The Cleveland Orchestra April 21, 25, 26, 28, 29 Concerts

THE ECSTASY OF TRISTAN AND ISOLDE

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TRISTAN AND ISOLDE April 21, 26, 29

MESSIAEN’S TURANGALÎLA April 25

DIVINE ECSTASY April 28

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Q&A with Franz Welser-Möst page 9 Week 21 April 21, 26, 29

Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde Week 22a April 25

Messiaen’s Turangalîla Week 22b April 28

Divine Ecstasy

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THE ECSTASY OF TRISTAN AND ISOLDE

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Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Q&A: Franz Welser-Möst . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Ecstasy: Thoughts & Reflections . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

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F E S T I V A L

Opera: Tristan and Isolde Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Opera: April 21, 26, 29 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Introducing the Opera . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Synopsis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 About the Opera . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 About the Composer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 About the Cast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

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Film: Melancholia

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Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Movie: April 22 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Symphony: Turangalîla Page

Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Concert: April 25 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Introducing the Concert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 About the Music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Guest Artists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

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Concert: Divine Ecstasy Page

Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Concert: April 28 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Introducing the Concert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 About the Music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Artists and Guest Artists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

About the Orchestra From the Executive Director . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 The Cleveland Orchestra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Music Director: Franz Welser-Möst . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Supporting the Orchestra Second Century Sponsors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Annual Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 Orchestra News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122

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Table of Contents

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What Music expresses is eternal, infinite, and ideal. Music expresses not the passion, love, desire, of this or that individual in this or that condition, but Passion, Love, Desire itself. —Richard Wagner

—Mark Twain

Music, Love, Transcendence, and Exultation In a series of concerts centered around Richard Wagner’s epoch-changing opera Tristan and Isolde, Franz Welser-Möst explores the meanings of Ecstasy through music — from the mystical and religious, to meditative understanding and love-induced longing.

In-concert performances present

Wagner’s dynamic operatic score as its music and characters pursue a never-ending search for ecstatic union and harmony.

Olivier Messiaen’s

Turangalîla-Symphonie recasts the same lovetale into a wondrously different, transcendent musical language.

In an evening titled Divine Ecstasy,

music from across five centuries offers thoughtful repose and anguished yearning — for peace and perception, commonality and communion.

Opposite: detail of oil painting by J. M.W. Turner, circa 1839. National Gallery, London

The Cleveland Orchestra

Festival: The Ecstasy of Tristan and Isolde

E ECSTASY

go into words; it feels like music.

THE ECSTASY OF TRISTAN AND ISOLDE

An ecstasy is a thing that will not

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In Rehearsal

PHOTOGRAPH BY ROGER MASTROIANNI

Q&A

Franz Welser-Möst discusses Tristan and Isolde, ecstasy, and finding meaning in music Q: Tell us about Tristan and Isolde.

Franz: Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde is, without any question, one of the most important musical milestones in history. And for many different reasons, musically and even philosophically. At one and the same time, it represents the ultimate high point of musical Romanticism and the launch of modern music. In this score, Wagner broke apart the harmonic tonal system to reveal something new. With this opera, Wagner unleashed music from the past and announced the start of our modern world.

I have long wanted to program this opera with The Cleveland Orchestra — to have the right singers and the right season to include this extraordinary work. With the remarkable soprano Nina Stemme, who we hosted several years ago here at Severance Hall and at Carnegie Hall as Salome, we have the world’s greatest living Isolde.

Fundamentally, for the orchestra and for the Cleveland audience, I believe that part of being a great orchestra includes playing and experiencing certain pieces. Tristan and Isolde is one of these. The experience of performing it — and of hearing it as an audience member — changes your understanding of what music can be. It is perfect for the Orchestra’s Centennial Season, as we explore how music literally makes history and at the same time leaves the past behind, taking us into the future.

Let me add to this the fact that Tristan and Isolde is very challenging and difficult to perform. The original production in Munich in 1865 had 142 rehearsals, just to learn this music and get it right. It is a demanding work, but also very rewarding. Audiences will come away having truly experienced a pinnacle in music — almost like climbing Mount Everest in sound. It is breathtaking, perhaps literally, in the “high” feeling, the magnificent feelings that it offers.

Q: Isn’t it just a story of star-crossed lovers, who both die in the end?

Franz: Many operas end in death and tragedy. That doesn’t mean they aren’t inspiring and filled with insight and understanding. Great works help us understand what it means to be human, to feel, to learn, to grow. Wagner’s genius in Tristan and Isolde is in creating a musical language of desire, of unending longing. The music does not rest, the harmonic key does not find resolution. Even at the very end, when the opera stops, the music is still unfinished harmonically — Severance Hall 2017-18

Q&A: Exploring Ecstasy

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continuing on forever. It is thrilling to experience.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said that Wagner’s music is like a drug. And he was right. The characters want more, you want more. And you hold on for every phrase, looking for resolution. In a way, Wagner portrays an emotional addiction, a desire that cannot be satisfied except through understanding. In the opera, love is caused by a special or magic potion. But it is really just something that allows two people to admit their feelings, their attraction for one another. And it is much more than physical, it is a mental state of being whole — of ecstasy and transcendence, of finding meaning and understanding in life.

The love of Tristan and Isolde is much more than physical.

It is a mental state of being whole — of ecstasy and transcendence, of finding meaning in being alive.

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Q: How does opera fit into The Cleveland Orchestra’s offerings each year?

Franz: The Cleveland Orchestra has a long tradition with opera, going almost back to the Orchestra’s founding. In the 1930s, under Artur Rodzinski, several operas were presented each season here at Severance Hall — staged operas, with sets and costumes. Lotte Lehmann, who was perhaps the most famous soprano of her time, sang Wagner here at Severance Hall. But the productions were expensive and were discontinued after several years, even though everyone loved them. More recently, in my time here, I have advocated that we make opera a focus again. Because it makes the Orchestra better, and because, again, audiences respond to it. From the time I started here, I thought that opera would be a fantastic addition to the schedule, and would help train this Orchestra to be even better. Just by listening to great singers, musicians of an orchestra learn to breathe and be more flexible, to respond to a given moment not just in your head but also with your heart.

Q: You described the “ecstasy” in Tristan and Isolde. How did you expand that idea to create a festival with additional concerts?

Franz: Tristan and Isolde, as I have said, is an ecstatic piece. In the ending, in Isolde’s “Love-Death” or Liebestod, this woman transcends her own existence and finds a deep understanding, of love and life, in death. For some people, ecstasy may be easier to understand through the word “transcendence.” Both words have meanings beyond the usual — of “being outside yourself” in ecstasy, or of becoming “more than” or transcending “beyond” the normal. In planning the season, and with Tristan and Isolde already on the calendar, I kept coming back to this idea. And I became Q&A: Exploring Ecstasy

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P H OTO G R A P H Y BY J U L I A W E S E LY

EEcstasy cstasyy — whether iitt iiss spiirituall, oorr spiritual, pphysical, hyssical, oorr musiccal — musical is the the experiexperriis ence of of letting letting ence annd uniting uniting go and togetther all together hat same at th that timee, feeling time, bbeyond eyond or beinng outside being yourself.

See Franz Welser-Möst’s bigraphy on page 99.

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excited at thinking about how much other music there is that touches around these ideas, of religious ecstasy, becoming one with god, of personal ecstasy, of being enlightened, of meditation and centering oneself inside. I think for many people, musical performances are often a channel to understanding and transcendence, of being more than yourself and at peace. And so I worked to develop a festival around the opera.

Think back to some of the great music, the great performances you have experienced, and that moment at the end, when there is silence, not even breathing, as the audience and the musicians think not about themselves but simply take in what has been witnessed and shared. That is transcendence — in leaving or forgetting the place where you are physically, for a moment, and of being part of something greater. Ecstasy — whether it is spiritual, or physical, or musical — is the experience of letting go and uniting together all at the same time. This is what we are exploring in these musical performances. I believe it will be an unforgettable experience to hear these works, separately and together.

Adding to Tristan and Isolde, which opens the festival, we have a performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie from 1949. This is all about ecstatic love, even physical love, and directly touches on and re-examines the story of Tristan and Isolde, but in a very different kind of musical language. It is “new age” or modern, mixing instruments and sounds from different times and cultures, with many percussionists and solo piano and the ondes martenot, an early electronic instrument. Much of this music is hypnotic, and it is pre-minimalist and mesmerizing. There is a slow movement, which portrays Tristan and Isolde’s love as a garden of delight and ecstatic, calming embrace, and in a different movement Messiaen portrays stars dancing in the celestial heavens.

The other concert centers on religious or spiritual ecstasy, and perhaps touching toward mysticism. Here we are featuring, of course, some music by Bach, and music by an earlier composer, Giovanni Gabrieli. But also more modern works, including Arvo Pärt’s Magnificat. And a piece of organ music by Franz Liszt, who was so often trying new things and working to expand the language of music. For this Divine Ecstasyy concert in particular, we explore music written specifically around religious ecstasy, of music that was written to extend and amplify spiritual or meditative feelings — of music as a means to lose yourself, and to find your way.

Q&A: Exploring Ecstasy

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Perspectives from the Executive Director Spring 2018 Welcome to the closing weeks of The Cleveland Orchestra’s landmark 100th season of concerts. From the first notes of the inspiring Education Concert “Beethoven & Prometheus: A Hero’s Journey,” which saw students from the Cleveland School of the Arts sharing the stage at Severance Hall, to performances of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and Franz Welser-Möst’s The Prometheus Project, the Centennial Season has been big and beautiful, energizing and inquisitive, quiet and contemplative.

As the New York Times noted in January, while praising the Orchestra as “one of the finest ensembles in the nation and the world,” we have focused our celebration this year in creating performances of extraordinary music to give voice to our profound gratitude to you — our audience and our community. The Times stated, “At 100, the Cleveland Orchestra may (quietly) be America’s best,” emphasizing the unique culture of this Orchestra and the absolute dedication of our artists in always putting the music first, before any individual egos. In fact, the season’s true celebration has taken place weekend after weekend onstage and off, in the connection created between the Orchestra and the audience sharing moments together in an ongoing exploration through music, of our common humanity.

You are at the heart of our 100th season — this remarkable milestone is really a celebration of our city and our community, whose passion and generosity have made it possible to create and sustain one of the world’s greatest orchestras for a century. You are one of the driving forces behind The Cleveland Orchestra’s greatness, and we are honored to share our passion for music with you, each and every concert.

As the centennial year continues, Franz Welser-Möst and the Orchestra offer two ambitious and large-scale festivals: The Ecstasy of Tristan & Isolde here in Cleveland (April 21-29) and The Prometheus Project, presented on three continents, in Cleveland (May 10-19), Vienna (May 24-28), and Tokyo (June 2-7). Each brings together musical performances centered on larger ideas and ideals from the world around us. In addition to the ongoing season of great musical performances, these festivals represent the kind of topical and indepth musical exploration that the Orchestra’s musicians — and this community — have aspired to across the decades. Cleveland takes a backseat to no one in the musical world.

And there’s more to come this summer with a public 100th birthday party in downtown Cleveland for the annual free Star-Spangled Spectacular, this year on Friday, July 6. We also celebrate the 50th Anniversary of our summer home, at Blossom Music Center, with a season of special musical offerings.

Yet, it cannot be said often enough that all of this — everything we do, every note The Cleveland Orchestra plays — is only possible through the attention, care, interest, enthusiasm, and generosity of thousands. As you can see on many different pages of this book, from the Second Century Sponsors to our annual donor Honor Rolls, many passionate people and organizations help ensure The Cleveland’s Orchestra’s music-making each and every year. If you have already given to the Annual Fund, let me extend a big thank you.

And if you have not, please take this as an invitation to join the large family of Cleveland Orchestra donors. Every dollar counts, every gift makes a difference. Thank you.

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André Gremillet

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From Our Physical Bodies . . . to the Stars . . . and Beyond

by David Wright

“ I T T A K E S M E O U T O F M Y S E L F. ”

Ec-sta-sy (EK-stah-see) 1. an overwhelming feeling of great happiness or joyful excitement.

2. an emotional or religious frenzy or trancelike state, originally one involving an experience of mystic self-transcendence.

