

Seven music directors have led the Orchestra, including George Szell, Christoph von Dohnányi, and Franz Welser-Möst.

14th

1l1l 11l1 1l1I

The 2015-16 season will mark Franz Welser-Möst’s 14th year as music director.

SEVERANCE HALL, “A “ merica’s most beautiful concert hall,” opened in 1931 as the Orchestra’s permanent home.

130,000+ 130,000 young people have attended Cleveland Orchestra symphonic concerts via programs funded by the Center for Future Audiences since 2011, through student programs and Under 18s Free ticketing.

52%

Over half of The Cleveland Orchestra’s funding each year comes from thousands of generous donors and sponsors, who together make possible our concert presentations, community programs, and education initiatives.

4million

Likes on Facebook (as of June 15, 2015)

The Cleveland Orchestra has introduced over 4.1 million children in Northeast Ohio to symphonic music through concerts for children since 1918.

94,941

1931

150

concerts each year.

The Orchestra was founded in 1918 and performed its first concert on December 11.

The Cleveland Orchestra performs over

THE CLEVEL AND ORCHESTRA

BY THE NUMBERS

Blossom Music Festival

5470

Blossom Music Center opened on July 19, 1968, with a concert that featured Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony under the direction of George Szell.

20%

OVE R

B LO S S O M M U SIC CENTER

1968

SEATS

25

and under

The portion of young people at Cleveland Orchestra concerts at Blossom has increased to 20% over the past five years, via an array of programs funded through the Orchestra’s Center for Future Audiences for students and families.

Blossom’s Pavilion, designed by Cleveland architect Peter van Dijk, can seat 5,470 people, including positions for wheelchair seating.

(Another 13,500 can sit on the Lawn.)

The Pavilion is famed for the clarity of its acoustics and for its distinctive design.

BY THE NUMBERS

19 million ADMISSIONS

Blossom Music Center has welcomed more than 19,000,000 people to concerts and events since 1968 — including the Orchestra’s annual Festival concerts, plus special attractions featuring rock, country, jazz, and other popular acts.

1,000+

The Cleveland Orchestra has performed just over 1,000 concerts at Blossom since 1968. The 1000th performance took place during the summer of 2014.

1250 tons of steel

12,000 cubic yards concrete 4 acres of sodded lawn

The creation of Blossom in 1966-68 was a major construction project involving many hands and much material, made possible by many generous donors.

Blossom’s 50th Anniversary Season in 2018 will bring to a close the Orchestra’s 100th Season celebrations during 2017-18, and mark the beginning of The Cleveland Orchestra’s second century serving Northeast Ohio.

2018

MORE MUSIC. MORE BLOSSOM! See a full listing of 2015 Blossom Music Festival concerts on pages 36-37of the Festival Book.

June 18 Saturday

Michael Feinstein A Big Band Tribute to Frank Sinatra

A CENTENNIAL SALUTE to “ol’ Blue Eyes” — no one

delivered a song like the Chairman! Frank Sinatra defined “cool” for an entire generation with a dazzling array of hit songs. Michael Feinstein, the multi-platinum-selling, five-time Grammy-nominated singer and pianist, performs live. Featuring such iconic tunes as “Luck Be a Lady Tonight,” “The Lady is a Tramp,” and more.

August 2 Sunday

Broadway Divas WICKED. LES MISÉRABLES. CHICAGO.

These iconic shows gave us the heroines we love . . . and the villains we revile — the unforgettable Divas of Broadway. Treat yourself to a Wicked-good evening of Broadway showstoppers, featuring selections from Wicked, Les Miz, Cabaret, My Fair Lady, Chicago, and more.

August 16 Sunday

The British Invasion

The Music of the Beatles, e The Stones, The Who & More THE BEATLES ARRIVED IN 1964 . . . but that

was only the beginning. The phenomenon called The British Invasion dominated the American airwaves, and leading the charge were the Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, and more. Now, their hits are given the full treatment with brilliant orchestrations performed by The Cleveland Orchestra.