SYNONYMS :

rapture, bliss, elation, euphoria, transports, rhapsodies, exultation, jubilation, joy

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That’s one of the most frequent answers when people are asked what benefit they derive from listening to classical music. It’s a simple statement, but it can mean many things.

One listener might go on to say, “For two hours, I didn’t think about what happened at the office or at home.”

Another might be thinking along these lines: “I felt myself released from the bonds of gravity, and I rediscovered in memory that extraordinary thrill of pleasure that dwells in high places. Next I found myself imagining the delicious state of a man in the grip of a profound reverie in an absolute solitude, a solitude with an immense horizon and a wide diffusion of light, an immensity with no other décor but itself. Soon, I experienced the sensation of a brightness more vivid, an intensity of light growing so swiftly that not all the nuances provided by the dictionary would be sufficient to express this ever-renewing increase of incandescence and heat. Then Ecstasy: Explanation

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“The Starry Night” — painting by Vincent Van Gogh, 1889

I came to the full conception of the idea of a soul moving about in a luminous medium, of an ecstasy composed of knowledge and joy hovering high above the natural world.”

This quote is, in fact, from the French poet Charles Baudelaire, after hearing Richard Wagner conduct a concert of his own music in Paris in 1860. Admittedly, not everybody has a poet’s way with words, but practically everybody has experienced music as an express train to regions of the heart and spirit that leaves the other arts, with their dependence on mundane things like pictures and words, chugging along the local track.

The train metaphor is chosen advisedly; every word we use to describe this sensation implies motion from here to there, beginning with transport, which can apply equally to a bus or an out-of-body experience. Rapture means literally “carried away.” Exaltation derives from roots Severance Hall 2017-18

meaning “out” and “high,” while euphoria contains “good” and “carrying.” Even bliss, a cognate of “blithe,” suggests ease of motion.

But the favorite word of the Romantic era and ever after, the word Baudelaire saved for the climax of the passage quoted above, describes the destination more than the journey. Its Greek roots mean exactly what one office worker wrote on an audience survey: “a state of outsideness.” That word is ecstasy.

SPIRITUAL MADHOUSE

The contemplative saints from the early Christian church up to the CounterReformation seemed to experience spiritual ecstasy without using that word, referring to it instead as “joy” or “light.” The path to that state began with renouncing what Saint Augustine called “the contradictory throng of sensuous images.” (Who knew

Ecstasy: Exploration

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Saint Augustine had a smartphone filled with umpteen-thousand photos?)

Or, as Saint John of the Cross wrote, “Live as if only God and yourself were in this world, so that your heart may not be detained by anything human.” At which point, perhaps, one might be able to say, with Saint Teresa of Ávila, “At the moment of my entrance into this new state, I felt a joy so great that it has never failed me even to this day.”

Early in its career in the English language, the word ecstasy wasn’t such a positive term. The word occurs seventeen

The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed.

—Jiddu Krishnamurti

times in Shakespeare’s works, usually meaning not “out of oneself” but “out of one’s mind.” Polonius overhears Hamlet’s disordered ramblings to Ophelia and describes them as “the very ecstasy of love.” Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, blames the “ecstasy” of his grief for his accusations against her. “Ecstasy?” the prince replies. “My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time / And makes as healthful music. It is not madness / That I have utt’red.” And Macbeth bemoans the guilt and fear that have brought him sleepless nights and “the torture of the mind to lie / In restless ecstasy.”

JOY TO TR AN SC E NDE NC E

But just a generation later, the word underwent a sea change, in the works of

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the erotic-poet-turned-Anglican-priest John Donne, whose poem “The Extasie” explored the interaction between earthly and divine love, the body and the out-ofbody. Of lover’s bodies he wrote, “We owe them thankes, because they thus, / Did us, to us, at first convay . . . Loves mysteries in soules doe grow, / But yet the body is his booke.”

Perhaps this is what Saint Augustine meant when he departed briefly from the doctrine of renunciation to utter his famous prayer, “O Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.”

(And what about the holy Teresa, who went on in the above passage to report, suggestively enough, that “God converted the dryness of my soul into a very great tenderness”?)

In any case, the “metaphysical” poetpriest Donne would likely have found a soul brother two centuries later in Franz Liszt, composer and dazzling performer of Transcendental Etudes for the piano. Like Donne’s, Liszt’s career arc took him from fame as an artist and notorious ladies’ man to retirement, retreat, and instruction to

The moment eternal — just that and no more, / When ecstasy’s utmost we clutch at the core / While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut, and lips meet!

—Robert Browning

become a priest, known to his friends as the Abbé Liszt.

Liszt joined with Wagner, his eventual son-in-law, to proclaim the “Music of the Future,” in Romantic rebellion against the rationalistic strictures of the 18th century.

And even these two worldly artists would

Ecstasy: Experimentation

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A soccer game is a Wagner opera. The narrative sets up, the tension builds, the music ebbs and flows, the strings, the horns, more tension, and suddenly a moment of pure bliss, trumpet-tongued Gabriel sings, and gods descend from Olympus to dance — this peak of ecstasy!

—Rabih Alameddine

“Kubjika, the Erotic Goddess” — wall painting, Kashmir

have admitted that any era that produced the music of Bach and Mozart could hardly be called lacking in spiritual elevation. The difference was over the path to reach it, which led, in their view — and not to put too fine a point on it — through the bedroom.

The philosopher and Wagner supporter Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “If there is to be art . . . one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy. Frenzy must first have enhanced the excitability of the whole machine . . . above all, the frenzy of sexual excitement, this most ancient and original form of frenzy.”

Nietzsche’s influential book The Birth of Tragedy hypothesized about ancient Greek drama and life, celebrating the intrusion of Dionysian chaos, drinking, and sexual license into the orderly Apollonian scheme of Greek drama, thus carrying theatrical art to its highest expression. Nietzsche believed that the later, more rational era of Severance Hall 2017-18

ideas put forth by Euripides and Socrates was a period of decline — and expressed the hope that Wagner would restore drama to greatness again.

Wagner did his best, in Tristan and Isolde, to fulfill that eroticized vision of enlightenment, composing some of the sexiest music ever written. At the same time, this was also (and still is) some of the most sexually frustrating music, forever yearning, its aching harmonies always reaching for, but never achieving, resolution. And thus the ultimate message of Tristan and Isolde turned out to be — guess what — not fulfillment, but renunciation.

Yes, the sensuous music of the Wagnerian Liebestod, or “Love-Death,” was in service of an idea that the ascetic Saint John of the Cross would recognize right away: that the way to spiritual bliss was letting go of “everything human.” And what is death if not the ultimate letting go — the

Ecstasy: Expiration

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dissolution of individual will into the great ocean of God, Love, Nirvana, That Which Is, or whatever name you give it.

Coincidentally (maybe), those who have had a peek across that life-death divide — by nearly dying and being revived — often report something like the “immense horizon,” “incandescence,” and “ecstasy of knowledge and joy” that Baudelaire experienced from listening to Wagner’s music.

S E N SAT I O N S L A RG E A N D S M A LL

Nietzsche and John Donne might point out that, if one isn’t ready to go as far as Wagner’s lovers, there’s always la petite

Why do people compose music?

Why do we listen to music? When we go into a concert, we want to experience a sort of ecstasy, to come out of ourselves.

—Stephen Hough mort, the “little death” of sexual orgasm, where one can experience oblivion — or, at least, be oblivious — for a few seconds before returning to one’s mundane existence.

Or one can just go to some high place, look down, and feel exhilaration (or fear) at the potential nearness of death. The power of the “sublime” in the visionary landscapes of J.M.W. Turner and Thomas Cole comes not just from the splendor of the Creator’s handiwork but from the feeling that the craggy scenery could at any moment fall down and send the onlooker to kingdom come (literally and remembering the meaning and origins of that phrase).

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Some viewers have that same sensation looking at Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, seeing in its brilliant swirls of light over a sleeping French village a supernova about to engulf the Earth and everybody in it. Or perhaps it’s just the paranoid fantasy of a mentally-ill artist. But most people see only joy in those bright lights, and for a moment of viewing at least, they agree with Van Gogh himself that the night is “much more alive and richly colored than the day.”

For Isolde and Tristan, night is the time of love’s mysteries and delights, while the day is all conflict and trivial activities (what in the modern era is too often described as “life”). For Van Gogh, the night’s delights were of another sort; he confessed to his brother Theo a “tremendous need for, shall I say the word — for religion — so I go outside at night to paint the stars.”

Van Gogh painted The Starry Night in 1889. From that time to the outbreak of World War I, European urbanites trooped off to the salons of various seers and spiritualists in search of enlightenment.

Of course, every period of spiritual

Religious ecstasy is a madness of thought freed of its bodily bonds, whereas in the ecstasy of love, the forces of twin natures unite, blend, and embrace one another.

—Honoré de Balzac

awakening has its sour-puss rationalists, and a century ago had none other than Sigmund Freud, who equated the quest for ecstasy with a wish for “unlimited narcissism.” That didn’t prevent composer Alexander Scriabin

Ecstasy: Exhaustion

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Art and Religion are . . . two roads by which we escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Thus, Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.

—Clive Bell

“The Ecstasy of Saint Francis” — painting by Anthony van Dyck, circa 1630

from pouring what he experienced in the séances of Madame Blavatsky into fiery, dissonant piano sonatas and tone poems that baffled more listeners than they inspired.

Freud’s opinion might have been closer to the mark during the next major outbreak of spiritual seeking, the “Flower Power” years of the late 1960s, when the guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi successfully commercialized Transcendental Meditation, a mental and physical health regimen that was easier to do than playing Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes.

The Maharishi at least had the wisdom to look at the ’60s drug scene and say it was logical that, in a materialistic culture, people would try to find enlightenment literally in or through a material.

The materials have remained with us.

One of them, C11H15NO2, or 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, is getting more and more popular in dance clubs these days. Its street name is Ecstasy. It’s said to Severance Hall 2017-18

lead to an improved sexual experience — a curious reversal of Nietzsche’s formula of the sexual urge leading to great art. Of course, it was also Nietzsche who wrote that Wagner’s music was “like a drug” — in the sense of leaving one always unsatisfied and wanting more. Music (more than drugs) can probably get you where you want to be.

In the end, perhaps, one person’s ecstatic transcendence is just that — your own experience beyond yourself. Yet for many of us, it is about communion, literally or metaphorically, sharing something with a single other person, or, as in a concert, with many — extreme togetherness. Judge (or don’t judge!) for yourself. Applause is optional (but sometimes warranted).

Ecstasy: Exultation

David Wright lives in New Jersey and writes about music. He previously served as program annotator for the New York Philharmonic. © 2015 BY DAVID WRIGHT

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TRISTAN T ISOLDE Music Drama in Three Acts

I N H I S R E T E L L I N G of the legendary love story of Tristan

and Isolde, Richard Wagner unbound Western tonal music to create a new musical language. Filled with restless harmonies and never-ending resolution, the music perfectly mirrors love’s endless longing — for union, for touch, for the unknown, for an answer, for tomorrow, for ecstatic release, for death’s finality.

Wagner’s masterpiece remains a formidable undertaking, for musicians and audiences

alike. The fever of love and for love never dies.

Opposite: from Slevin Aaron’s photographic study of “Tristan and Isolde,” 2014

THE ECSTASY OF TRISTAN AND ISOLDE

RICHARD WAGNER’S

Above: “Tristan and Isolde,” by Austrian artist Kolo Moser, circa 1915

The Cleveland Orchestra

Opera: Tristan and Isolde

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THE

CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA FR ANZ WELSER- MÖST

M U S I C D I R E C TO R

2O1 7-18

Severance Hall

CENTENNIAL SEASON

Saturday evening, April 21, 2018, at 6:00 p.m.

Thursday evening, April 26, 2018, at 6:00 p.m.

Sunday afternoon, April 29, 2018, at 3:00 p.m.

TRISTAN AND ISOLDE O P E R A

IN C O N C E RT

Music Drama in Three Acts by Richard Wagner (1813-1883) to an original libretto by the composer based on the medieval legend of “Tristan and Isolda” with THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA conducted by Franz Welser-Möst Sung in German with projected English supertitles.

English Supertitles by Jonathan Burton

The opera was premiered in Munich on June 10, 1865.

Miloš Repický, répétiteur Vincent A. Feraudo, production stage manager Alicja Basinska, supertitle operator

These performances are sponsored by Jones Day, a Cleveland Orchestra Partner in Excellence.

The Sunday afternoon performance is dedicated to Mrs. Emma S. Lincoln (1922-2017) in recognition of her generous support for Cleveland Orchestra opera presentations.

See page 34.

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Concert Program — Week 21 Opera

The Cleveland Orchestra

C A S T in order of appearance Young Sailor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Matthew Plenk, tenor Isolde, a princess of Ireland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nina Stemme, soprano Brangäne, Isolde’s maidservant . . . . . . . . Okka von der Damerau, mezzo-soprano Tristan, a night of Cornwall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gerhard Siegel, tenor Kurwenal, Tristan’s aide-de-camp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alan Held, bass-baritone Melot, courtier to King Marke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sean Michael Plumb, baritone King Marke, of Cornwall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ain Anger, bass Shepherd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Matthew Plenk, tenor Steersman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Francisco X Prado, baritone

and with Men of the CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA CHORUS (Lisa Wong, acting director ) as sailors, knights, attendants, and soldiers

Place: The lands of Cornwall and Brittany, and on the sea Time: Legendary

ACT 1 — Onboard a ship from Ireland to Cornwall ACT 2 — King Marke’s castle, in Cornwall ACT 3 — At Kareol, Tristan’s castle in Brittany The performance is presented with two intermissions and will end at about 10:50 p.m. on Saturday and Thursday evenings, and at approximately 7:30 p.m. on Sunday.

Read a synopsis of the opera’s story on pages 26-27.

Severance Hall 2017-18

Concert Program — Week 21 Opera

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April 21, 26, 29 [slow and languid] Oboe

English Horn

Clarinet

Bassoon

Cello

In this score, Wagner broke apart the harmonic tonal system to reveal something new. With Tristan and Isolde, Wagner unleashed music from the past and announced the start of our modern world.

O P E R A

R U N N I N G

T I M E

—Franz Welser-MÜst

EVENINGS April 21 and 26

opera ends:

starts: 6:00 p.m.

(approx.)

10:50 p.m.

Act 1 80 minutes

INTERMISSION

40 minutes

Act 2 75 minutes

INTERMISSION

20 minutes

AFTERNOON April 29

Act 3 70 minutes

opera ends:

starts: 3:00 p.m.

(approx.)

7:30 p.m.

Act 1 80 minutes

INTERMISSION

20 minutes

Act 2 75 minutes

INTERMISSION

20 minutes

A selection of light food options is available during both intermissions from bars located on all levels of Severance Hall.

Act 3 70 minutes

INTRODUCING THE OPERA

Love, Night, Ecstasy . . .

T H E G R E A T L O V E S T O R Y of Tristan and Isolde has been told and

retold for many generations, and depicted by many artists in different forms and formats. Perhaps the ultimate achievement of Wagner’s operatic retelling is how he could so exactly mirror the story and the music, while at the same time writing, in words, a poetic landscape addressing love’s many elusive and contradictory aspects.

The opera’s storyline and music explore many interconnected ideas — including the exultant joys (and fears) of love and passion (both physical and psychological), the comfort and understanding of friendship, the two-sided ideas of loyalty and betrayal, and the contrasting power and possibilities of Day and Night, of Life and Death. It is a powerful journey, of music and ideas. At the same time, it is nothing but a good old-fashioned love song, compellingly told — in four hours of daring music, managed by a collected group of hard-working T H E S T O R Y In Brief singers (and orchestral musicians).

A love-potion triggers an Love is, ultimately, a funny odd thing. It is affair between a knight difficult to explain. It is challenging to define.

It is energizing and distracting both at the same (Tristan) and his uncle’s time. In Wagner’s own libretto, his lovers come bride-to-be (Isolde); they to describe it — and understand it — as the are discovered meeting difference between Day and Night, of desire in secret; he’s mortally held back (Day) and unleashed (Night), what you wounded; the two vow see (Day) and how you, literally, must feel in the dark, to touch (Night). to consummate their In this music, Wagner created a pulsing, love in death. never-ending, never-stopping sounding-river of longing. The music itself yearns for embrace and fulfillment — and release — just as the title characters do. Wagner’s genius in this score was by taking Western music’s tonal-based system of notes and harmony and creating a new kind of music, unanchored to any one key, but endlessly searching for rest and resolution, fulfillment and understanding. The journey is worth every minute!

—Eric Sellen

Severance Hall 2017-18

About the Concert — Week 21 Opera

25

TRISTAN AND ISOLDE SYNOPSIS

Act 1 The Story IN BRIEF 1

King Marke has ordered his nephew, Tristan, to escort the Irish princess Isolde to Cornwall to become Marke’s queen. Earlier, Tristan had slain Isolde’s betrothed, Morold.

Tristan, wounded and in disguise, had sought out Isolde to be healed by her magic herbs.

She had recognized Tristan, but was also drawn to him — and chose not to kill him.

Now, on the voyage, Isolde is distraught at becoming King Marke’s bride. She wants to kill herself — and Tristan. She orders her maidservant, Brangäne, to prepare the poison.

Instead, Brangäne mixes a love potion. Isolde and Tristan drink. They profess their passion for one another, but they do not die.

2

Isolde and Tristan are in love, and agree to meet secretly at night — eager to be joined together, in the darkness or in death.

They are discovered. Tristan is wounded.

3

At his home in Brittany, awaiting death, Tristan is in agony and delirious, imagining that Isolde will find him and join him in blessed darkness. A ship approaches, bringing Isolde. The lovers profess their bond, but Tristan dies. King Marke arrives to forgive Isolde. His men fight with Tristan’s guards, causing more death. Isolde envisions uniting with Tristan in death and rapture.

On a ship: Isolde, an Irish princess, has been captured and is being escorted by Tristan to Cornwall to marry Tristan’s uncle. A sailor’s song enrages her. She and Brangäne talk of the recent past, of how Tristan killed her betrothed, Morold, but was wounded in the battle — and came to Ireland in disguise to be healed by Isolde’s magical arts. She came to understand who Tristan was, but was unable to kill him in revenge. Instead, they each recognized a powerful attraction to one another.

Isolde asks to meet with Tristan. He refuses and sends his aide-de-camp, Kurwenal, to dismiss Isolde’s requests and pointedly reminds her of Morold’s death.

Isolde’s anguish intensifies and she talks of suicide or revenge. Her maidservant, Brangäne, reminds Isolde about her mother’s chest of potions — perhaps this is the means and opportunity to kill Tristan?

As the ship approaches shore, Tristan finally agrees to meet with Isolde. She asks for his atonement for killing Morold.

He offers her his sword to strike him dead.

Instead, she offers a drink of peace and friendship. He accepts. Isolde also drinks from the same cup. They profess their passion for one another. Brangäne admits she prepared a love potion instead of poison.

INTERMISSION

26

Tristan and Isolde: Synopsis

The Cleveland Orchestra

Act 3 Act 2 In the gardens of King Marke’s castle: Distant horns signal that King Marke and his attendants are away for a nocturnal hunting party, leaving Isolde alone with Brangäne. The two are waiting to extinguish a torch as a pre-arranged signal to Tristan. Brangäne warns that the King’s courtier, Melot, cannot be trusted. But Isolde, anxious for her rendezvous with Tristan, ignores Brangäne’s pleas. Tristan arrives. Brangäne withdraws to keep watch for the returning huntsmen.

Tristan and Isolde proclaim their love and longing for one another — wanting to touch, to kiss, to love freely. Tristan declares that Nighttime is their home — that Daylight keeps them apart, and that only in the long Night of Death can they finally be united. Together, they declare their desires, for Love, for Night, for Death.

Brangäne tries to warn the two lovers that daybreak is approaching, but they are passionately focused on one another. Melot arrives with the King and his men to discover Tristan and Isolde in each other’s embrace. King Marke is heartbroken. Asked about his betrayal, Tristan says there is no answer. Instead, he asks Isolde if she still wants to join him in the long embrace of Night? Melot, enraged, draws his sword to challenge Tristan. Tristan accepts Melot’s quest, but lowers his own sword and is gravely wounded.

At Kareol, Tristan’s castle in Brittany: Kurwenal has taken Tristan home, hoping that the knight can be restored to health.

A shepherd plays a mournful tune and asks if Tristan is awake. Only Isolde’s arrival can save him, Kurwenal replies. The shepherd will stand watch and play a joyful tune if he sees her ship approaching.

Tristan is delirious. He laments his fate, awake and suffering in the false reality of the Day. He remembers his parents’ deaths, and his later duel with Morold. He imagines Isolde’s healing powers and passionate touch.

The shepherd plays a new tune, signalling Isolde’s approach. Tristan joyfully tears off his bandages and rushes to embrace her in Daylight. He dies in her arms.

She begs him to respond once more to her eyes, to her voice, to her desires.

The approach of a second ship is signalled. King Marke arrives with his men, who battle their way in. Kurwenal and Melot are killed. But the King has come to forgive Isolde and Tristan — Brangäne has told him about the love potion. But Isolde is transfixed. She is envisioning Tristan beckoning her to the world beyond, to their being united forever in rapturous embrace, under the shining glow of stars across the Night sky.

INTERMISSION Severance Hall 2017-18

Tristan and Isolde: Synopsis

27

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Tristan and Isolde, Opera in Three Acts composed 1857-59

At a Glance

by

Richard

WAGNER born May 22, 1813 Leipzig died February 13, 1883 Venice

Wagner wrote his libretto for the opera Tristan and Isolde in the summer of 1857 and composed the score between October of that year and August 1859. The opera was first performed on June 10, 1865, in Munich, with Hans von Bülow conducting.

Wagner prepared a concert version of excerpts linking the Prelude with the final minutes of the opera (the “Love-Death”), which he conducted in concert in 1863, two years before the opera’s premiere.

In performance, the three acts of the opera’s music run nearly four hours, varying somewhat depending on the conductor, plus two intermissions. Wagner scored it for 3 flutes (third doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, english horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet,

3 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, bass tuba, timpani, percussion (cymbals, triangle), harp, and strings, plus the solo singers and men’s chorus.

The Cleveland Orchestra first performed music from Tristan and Isolde in March 1921, when Nikolai Sokoloff led performances of the Prelude and Love-Death, which has been programmed frequently since that time. Artur Rodzinski led staged performances of the complete opera in November 1933, with Paul Althouse as Tristan and Elsa Alsen as Isolde. The Orchestra has performed the LoveDeath in concert with many acclaimed sopranos, including Kirsten Flagstad, Helen Traubel, Margaret Harshaw, Jessye Norman, and Christine Brewer.

About the Music A S T H E Y E A R 1 8 4 8 B E G A N , things were going well for

ABOVE:

Richard Wagner, oil on canvas painting

by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, circa 1882.

Severance Hall 2017-18

Richard Wagner and his wife, Minna. His operas Rienzi, The Flying Dutchman, and Tannhäuser had all received successful premieres at the Dresden Court Theater, Wagner had been appointed conductor of the Royal Saxon Court, and their future in Dresden seemed secure. It’s true that Minna didn’t understand the new directions her husband’s music was taking, and she could hardly be expected to sympathize with his habit of forming passionate attachments to other women, whether reciprocated or not. All in all, their lives were moving forward.

Politics intervened, however, with Wagner’s participation in the revolution that April against King Friedrich August II. The uprising failed, Wagner had to flee with Minna to Switzerland, and his operas were banned in Germany.

With no job and no income from performances, Wagner tried his luck in Paris without success — ironically, considering the Wagner cult that would spring up there later — and returned to Zurich, where he had the good fortune to meet two wealthy admirers, the silk merchant Otto von Wesendonck and his wife, About the Opera

29

Mathilde. The Wesendoncks covered Wagner’s debts and eventually moved him and Minna into a small house next to theirs, which the composer called his Asyl, meaning “Refuge.”

This living arrangement had aspects of playing with fire, as Wagner had already made Mathilde aware of how her beauty, intelligence, and understanding of his music had affected him as a highly susceptible composer.

For her part, Mathilde had no intention of breaking her marriage vows — and kept her husband informed about her interactions with Wagner. Still, the satisfaction of having a great man madly in love with her must have been considerable.

Meanwhile, despite the potential intrigue, Otto kept up his financial support for the composer.

TURNING LOVE INTO MONE Y

French book illustration, circa 1470, of the story of “Tristan and Iseult,“ showing Tristan drinking the love potion.

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Living on someone else’s money was something of an embarrassment to Wagner (although, throughout his life, he continued to learn new ways to “accept” gifts, including some that had been intended merely as loans). In Zurich, the composer’s income from writing essays and criticism was nowhere near covering his expenses. And it was also quite evident that the vast project he was working on, The Ring of the Nibelung — first envisioned as one opera and then growing to a cycle of four — would take years to finish. What to do? What to live on in the meantime?

In 1854, Wagner conceived a plan to make some fast money by composing a simple opera with a small cast. This new work would, he hoped, be snapped up by opera houses everywhere. He thought he had a good idea for the libretto — a tale of doomed love (such tales have always sold opera tickets!). The storyline came from Celtic mythology, as written down in an epic poem in 1210 by Gottfried von Strassburg, detailing the life and adventures of the noble knight Tristan, nephew of King Marke of Cornwall. Strassburg’s narrative is vast, a multi-generational yarn of kings, warriors, princesses, invasions, battles, treachery, heroism, and dynastic intrigues (worthy of The Lord of the Rings, or, for that matter, The Ring of the Nibelung).

But Wagner wanted to focus on just the essentials. For the libretto to his Tristan and Isolde, he used only the last few scenes, detailing the knight’s demise. In a sense, this was as if Strassburg’s About the Opera

The Cleveland Orchestra

epic were a movie, and the composer came in about five minutes before the end. Once set to music, however, the resulting libretto would take nearly four hours to enact onstage.

As he began, however, Wagner didn’t fully understand how long his new opera would turn out to be.

His story was to be an uplifting experience, of a hero nobly choosing death rather than be disloyal to the king or deny his love for the king’s wife. You may substitute Otto (King) and Mathilde Wesendonck (Queen) into this storyline if you wish, for Wagner (Tristan) certainly was taking inspiration from his everyday real-life situation. We should keep in mind, too, that Wagner’s original intent was for this new piece to be easy on the performers and the audience alike — and thus financially fruitful for himself.

“Since I have never enjoyed in life the actual happiness of love,” he wrote to Franz Liszt in December 1854, “I want to erect another monument to this most beautiful of all dreams, in which, from beginning to end, this love is going to satisfy its hunger properly for once. I have worked out a ‘Tristan and Isolde’ in my head — the simplest and at the same time most full-blooded musical conception.”

As late as September 1857, he was writing to the publisher Breitkopf & Härtel, “I am about to begin the musical composition of ‘Tristan and Isolde.’ . . . Practically the only demanding task will be to find a good pair of singers for the main parts, which means that I shall possibly get a good first performance and the chance of distributing it to the theaters very quickly, unimpeded by any obstacles.”

Any obstacles, that is, except the unprecedented complexity and challenges of the score itself, as though it were a new musical language altogether — as it eventually turned out.

In an effort to get the much-needed cash flowing as soon as possible, Wagner proposed an unusual arrangement with the publisher: “I suggest that each time I deliver the full score of one of the three acts, I receive a third of the total fee. . . . The score will be engraved, and the engraving is to begin immediately after I have sent in the manuscript. This can be arranged so that when I’ve finished the manuscript, the engraving will be finished shortly thereafter.”

In other words, in his desperation for income, Wagner offered to compose on a high wire without a net. He even asked the publisher how fast the engraver was working, so he could adjust his composing pace accordingly. Thus, the music was committed to print nearly Severance Hall 2017-18

About the Opera

Wagner’s inspiring love interest, the wife of his patron: Mathilde Wesendonck, painted by Carl Friedrich Sohn in 1850.

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as soon as Wagner wrote it down.

The usual option of going back and revising, of adjusting something you wrote in Act I because of an idea you had in Act III, was not available. The opera that would become one of the monuments of Western civilization was, in a real sense, one long improvisation.

It’s difficult to believe that this unusual, no-looking-back process didn’t play a role in creating the opera’s revolutionary stream-of-consciousness style, the music driving ever forward with harmonies forever unresolved. With each act and measure, Wagner was himself searching the way forward, just as much as his characters.

I N T I M AT E L OV E S O N G S

“Tristan and Isolde,” painting by Scottish artist John Duncan, 1912.

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Just before starting to compose Tristan and Isolde in earnest, Wagner developed a sudden fascination with the art song — the Lied [pronounced leed], in German — songs for one singer with piano accompaniment. This artform had long been the most intimate genre in German music, the very opposite of grand opera in scale and feeling.

Wagner invited Robert Franz, the leading composer of Lieder in the generation after Schubert and Schumann, to the Wesendonck estate, and after that visit decided to compose five songs to poems by Mathilde. Actual musical material from two of his Wesendonck Lieder eventually found their way into the opera, but more importantly Wagner’s explorations in this area imparted to the opera a distinctly un-”operatic” aesthetic — of subjectivity and inner emotional flow.

Incidentally, it was in publicly presenting Mathilde with one of “her” songs, fully orchestrated, for her birthday, followed by sending her the score of the first act of Tristan and Isolde with a passionate cover note, that Wagner got himself banished from “King” Otto Wesendonck’s realm, just as he had been earlier banished by King Friedrich August.

While the composer’s wife Minna went to Dresden to bathe in curing waters, Wagner moved into a palazzo in Venice and composed Act II of Tristan and Isolde in solitude.

By the spring of 1859, Wagner was back in Switzerland, keeping the Tristan assembly line running, as always, on two fronts: “The process of correcting the proofs of the second act, while I was simultaAbout the Opera

The Cleveland Orchestra

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Martha Thompson The Eruption of Vesuvius (detail), 1771. Pierre-Jacques Volaire (French, 1729–1799). Oil on canvas; 116.8 × 242.9 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection, 1978.426. Image: The Art Institute of Chicago, IL / Bridgeman Images

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Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo / Singapore, and Victoria Miro, London. © Yayoi Kusama

CLEVEL AND ORCHESTR A SPOTLIGHT

Honoring Mrs. Emma S. Lincoln The Cleveland Orchestra gratefully salutes Mrs. Emma S. Lincoln, a trailblazer who lived an extraordinary life and shared her great love of opera with Northeast Ohio and beyond. Mrs. Lincoln, who died at the age of 95 this past December, was a singer and pianist, who made a significant impact on The Cleveland Orchestra’s ability to create dynamic annual opera presentations. Across the past decade, she had become the largest philanthropic supporter of the Orchestra’s opera programming. She was also a dedicated Annual Fund donor and Cleveland Orchestra subscriber for many years, and gave generously of her time as a volunteer.

Beyond her support for the Orchestra, Mrs. Lincoln’s philanthropy and volunteer work made a wide impact across Northeast Ohio, supporting programs and institutions devoted to education, health, nature, anthropology, textile conservation, and more.

Emma Lincoln had a groundbreaking legal career, graduating in 1949 as one of three women in her class from the Franklin Thomas Backus School of Law at Case Western Reserve University, then starting her own law practice and becoming an assistant attorney general for the State of Ohio. She had a keen mind for business and served as a director of the Lincoln Electric Co. and later as director emeritus.

Mrs. Lincoln was the mother of six children, spoke eight languages, and was an avid photographer, yacht enthusiast, certified welder, fervent supporter of Cleveland’s baseball team (attending games at home and away), and intrepid traveler. She explored more than 250 countries and territories and celebrated birthdays on every continent.

To honor the life and legacy of a remarkable person, the performance of Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde on Sunday, April 29, is dedicated in Mrs. Lincoln’s memory.

34

Donor Spotlight

The Cleveland Orchestra

neously in the throes of composing the ecstasies of the third act, had the strangest, almost uncanny, effect on me,” he later wrote in his autobiography, My Life. “For it was in just those first scenes of this act [i.e. the third] that I realized with complete clarity that I had written the most audacious and original work of my life.”

In short, Wagner himself was aghast at what had happened to his “easy” potboiler opera. With the entirely Romantic goal of probing for the quivering heart of mad, unreasoning, heedless love, he had blown Romantic-era harmonies apart, leaving music to fly free of its tonal centers into the language of the future, to . . . Debussy, Ives, Schoenberg, Messiaen, Boulez, and beyond. In truth, Wagner created a world where music could flourish in new and modern ways, by unleashing the past to roam freely.

What should have been merely romantic (small-R), with two lovers expiring prettily but sadly at the final curtain, grew into something more. In Wagner’s hands, the lovers Isolde and Tristan are made of much stronger stuff, strong enough to carry the philosophical message Wagner had eagerly imbibed from the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer and the teachings of Buddha — that all suffering and pain in life is the product of the human will (i.e., wishes and desires) and that the road to peace of spirit leads not through fulfillment of wishes, but through overcoming and renouncing them.

It doesn’t exactly sound like material for a triumphant ending, does it? But when Wagner composed it, the triumph of two souls first merging into TristanIsolde, then merging with the Universal Soul through death, beat anything in grand opera, no matter how many soldiers, gypsies, supernumeraries, and elephants others were squeezing onstage.

Schopenhauer influenced Tristan and Isolde in another way.

While Wagner’s original concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (the idea of a comprehensive work of art) placed all the other arts at the service of drama, in the end he agreed with Schopenhauer that music — an art not dependent on words or pictures — expressed the human will most directly. So that MUSIC was to be Severance Hall 2017-18

About the Opera

The first singers to portray Tristan and Isolde, the husband and wife team of Ludwig and Malvina Schnorr, in their costumes in 1865. Ludwig died just six weeks after the premiere, aged 29, causing some to claim that the role itself was too strenuous and difficult. Malvina, after her husband’s death, retired from the stage, dying forty years later.

35

the foundation of all art.

In a letter to a critic, Wagner described his artistic product as “deeds of music made visible,” and it’s certainly true that the visible part of a production of Tristan and Isolde isn’t the half of it. In an opera with very little stage action, the deeds — and the psychic states, the philosophical musings, the ironic references, and the meaningful connections — are mostly in the music (whether a stage director chooses to act out more, or not).

The music of Tristan and Isolde begins with the most famous seventeen measures this side of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Here, Wagner simply makes chromatic lines coalesce into a single stinging chord, then drift away again. Then he repeats the process, one step higher. All of human erotic yearning, all of unslakeable desire, is distilled into that gesture.

An industrious graduate student has determined that the dissonant so-called “Tristan chord” heard in those first bars recurs over 1,400 times in the course of the opera. Talk about reminders of our human failings! That’s the real villain of the piece, not the hapless soldier Melot, whose sword Tristan chooses as his ticket to eternity. It is the music that takes us hostage and never relents in feeding our desire for love. Such a wily, persistent villain, not to be overcome easily.

Certainly not by Wagner himself, who as late as 1865 was urgently entreating Mathilde Wesendonk to attend the premiere of Tristan and Isolde in Munich. The lady declined. She had, in the meantime, transferred her musical loyalty to Johannes Brahms. (As for Wagner’s own heart, he moved on to the wife of another man, the conductor Hans van Bülow. She was the daughter of Franz Liszt.

Cosima and Richard married, after having children together. Love stories are timeless, and never ending.)

—David Wright © 2018

Designs for the original productions of Tristan and Isolde by Angelo Quaglio.

At left, model of his set for Act I in 1865; at right, his scenery design for Act III in 1886.

36

About the Opera

The Cleveland Orchestra

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What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

—John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

RICHARD

WAGNER Genius, Madman, Egotist Hugh Macdonald reflects on the composer’s vision, creativity, and personal excesses to review Wagner’s impact on art and opera — and our understanding of music, passion, and artful expectations

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I T I S A FIETEIBSL aE feeble U N D Eunderstatement R S T A T E M E N T to say

that Richard Wagner never did anything by halves. He was an artist in the biggest, widest, most gargantuan sense of that term (certainly in his own mind) — and was ready to embrace “all the arts” in an enormous possessive hug.

As a teenager, he thought he was to be a dramatist who would write plays.

Soon enough he became a musician — who could (and who would dare to) write everything.

From the start, he wrote his own librettos, thus assuming the garb of poet and co-creator (along with himself) of the warp and weft, the very material threads and patterns in the fabric of his work.

Next, he declared his intention of creating a Gesamtkunstwerk, an “All-ArtsWork” in which the entirety of the arts would exist together, equal and vital — music and words, movement and dance, scenery and lighting, storytelling and meaning. To do so, he would supervise Wagner — Musical Passion

The Cleveland Orchestra

Richard Wagner, Munich, 1871, photographed by Franz Hanfstaengl.

everything, start to finish, conception through rehearsal to performance to interpretation and review. He was combining all the arts into a single artwork, “farm to table,” with the world as his stage.

But . . . hang on a minute!! Was he a dancer or ballet-master? Was he a painter?

Was he a stage-director? Strictly speaking, no. He was none of these. But one of the few compromises he ever made was to tone down the theoretical “equivalence” of the arts in his new operas in order to recognize that, in reality, music and drama were the leading elements. Everything else was secondary. And so he also chose to re-name his operas as “music dramas.”

Yet by no means did he abandon claim to be the creator of all the artistic elements involved, and his texts contain uniquely comprehensive stage directions (even for a period when staging was elaborate and realistic). He wrote out not just the sets, but the movements, gestures, and expressions of his characters.

These are all specified — in words — in the scores themselves.

At the unforgettable moment in the Severance Hall 2017-18

first act of Tristan and Isolde when Isolde wrests the cup from which Tristan has just drunk the love potion and then drinks from it in turn, the score tells us: “She drinks. Then she throws away the goblet.

Seized with convulsive trembling, they gaze into one another’s eyes in the utmost emotion, but without stirring, while their expression changes from defiance of death to the glow of passion.”

The music, in fact, tells us all of this.

The cellos wriggle downwards, as the potion trickles down Isolde’s throat. The violas do some convulsive trembling, and the timpani punctuate the silence. Then the cellos recall the same theme with which the opera opened, reaching the “Tristan chord” and its concentrated message of doomed passion.

In fact, at least in part, Wagner wrote his librettos in full, complete with detailed stage directions, so that when he later came to actually write the music he could set not just the words his characters sing, but also the gestures and expressions that he had proscribed in the stage directions.

Music and staging are thus tightly reflec-

Wagner — Madman Poet

39

tive of each other.

A famous scene at the beginning of Die Walküre (or “The Valkyrie”) shows Sieglinde anxiously caring for the exhausted stranger who has burst through her door.

Every step she takes around the hut, every glance she steals in the direction of the stranger, every drop of water she brings him, all these are vividly expressed in the music — along with the instinctive sympathy for someone she does not yet know to be her twin brother.

All of which is to say that, in fact, concert performances of his operas work very well because the music — if you let yourself succumb to its push and sway — clearly assists the audience in imagining

reinforcing one another, and nothing less than a combined assault on all our sensibilities would be sufficient. When The Flying Dutchman (1843) and Tannhäuser (1845) were first staged in Dresden, Wagner was conducting, as well as overseeing the construction of the sets, the lighting, and the stage movement. Lohengrin (1850) was first staged in Weimar by Franz Liszt while Wagner, in exile in Switzerland for some political agitation he had joined in with, was unable to attend, to his great frustration. All his later operas were first staged with someone else conducting, allowing Wagner to throw himself into the staging and acting and everything else that required his attention.

B U I LD I N G H I S OW N T H E AT E R

what is going on onstage. It can even be argued that the music is already illustrating the physical and emotional action, so much so that there is no need to duplicate it. Indeed, some stage directors today take little notice of Wagner’s directions and devise their own action, sometimes in blatant contradiction to Wagner’s text — and thus to his music. But we are in an age of contradiction, when truth is highlighted and reinforced by showing the opposite — and sometimes it really works to do so!

Yet Wagner felt strongly that the music, however powerful, was not enough.

His dramas needed words and gesture all

40

For his magnum opus, the fouropera Ring of the Nibelung tetralogy, Wagner’s imagined stage requirements — including talking birds and many other animals, flames and flood — made almost impossible demands on the technology of his day. To assist, he had the foresight (and audacity) to design and build his own theater, at Bayreuth, to new specifications that included hiding the orchestra within a new kind of pit. And there he was at last in total command, with his Festival Theater built for the single purpose of staging his operas — and nothing else.

Evenso, the technical demands were so great that even Wagner had to admit that, sometimes, what his mind could see the audience, perhaps, might not. Still, this was the greatest of all ego trips, and, by most accounts, was fully justified. The Ring is still the longest — many (but not all) say the greatest! — opera ever written and invariably sells every seat whenever

Wagner — Egotistic Artist

The Cleveland Orchestra

and wherever it is performed. Its premiere in the new Festival Theater in the summer of 1876 was international news.

G R A N D E X PE C TAT I O N S

Wagner’s capacity for work, like his capacity for feeling, knew no limits. He lived for his art. Control of his domestic life came to him less easily, for until his last years he was permanently in debt and permanently unashamed to beg money from anyone by assuring them that they would be helping a great artist fulfill his mission. Enough supported him to help prove that he was right.

The money was needed not just to support himself, his wife, and his stepdaughter (and eventually his own son and daughter), but to keep him exquisitely comfortable. He expected a standard of comfort appropriate for a wildly successful composer, which he was sure he would one day be, like Rossini. He ordered silk shirts from Paris and every kind of luxury.

In the 1850s, he redecorated the apartment where he was living in Zurich with velvet curtains and upholstery that cost him, it is said, ten times the annual rent.

In Zurich, it was convenient that his most devoted patrons were Otto and Mathilde Wesendonck. Otto had amassed a fortune in the silk business in New York and was two years younger than Wagner. His wife was fifteen years younger — beautiful, passionate, fond of poetry, and transfixed by Wagner’s music. Otto was wealthy and generous. Together, this couple was a combination perfectly calculated to draw Wagner into their orbit. They soon provided the spiritual (Mathilde) and material (Otto) support that was always the composer’s greatest need.

Severance Hall 2017-18

PA S S I O N AT E D R E A M S

Bewitched by Mathilde, Wagner put aside the multi-year task of writing the Ring (leaving the story’s hero, Siegfried, waiting “in the forest”) and set about composing Tristan and Isolde, the most ecstatic of all operas, celebrating a love so passionate that it can only find fulfillment in death. Unlike his other operas, which often simmered on the back burner of his mind for years (sometimes decades), Tristan and Isolde was conceived and created quite quickly, from start to finish within a period of three years — during which the scandal of Wagner’s affair with Mathilde wrecked his own marriage and drove him from Zurich.

First performed in 1865, Tristan and Isolde reached an extreme point in two domains. First, in the modernity of its harmony. Second, in the force of its emotional expression. The two, in fact, were and are closely interdependent — and Wagner’s success in building them together is a supreme achievement. In Wagner’s own words, Tristan and Isolde is a “monument to the loveliest of all dreams,” of integrating drama and music into a seamless, emotionally-wrought whole.

TRANSCENDENCE

In The Flying Dutchman, Wagner had elevated the tale’s lovers, Senta, a simple Norwegian sea captain’s daughter, and the mysterious Dutchman, far above the status of the storyline’s “love interest” to that of embodying the all-encompassing power of transcendent love. The final stage direction says: “She throws herself into the sea. Immediately, the Dutchman’s ship sinks with all hands into the waves. The sea heaves and falls in a whirlpool. In the red

Wagner — Visionary Prophet

41

glow of the rising sun, Senta and the Dutchman, transfigured, are seen in a close embrace rising from the wreck of the vessel and soaring upwards.”

While this ending was (and still is) a fearsome challenge to the scenery designers, stage crew, and lighting staff, it was a passionate expression of Wagner’s faith in the redemptive power of love, transcending all mortal concerns in a grand ecstatic apotheosis.

Many say that Tristan and Isolde’s sliding harmonies launched the world toward modern music. Yet Wagner was imagining forward throughout his lifetime.

To invent a new musical language in which to express his mature music-dramas was entirely characteristic of Wagner. In doing so, he also invented a new orchestra (double the size of the standard one be-

fore him) with which to depict the Rhine, the Valkyries, and the Gods. For this, he even invented a new instrument, the Wagner tuba — combining features of the orchestral horn, tuba, and trombone — to bring a certain sound and weight to his assembled brass section.

All of which is to say that although Wagner was a small man — he stood 5'5" tall — he was a colossus in his impact on the world of music and opera and ideas.

GOOD AND BAD

Whatever one thinks of his music, it is difficult to love Wagner the man — his egomania, his grasping dependence on friends, his antisemitism, his political vacillation, his predatory attitude to other men’s wives, and his interminable, unreadable prose (without the music, the poetry is

BELIEVE IN YOUR NEXT NOTE... WE DO. CONSERVATORY MUSIC

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bw.edu/conservatory

Baldwin Wallace University, Berea, Ohio 44017

“Top 10 Liberal Arts Colleges for Music in the U.S.” Music School Central

“Top 10 List for Musical Theatre Colleges” Backstage

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42

Wagner — Passionate Creativity

The Cleveland Orchestra

lifeless on the page) — there is a tendency to forgive him at those many memorable moments when the magic happens.

For instance, when that first note of Tristan and Isolde rises mysteriously from the cellos (in 1889, at Bayreuth, two French composers, Lekeu and Chabrier, both had

to be carried out in a faint during the Prelude), or when the clang of bells brings forward the knights in Parsifal (1883), or when, in the Ring, the god Wotan embraces his beloved soon-to-be-human daughter Brünnhilde for the last time.

Severance Hall 2017-18

These, and many others like them, are transcendent moments, when passion and intense devotion are enacted onstage — and when Wagner’s music lifts the action onto to a much higher plane, to a level that can only be described as spiritual ecstasy or, perhaps, quite simply, heaven.

He may have been a bad man, filled with unforgivably ugly opinions and actions by today’s standards. But he lived in a different time, and his art can speak to any of us, to all of us, of the need for love and transcendence — from our worst instincts and prejudices, to each of us becoming someone better.

—Hugh Macdonald Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in Saint Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin.

Wagner — Musical Visionary

43

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Nina Stemme

Gerhard Siegel

Swedish soprano Nina Stemme is hailed among today’s most-acclaimed dramatic sopranos, known for portraying a repertoire of Wagnerian and Strauss heroines. She is in demand at the world’s major opera houses and festivals. Ms. Stemme is a frequent guest at La Scala, New York’s Metropolitan Opera, London’s Royal Opera House, and the Vienna State Opera, as well with opera companies in Barcelona, Berlin, Paris, and Zurich. Her first appearances as Isolde in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde were at Britain’s Glyndebourne Festival Opera, available on DVD and as albums on EMI and PentaTone. A recording of the opera, with Ms. Stemme singing opposite Plácido Domingo, is also available. Her discography features Beethoven’s Fidelio, along with operas by Strauss, Wagner, and Zemlinsky. In 2006, Nina Stemme was appointed Swedish Royal Court Singer; she became an Austrian Kammersängerin in 2012. She is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, and recipient of the Swedish Royal medal Litteris et Artibus and Italian Premio Abbiati. She made her Cleveland Orchestra debut singing the title role in Strauss’s Salome in May 2012. For more information, visit www. ninastemme.com.

German tenor Gerhard Siegel began his musical career as an instrumentalist and composer. After completing voice studies with Liselotte Becker-Egner at the Augsburg Conservatory, he became an ensemble member of the Stadttheater Trier. He later won the 1995 International Hans Gabor Belvedere Singing Competition in Vienna. Mr. Siegel joined Theater Augsburg in 1997, and subsequently sang as a member of the Nuremberg Opera, 1999-2006, where he sang roles including the Wagnerian roles of Parsifal, Mime, and Siegfried, along with Florestan in Fidelio. He has performed with many of the world’s major opera houses, including in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Bayreuth, Berlin, Brussels, Cologne, Dresden, Geneva, London, Madrid, Montpellier, Munich, New York City, Salzburg, Tokyo, Vienna, and Zurich.

Mr. Siegel’s recent performances have included the roles of Midas in Strauss’s Die Liebe der Danae under Franz Welser-Möst in 2016, and as Mime in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung with conductor Christian Thielemann. He is making his Cleveland Orchestra debut with these performances of Tristan and Isolde. For more information, visit www.gerhardsiegel.com.

as ISOLDE

Severance Hall 2017-18

as TRISTAN

Opera: The Cast

45

Okka von der Damerau

Ain Anger

German mezzo-soprano Okka von der Damerau was born in Hamburg and began her music studies in Rostock and graduated from the University of Music in Freiburg.

Her first engagements were with the theaters of Rostock and Freiburg. From 2006 to 2010, she was an ensemble member of the Hannover State Opera, where her performances included the world premiere of Edward Rushton’s Die Fromme Helene, as Erda in Wagner’s Das Rheingold, and Maddalena in Verdi’s Rigoletto. Since 2010, she has sung as a member of the ensemble of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. Recent roles there have included Ulrica in Verdi’s The Masked Ball and Magdalena in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. Recent seasons have also included Ms. Damerau’s debuts with the Chicago Lyric Opera, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Oper Frankfurt, Teatro alla Scala in Milan, and the Vienna State Opera. In concert, she has sung with the Bavarian State Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin, and appeared at the Enescu, Maggio Musicale, and Verbier festivals. Okka von der Damerau is making her Cleveland Orchestra debut with these performances of Tristan and Isolde.

Estonian-born Ain Anger has sung Wagnerian bass roles across Europe. Equally in demand in Italian, German, and Russian repertoire, he made his Cleveland Orchestra debut in June 2006. His most recent appearances here in May 2015, in Strauss’s Daphne. While studying at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, Mr. Anger sang at the Estonian National Opera.

He was a soloist with the Leipzig Opera, 2001-04. Since joining the Vienna State Opera roster in 2004, he has performed more than 40 roles there. In addition, he has appeared at the Bavarian State Opera, Bayreuth Festival, Canadian Opera Company, Chicago Lyric Opera, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Dutch National Opera, Oper Frankfurt, Opéra National de Paris, Teatro alla Scala in Milan, and Washington D.C.’s National Opera. He has also sung with the orchestras of Dresden, Frankfurt, New York, Philadelphia, Saint Louis, San Francisco, Stockholm, and Tokyo, and at the Bergen, Helsinki, Lucerne, and Savonlinna festivals. In 2013, Ain Anger was awarded the Order of the White Star for his services to the Estonian state.

as BRANGÄNE

46

as KING MARKE

Opera: The Cast

The Cleveland Orchestra

Alan Held

Sean Michael Plumb

Recognized among today’s leading singing actors, American bass-baritone Alan Held has appeared in major roles at many of the world’s great opera houses, including the Bavarian State Opera, Hamburg State Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Metropolitan Opera in New York, Munich State Opera, Paris Opera, London’s Royal Opera House, San Francisco Opera, Teatro alla Scala, and the Vienna State Opera.

He has also performed with major orchestras around the world, and at prominent festivals. His many roles include Wotan in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung cycle and Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger, as well as the title role in Berg’s Wozzeck, and Scarpia in Puccini’s Tosca. Mr. Held can be heard on an EMI Classics recording of Beethoven’s Fidelio, and in DVDs of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Wagner’s Das Rheingold and a Paris Opera presentation of Hindemith’s Cardillac. A native of Washburn, Illinois, Mr. Held received his vocal training at Millikin University and Wichita State University. His many awards include the Birgit Nilsson Prize. He made his Cleveland Orchestra debut in 2004, and most recently sang in The Cunning Little Vixen in 2014 and 2017.

American baritone Sean Michael Plumb currently sings as an ensemble member of the Bavarian State Opera, where this season his roles have included Guglielmo in Mozart’s Così fan tutte and Dandini in Rossini’s La Cenerentola. An advocate of new works, he appeared in the world premiere of Miroslav Srnka’s South Pole, in world premiere workshops of Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain with Opera Philadelphia and Santa Fe Opera, and in workshop performances of Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s Breaking the Waves in New York and San Francisco. In concert, Mr. Plumb has sung with orchestras across the United States. He is making his Cleveland Orchestra debut with these Severance Hall performances of Tristan and Isolde. Mr. Plumb graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music, became a member of the Salzburg Festival’s Young Singers Project, and was a young artist at the Aix-en-Provence, Aspen, and Glimmerglass festivals. In 2016, he was awarded the Grand Prize of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. For more information, visit www.seanmichaelplumb.com

as KURWENAL

Severance Hall 2017-18

as MELOT

Opera: The Cast

47

Men of the

Cleveland Orchestra Chorus LISA WONG, acting director

Matthew Plenk

TENORS

as YOUNG SAILOR / SHEPHERD

American tenor Matthew Plenk has sung with opera companies across the United States. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the Hartt School of Music and a master’s degree from Yale University, and is a graduate of the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program. He has appeared with the Metropolitan Opera Chamber Ensemble, Musica Angelica Baroque, and Oratorio Society of New York, as well as in performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, and Philadelphia Orchestra, and with a variety of summer festivals across North America. He has previously sung at Severance Hall in The Cleveland Orchestra’s performances of Strauss’s Salome (2012) and Daphne (2015). In 2015, he joined the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music as assistant professor of voice.

Francisco X. Prado as STEERSMAN

A graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Music, baritone Francisco Prado was last heard with The Cleveland Orchestra singing the role of Peter in Bach’s Saint John Passion last season. He has been a member of the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus since 2016. Upcoming engagements include the role of Maciej in the Cleveland premiere of The Haunted Manor by Polish composer Stanisław Moniuszko with The Cleveland Opera in June and concerts with Apollo’s Fire this coming autumn.

48

Opera: The Cast

Vincent L. Briley Gerry C. Burdick David Ciucevich Corey Hill* Peter Kvidera Adam Landry Tod Lawrence Matthew Rizer Ted Rodenborn Lee Scantlebury William Venable Michael J. Ward Allen White BASSES

Christopher Aldrich Jack Blazey Sean Cahill Kevin Calavan Kyle Crowley Christopher Dewald Jeffrey Duber Kurtis B. Hoffman Jason Howie Joshua Jones David Keller Jason Levy Tyler Mason Stephen Mitchell Tom Moormann Tremaine Oatman Francisco X. Prado Jarod Shamp James B. Snell Stephen Stavnicky* Additional information about the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus can be found on pages 90-91. *Shari Bierman Singer Fellow

The Cleveland Orchestra

presents t

The Haunted Manor (Straszny Dwór)

by

Stanisław Moniuszko

This original production off The Cleveland Opera is ffully staged and costumed, sung in Polish with English translation projected.

Saturday, June 16, 2018 | 7:30 pm The Ohio Theatre, Playhouse Square | 1511 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland OH 44115 Tickets $25 - $65 can be purchased through Playhouse Square box office at playhousesquare.org or by calling 216-241-6000 or 866-546-1353.

50% discount for children and students — use promo code MANOR The Haunted Manorr (Straszny dwór) an enemy; hence their oath never to marry. composed by the Polish composer Stanisław But, as they meet two lovely, extraordinary Moniuszko to the libretto by Jan Chęciński women, Hanna and Jadwiga, their brazen was premiered in 1865 in The Grand Opera in steadfastness is melted by the fire of their Warsaw. The opera combines a romance and hearts. Enhanced with magnificent choruses a comedy expressed through Polish dance- and ballet, and mingling comedy and pathos, style music. It is considered Moniuszko’s The Haunted Manorr is a brilliant example of best opera, and also the greatest among all opera semiseria.

19th-century Polish opera scores.

For more information The story represents an idyllic call 216-816-1411 or visit view of life in a Polish country manor house thwarted by the theclevelandopera.org need of two young men, Stefan Manor house in Kalinowa, and Zbigniew, to defend their the probable original location for the setting of homeland against an invasion of The Haunted Manor.

More About

WAGNER

F I F T Y Y E A R S A G O , there was a solid belief that more books had been written

about Wagner’s life and music than any other musician. In today’s era of databases and databytes, one might think there could be an accurate count, but . . . too many variables muddle even the best attempts at a modern summing. Evenso, there are plenty of good books (and recordings) ready and waiting to fill our brains with as much Wagnermania as you might possibly wish. Here are a few choice titles: Being Wagner: The Story of the Most Provocative Composer Who Ever Lived, d by Simon Callow. 244 pages. (Random House, 2017). A recent and somewhat breezy modern attempt to tell about Wagner’s life, by a man who gave a one-man show in London in 2012 to begin celebrating the composer’s bicentennary the next year. Purists may bristle with the approachable — sometimes theatrical — writing, but Callow made a choice to tell a storyy rather than simply write history.

Richard Wagner: A Life, by Martin Geck, translated from German n

by Stewart Spencer. 465 pages. (University of Chicago Press, 2013). A middle-sized one-volume biography written by an editor for the most recent complete edition of Wagner’s musical works. Geck provides a clear storyline, while adding perceptive personal commentary and contextual viewpoints for today’s audiences.

The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy, y by Bryan Magee. 420 pages. (Metropolitan Books, 2001). A probing discussion of the influence of many important philosophers and philosophical movements on Wagner, this book gives context to the composer’s evolving thoughts on a wide range of topics — musical, historical, theatrical, and otherwise. Like Beethoven, Wagner kept abreast of new ideas and the thinking of a diverse group of men (yes, they were almost all men) across Europe. Not for those seeking easy reading, but if you really want to start delving and surmising.

The Life of Richard Wagner, r by Ernest Newman. 4 volumes; 2500 or so pages.

(1933-46). Old but good. Much has been discovered and learned about Wagner since Newman’s monumental biography, but when looking for almost day-by-day detail, this is a choice place to start. For the true Wagnerites among us — my family, understanding my interest, gave me my four-volume set as a freshman in college.

The Wagner Operas, by Ernest Newman. 725 pages. (Alfred A. Knopf, 1949; Princeton University reprint). A concise yet detailed look at Wagner’s ten mature operas (excluding his four early works), including extensive discussions of the historic sources for each story, expanded plot synopses, and printed examples of the major musical themes (or leitmotifs).

—Eric Sellen

50

More About Wagner

The Cleveland Orchestra

Richard Wagner, posthumous painting by Franz von Lenbach, circa 1890

One supreme fact that I have discovered is that it is not willpower, but fantasy that creates. Imagination is the creative force. Imagination creates reality.

—Richard Wagner

F U R T H E R E X P L O R I N G the emotional implications of ecstasy,

the film Melancholia offers differing approaches to life’s search for meaning and understanding in the face of both everyday and life-altering events. Winner of the European Film Award for best film of 2O11, Lars von Trier’s apocalyptic fantasy is a visually stunning drama with an all-star cast. The film follows two sisters at a disastrous dusk-to-dawn wedding reception at a lavish estate. After the party, they remain on the property as a rogue planet hurtles toward earth on a possible collision course. The film memorably employs music from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde as a central part of its soundtrack. In English.

52

The Ecstasy of Tristan and Isolde

The Cleveland Orchestra

Sunday evening, April 22, 2018, at 6:30 p.m.

Cleveland Institute of Art, Gund Building, 11610 Euclid Avenue

MELANCHOLIA

a film by Lars von Trier produced by Meta Louise Foldager and Louise Vesth written and directed by Lars von Trier Kirsten Dunst Charlotte Gainsbourg Brady Corbet Cameron Spurr Stellan SkarsgĂĽrd Jesper Christensen

starring Alexander SkarsgĂĽrd Kiefer Sutherland Charlotte Rampling Jesper Christensen John Hurt Udo Kier

cinematography by Manuel Alberto Claro edited by Molly Marlene Stensgaard release: 2 O11 running time: 135 minutes presented by Cleveland Cinematheque in partnership with The Cleveland Orchestra

A ticket is required for admission; tickets can be purchased at the door or online at www.cia.edu/cinematheque.

The Cleveland Orchestra

Ecstasy Festival: Movie Presentation

53

Two Brothers: Planning for the Future In Greek mythology, Prometheus was one of two brothers. His younger brother was named Epimetheus, from the Greek word meaning “afterthought.” As he grew up, Epimetheus spent much of his time thinking about yesterday, and last week, or looking at the history of a hundred years ago. All too rarely did he ever think about the future.

In contrast, the name Prometheus was derived from the Greek word meaning “foresight” or “forethought.” And, true to his name, Prometheus was always thinking about the future and the possibilities tomorrow might bring. He wanted to be ready today for whatever might happen next — whether that was next month or even a century hence.

It is with creativity and foresight that Franz Welser-Möst developed The Prometheus Project as part of launching The Cleveland Orchestra’s Second Century.

You, too, can help ensure the future with generous forethought by joining The Cleveland Orchestra Heritage Society.

clevelandorchestra.com/legacy For more information, please contact Dave Stokley, Legacy Giving Officer, at 216-231-8006.

TH E P RO M E TH E U S P ROJ E C T

BE ETHOVE N THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA

CLEVELAND May 1O-19 VIENNA May 24-28 TOKYO June 2-7 conducted by Franz Welser-Möst The Cleveland Orchestra’s Centennial Season ends with a special series of concerts on three continents. Franz Welser-Möst examines Beethoven’s nine symphonies through the story of PROMETHEUS, a titan of Greek mythology who defied Zeus to give fire to humanity — sparking imagination, civilization, learning, and creativity. Similarly, BEETHOVEN, a titan of classical music, pursued his own art and energies in service to Promethean beliefs — in the goodness of humanity, and the ongoing heroic struggle to create a better world, filled with justice and human worth. These Festival concerts are a not-to-be-missed experience to hear Beethoven’s genius in its glory and great goodness.

CLEVELAND S E V E R A N C E H A L L MAY 10 Symphonies Nos. 1 and 3 (“Eroica”) MAY 11 Symphonies Nos. 4 and 7 MAY 12 Symphonies Nos. 8 and 5 MAY 13 Symphonies Nos. 6 (“Pastoral”) and 2 MAY 17, 18, 19 Symphony No. 9 (“Choral”)

21 6-2 3 1-1111 clevelandorchestra.com TI CK E TS

Messiaen’s Turangalîla

F R A N Z W E L S E R - M Ö S T leads Messiaen’s brilliant

ten-movement symphony from 1949. Conceived while the composer was intensively studying the Tristan and Isolde legend — its artistic enumeration and spiritual constructs — Turangalîla-Symphonie portrays human love on a vast musical canvas, filled with gardens of delight and longing, starry nights of ecstatic love-making, and a never-ending search for transcendence and embrace.

Opposite: one section of the Small Magellanic Cloud, Hubble photograph, NASA

THE ECSTASY OF TRISTAN AND ISOLDE

Rethinking and Recasting the Story of Tristan and Isolde

Above: “Love Among the Ruins” — watercolor by British artist Edward Burne-Jones, circa 1873

The Cleveland Orchestra

Messiaen’s Turangalîla: April 25

57

Committed To Excellence As another long-established Cleveland institution with a global reputation for excellence, we are delighted to continue our support for The Cleveland Orchestra in its centenary year.

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Local Connections. Global Inuence.

THE

CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA FR ANZ WELSER- MÖST

M U S I C D I R E C TO R

2O1 7-18

CENTENNIAL SEASON

Severance Hall

Wednesday evening, April 25, 2018, at 7:30 p.m.

Franz Welser-Möst conductor

(for piano, ondes martenot, and orchestra) 1. Introduction 2. Chant d’amour I [Hymn of Love I] 3. Turangalîla I 4. Chant d’amour II 5. Joie du sang des étoiles [Joy of the Blood of the Stars] 6. Jardin du sommeil d’amour [Garden of Love’s Sleep] 7. Turangalîla II 8. Développement de l’amour [Development of Love] 9. Turangalîla III 10. Final JEAN-YVES THIBAUDET, piano CYNTHIA MILLAR, ondes martenot

ECSTASY

Turangalîla-Symphonie

THE ECSTASY OF TRISTAN AND ISOLDE

OLIVIER MESSIAEN (1908-1992)

The concert is presented without intermission and will end about 8:50 p.m.

This concert is supported through the generosity of the Squire Patton Boggs (US) LLP Cleveland’s Own Series sponsorship.

Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s appearance with The Cleveland Orchestra is made possible by a contribution to the Orchestra’s Guest Artist Fund from Mr. and Mrs. James P. Storer.

Cynthia Millar’s appearance with The Cleveland Orchestra is made possible by a contribution to the Orchestra’s Guest Artist Fund from Elizabeth Dorothy Robson.

Severance Hall 2017-18

Concert Program — Week 22a

59

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INTRODUCING THE CONCERT

Ecstasy&The Night Stars T H R O U G H O U T H I S L I F E , Olivier Messiaen’s music was grounded

by his intense Catholic faith and buoyed by his interest in new sounds that could be incorporated into his ongoing attempt to stylize music’s limitless possibilities. While a German prisoner during World War II, he wrote music of and for the moment, but which captured deep communal feelings of endurance and hope.

After the war, he immersed himself in understanding the great love legend of Tristan and Isolde, eventually writing three larger works influenced by his studies. None of them are direct tellings of the tale, but instead reflect and amplify its emotional feelings and sensual undercurrents.

Turangalîla-Symphonie is about being human, about love and fate, about physical joy and natural wonder. In his own explanations and writings about the piece, he made the connection to Tristan and Isolde explicit. The garden in the sixth movement is, for instance, two gardens wrapped around — or grown as vines and intertwined with — each another. One is named Isolde, the other is Tristan. At night, they grow closer — just as, in Wagner’s opera, the two lovers long to escape the reality of Day to embrace the freedom of Night.

Nearly 70 years after its premiere, Turangalîla remains among the freshest and most engaging musical works of 20th century music. The distinctive palette of its soundworld grabs us, to warm our minds and bodies, and to touch our souls with wonder, relish, and fascination.

Above: Set design for the Queen of the Night’s entrance in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 1815.

April 25 4:30 p.m.

concert ends 6:30 p.m.

7:30 p.m.

Preview Severance Restaurant and Opus Café open

—Eric Sellen

Concert (75 minutes)

CONCER T PR E V IE W

“Love Lost in the Stars” with Caroline Oltmanns, Youngstown State University

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(approx.)

8:50 p.m.

About the Concert: Turangalîla

P OS T- CO N CE R T Severance Restaurant and Opus Café open with dessert and drink service

61

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Turangalîla-Symphonie composed 1946-48

At a Glance

by

Olivier

MESSIAEN born December 10, 1908 Avignon, France died April 27, 1992 Paris

Messiaen wrote his Turangalîla-Symphonie between 1946 and 1948, on commission from Serge Koussevitzky and the Koussevitzky Foundation, for the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO). For an explanation of the title, see page 65. The first performance took place on December 2, 1949, at Boston’s Symphony Hall with the BSO led by Leonard Bernstein. The soloists were pianist Yvonne Loriod (who would later become Messiaen’s second wife) and Ginette Martenot (whose brother Maurice had invented the ondes martenot instrument).

The 10 movements of Turangalîla run about 75 minutes in performance.

Messiaen scored it for 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, english horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, 4 horns, piccolo trumpet, 3 trumpets, cornet, 3

trombones, tuba, percussion (triangle, small turkish cymbal, suspended cymbal, crash cymbals, chinese cymbal, tam-tam, tambourine, provençal tambourine, maracas, temple blocks, wood block, snare drum, bass drum, tubular bells, keyboard glockenspiel or 2 mallet glockenspiels, vibraphone), celesta, and strings, plus solo piano and solo ondes martenot.

The Cleveland Orchestra first performed Turangalîla in October 1973, under the direction of Louis Lane; Messiaen’s wife Yvonne Loriod played the piano solo and her sister Jeanne the ondes martenot. The most recent performances were led by Franz Welser-Möst in the autumn of 2005, with pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Cynthia Millar playing the ondes martenot.

About the Music R H Y T H M , C O L O R , B I R D S O N G , F A I T H . These are the four pillars of Olivier Messiaen’s creative personality, to which he constantly returned.

His music is complex, richly overlaid with meaning, and difficult to perform. Yet audiences have little difficulty grasping the individuality of its sonority, the sincerity of its faith, and the high craft and artistry which it demands.

Messiaen never hid behind a screen of jargon and technical mystification. As a teacher, he believed profoundly in expounding music and explaining how it works. The areas in which he developed a fantastic expertise, such as Greek meters, Hindu rhythms, and ornithology — he could hold his own against professionals in all those fields — these he regarded as fundamentally accessible to anyone prepared to put in the necessary study.

So . . . what’s the problem? he might have said.

He wrote and spoke about his music in the most open manner, neither boasting of its brilliance nor veiling its meaning. Even his religious faith, which must be the most inaccessible part of his

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About the Music: Turangalîla

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make-up to unbelievers, he treated as if it had no complication or mystery for anyone. This was naïveté of a fine and noble kind, for it went hand in hand with an optimism that drew him away from the darker aspects of life. “Sin and dirt are not interesting,” he said.

His faith opened up the prospect of salvation, of transfiguration, of resurrection, of glory, and of the certainty of the after-life.

Messiaen was, by all appearances and study, a happy man.

He was secure in his faith, and manifestly thrilled by his studies, his teaching, his ornithological fieldwork, his duties as an organist, and, of course, by composing and creating musical works. He was never troubled by doubt. While it was Darius Milhaud who titled his autobiography “My Happy Life,” it might equally have served for Messiaen (had he written such a book).

The legend of Tristan We are so accustomed to enumerating the and Isolde is the symbol of 20th century’s record of evil and despair that it has all great loves and for all the become much easier to grasp Shostakovich’s persistent expression of emptiness and struggle than great love poems in literato relate to a figure who inoculated himself against ture or in music. . . . It tranthe world’s atrocities by effortlessly focusing on scends even the limitations the beauties of nature and on the divine, on Saint Augustine’s ideals of truth, goodness, and beauty. of the mind, and grows to a Over all of Messiaen’s music there lingers an aura cosmic scale. of what Paul Griffiths has called “exotic sensuality” and a burning conviction that this music is part of —Olivier Messiaen the divine order of things.

In 1940, Messiaen was held prisoner in Germany for a time, but once released he entered into an immensely productive period in which his mature style took permanent shape.

Two decades later, he married the brilliant pianist Yvonne Loriod, for whom the piano solo part in Turangalîla was written and who gave the first performances of all his piano works after 1961.

Turangalîla-Symphonie was composed in the years 1946-48, before Messiaen’s studies of color and birdsong found their way directly into his work, but it profited from his profound study of Hindu rhythm (and of rhythm generally), which occupied him in the 1940s. And this music also alludes many times to Catholic theology, as is true of almost all his musical works. Messiaen developed a complex system of modes (a kind of alternative to the usual key signatures), yet the overall impression of Turangalîla is its tendency to return to its home key, to a grounding foundation or home. This is particularly inescapable at the end.

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About the Music: Turangalîla

The Cleveland Orchestra

TH E E C S TA SY O F TRI S TAN AN D I S O LDE

Messiaen wrote his Turangalîla-Symphonie in response to a commission request in 1945 from Serge Koussevitzky, music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Koussevitzky told him: “Choose as many instruments as you desire, write a work as long as you wish and in the style you want.” No deadline was specified.

At the time, Messiaen was in the midst of studying and reflecting on the legend of Tristan and Isolde, as an inspiration for artists and as a metaphor for ecstatic, or transforming, love — for love that reflects or mirrors the intensity of divine love, of God’s presences and understanding. He later commented: “In no way did I wish to rework Wagner’s Tristan Share your memories of the performance and and Isolde or Debussy’s Pelléas and Mélisande, to menjoin the conversation online . . . tion only the two greatest ‘Tristans’ in music.” facebook.com/clevelandorchestra In fact, Messiaen created a trio of works related twitter: @CleveOrchestra to ecstatic love, with the Turangalîla-Symphonie as the instagram: @CleveOrch middle work. And, with telling details in his description (Please note that photography is of this music, he left us hints of the meaning and conprohibited during the performance.) nections to Tristan and Isolde. This is most direct within the sixth movement, titled “Garden of Love’s Sleep,” in which he describes the lovers as two gardens wrapped and entwined and growing around one another; one is named Tristan, the other Isolde.

NAMES, THEMES, AND MEANING

The title Turangalîla is a combination of two Hindu words: Lîla means “game” or “play,” especially in the sense of cosmic or divine action, such as creation — “the play of creation, of destruction, of reconstruction, the play of life and death.” At the same time, Lîla can also mean “love.”

Turanga describes “the passage of time,” specifically as it relates to pace, rhythm, and pulse. Turanga “is time that runs, like a galloping horse, and flows like sand in an hourglass . . . it is both movement and rhythm.”

Thus, Turangalîla is a work about creation and love, about life and death expressed through the movement (and rhythms) of the passage of time.

In speaking about this music, Messiaen drew particular attention to four themes that pervade the work: a. the “statue” theme, introduced by trombones and tuba near the beginning of the introduction under a spray of high Severance Hall 2017-18

About the Music: Turangalîla

65

pitches, evoking dread; the image of a dreadful statue comes, most famously, from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in which a statue of stone comes to life to carry out divine retribution (sending the Don to hell); b. the “flower” theme, played very softly by two clarinets on their own, followed by a flute and bassoon; c. the “love” theme, heard most clearly at the start of the sixth movement, played by strings in dense harmony; d. a chain of long dissonant chords, to which he gave no name.

These themes are introduced, recur and are developed throughout the symphony. In many ways, the composer uses them very much like musical leitmotivs [“leading motifs”], in the same way that Wagner had developed this technique within his operas, including Tristan and Isolde.

A special characteristic feature of Turangalîla-Symphonie is the use of the ondes martenot, an electric instrument invented

by Maurice Martenot in 1928 and adopted by a number of French

Strange Sounds: Ondes Martenot On April 20, 1928, the French musician and inventor Maurice Martenot unveiled his new electronic instrument at the Paris Opera. The ondes martenot (“ondes” is the French word for “waves”), as it came to be known, was quickly recognized as an important advance over other electronic instruments of the time, particularly the theremin (popular in the scores for horror films), which essentially played only a single kind of sound. The ondes martenot is played in two ways, either using a seven-octave keyboard, or au ruban, meaning that it is played sliding a metal ring along a metallic ribbon. The first method is similar to playing the piano, except that quarter-tones and wide vibrato are both possible. The ribbon method produces a continuous glissando — a wailing sound of penetrating potential, of varying sound colors and sliding pitch. Messiaen remains the most prominent composer to have used the ondes martenot extensively in his music.

66

About the Music: Turangalîla

The Cleveland Orchestra

composers of that time. The performer can make fine adjustments to the pitch and timbre, which can sound uncannily like a human voice or even suggest a divine presence.

A SYMPHONY OF MOVE ME NT S

1. Introduction: This music introduces both the “statue” theme and the “flower” theme. The piano has a solo cadenza incorporating the “flower” music, after which a build-up of complicated poly-rhythms brings the music to an abrupt end. [6 minutes].

2. Chant d’amour I [Love Song I]: The ondes martenot can be heard singing up high with the strings. Bursts of anger from the strings give contrast in a movement of many wild contrasts. The music may represent the different sides of love, passionate embrace vs. tender conjoining. [8 minutes].

3. Turangalîla I: This movement features an almost chamber musical texture, of isolated instruments breaking through the silence in rhythmic variation. There are some delicate sounds in the middle section, leading to silence at the end.

[5 minutes].

4. Chant d’amour II [Love Song II]: This is a “scherzo” kind of movement, with a regular pulse. The middle (or Trio) section is broad, and the movement gradually takes on new material, which then all combines together for full orchestra. The piano then has a cadenza, and the “statue” closes the movement. [11 minutes].

5. Joie du sang des étoiles [Joy of the Blood of the Stars]: The opening is a surprise, leading with a catchy tune in regular phrases! This is ecstatic joy in the form of a “frenetic dance,” with a transformed “statue” theme excitedly in motion. More complicated rhythms intrude, but the dancing tune keeps coming back in a whirlwind of sound. A brief piano cadenza and then the “statue” returns in its sinister guise to close the movement. [7 minutes].

Poster for Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde at Seattle Opera, 1980, illustration

by American artist David Kreitzer.

6. Jardin du sommeil d’amour [Garden of Love’s Sleep]: Messiaen’s own written description of this movement is particularly poetic, and apt: “The two lovers are wrapped in the sleep of love. A landscape has issued from them. The garden that surrounds them is called Tristan; the garden that surrounds them is called Isolde. This garden is full of shadows and lights, plants and new flowers, and melodious birds of bright colors.

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About the Music: Turangalîla

67

. . . Time slips by, forgotten. The lovers are outside time; let’s not wake them.” This is the symphony’s slow movement, a hymn to love featuring the “love” theme in the strings while the piano, vibraphone, and flute provide decoration. [12 minutes].

7. Turangalîla II: After a piano solo the percussion come into their own. There are hints of the birdsong music that Messiaen was to develop later, even though the intended meaning of the movement is to evoke a building sense of uncertainty and tension (he likened the mood of foreboding to Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Pit and the Pendulum”). Danger lurks for the sleeping lovers of the previous movement. [4 minutes].

8. Développement de l’amour [Development of love]: Perhaps this is intended as the development of the music’s themes as well as of a growing passion. The “flower” theme is heard from time to time throughout the movement. The tempo keeps changing, as the love “grows steadily into infinity.” The music builds, with passages marked charnel et terrible [“carnal and terrible”] leading to a monumental climax, proclaiming love’s overwhelming transcendence from realities of “here and now.” [11 minutes].

9. Turangalîla III: The percussion are again important, as is a texture closer to chamber music. The clarinet’s opening theme is the essential melodic element here in a movement that grows in density and is then cut off in mid-flow. [4 minutes].

10. Final: Tunefulness returns and an unmistakable joy in Messiaen’s vision of ecstatic fulfillment, understanding, and peaceful transcendence. The symphony ends in a triumphant chord of F-sharp major, the key that has been “promised” and “longed for” all along. [7 minutes].

—Hugh Macdonald © 2018

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68

About the Music: Turangalîla

The Cleveland Orchestra

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Jean-Yves Thibaudet

Cynthia Millar

For more than three decades, French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet has performed world-wide, recorded dozens of albums, and built a reputation as one of today’s most sought-after pianists. From the start of his career, Mr. Thibaudet has delighted in music beyond the standard repertoire, from jazz to opera. His many professional friendships crisscross the globe and have led to a variety of fruitful collaborations in film, fashion, and visual art. He made his Cleveland Orchestra debut at the 1991 Blossom Music Festival. His most recent performances with the Orchestra were in February 2018. This season, Mr. Thibaudet’s schedule takes him to fourteen countries on three continents. He also continues serving as artist-in-residence with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and with the Colburn School of Music, and tours as soloist across Europe with the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra. JeanYves Thibaudet has recorded more than fifty albums. His artistry has earned two Grammy nominations, the Choc de la Musique, Diapason d’Or, Edison Prize, Gramophone Award, Schallplattenpreis, and two Echo awards. For additional information, visit www.jeanyvesthibaudet.com.

British artist and composer Cynthia Millar first studied the ondes martenot with John Morton in England and later with Jeanne Loriod. Since the time she first performed Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie at the BBC Proms in London with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, she has performed it with many of the world’s leading conductors. She has appeared with most of America’s major symphony orchestras, including Chicago, Cleveland, and Los Angeles, as well as performing throughout Europe, Australasia, and Eastern Asia. In 2016, she performed the ondes martenot in a new part written especially for her by composer Thomas Adès in his opera The Exterminating Angel at the Salzburg Festival. Subsequent performances of the opera have featured her artistry at London’s Royal Opera House and New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Ms. Millar has played in over one hundred film and television scores, including music by Elmer Bernstein, Richard Rodney Bennett, Maurice Jarre, Henry Mancini, and Miklós Rózsa.

She has also written scores for television and film. She made her Cleveland Orchestra debut in March 2002, and played here most recently in October 2013.

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Guest Artists: Turangalîla-Symphonie

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Musical , Religious , and Mystical

T O C O M P L E M E N T and contrast with performances of

Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, Franz Welser-Möst offers a musical evening exploring the idea of Divine Ecstasy — religious and mystical. The selections range from across four centuries, and involve brass instruments, orchestra, chorus or chamber chorus, vocal soloist, and organ. Performed here for reflection and contemplation — to enable and encourage understanding, perspective, and transcendence.

Opposite: inside Saint Mark’s Cathedral, Venice

THE ECSTASY OF TRISTAN AND ISOLDE

DIVINE ECSTASY

Above: Mevlevi, or whirling dervishes, Turkey

The Cleveland Orchestra

Divine Ecstasy: April 28

73

THE

CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA FR ANZ WELSER- MÖST

M U S I C D I R E C TO R

Severance Hall

Saturday evening, April 28, 2018, at 8:00 p.m.

D I V I N E E C S TA SY GIOVANNI GABRIELI (1554-1612) — arranged by Timothy Higgins

Canzon per Sonar Septimi Toni No. 2 and Canzon per Sonar in Echo Duodecimi Toni from Sacrae symphoniae CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA BRASS conducted by VINAY PARAMESWARAN ARVO PÄRT (b. 1935)

Magnificat

CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA CHAMBER CHORUS conducted by LISA WONG GIOVANNI GABRIELI (1554-1612) — arranged by Timothy Higgins

O Magnum Mysterium from Sacrae symphoniae

CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA BRASS conducted by VINAY PARAMESWARAN AARON JAY KERNIS (b. 1960)

“I Cannot Dance, O Lord” from Ecstatic Meditations CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA CHAMBER CHORUS conducted by LISA WONG ANDREA GABRIELI (1553-1585)

Fantasia Allegra PAUL JACOBS, organ

GIOVANNI GABRIELI (1554-1612) — arranged by Timothy Higgins

Omnes gentes plaudite

CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA CHORUS — choirs i & ii CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA BRASS — choirs iii & iv PAUL JACOBS, organ conducted by VINAY PARAMESWARAN

INTER MISSION

74

Concert Program — Week 22b

The Cleveland Orchestra

2O1 7-18 CENTENNIAL SEASON

1. Aria: “Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust” [Delightful rest, beloved pleasure of the soul] 2. Recitative: Die Weit, das Sündenhaus” [The world, which houses sin] 3. Aria: “Wie jammern mich doch die verkehrten Herzen” [How unhappy I feel for these wayward hearts] 4. Recitative: “Wer sollte sich demnach wohl hier zu leben” [Who, with all of this, should wish to live here?]

5. Aria: “Mir ekelt mehr zu leben” [It sickens me to continue living] THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA IESTYN DAVIES, countertenor PAUL JACOBS, organ conducted by FRANZ WELSER-MÖST FRANZ LISZT (1811-1886)

Fantasy and Fugue on the Chorale “Ad nos, ad salutarem undam” (from Meyerbeer’s opera Le Prophète)

ECSTASY

Cantata No. 170: “Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust”

T H E E C S TA S Y O F T R I S TA N A N D I S O L D E

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685-1750)

PAUL JACOBS, organ

The concert is presented with one intermission and will end at approximately 9:45 p.m.

Paul Jacobs’s appearance with The Cleveland Orchestra is made possible by a contribution to the Orchestra’s Guest Artist Fund from Mr. and Mrs. Michael Sherwin.

This concert is dedicated to The Honorable and Mrs. John Doyle Ong in recognition of their extraordinary generosity in support of The Cleveland Orchestra’s Annual Fund.

Severance Hall 2017-18

Concert Program — Divine Ecstasy

75

INTRODUCING THE CONCERT

Ecstasy: Divine& Musical M U S I C H A S L O N G H A D a psychological effect on those listening

or performing — taking the moment of experiencing it and adding to it.

Music can get you down, or rev you up. It can deepen your feelings of sadness, happiness, love, and introspection, or of communion with those around you. It can be a solitary moment, or a group event.

This evening’s concert explores music in the context of religious and/or spiritual belief, and, through a range of pieces written across half a millennium, touches on music’s mystical (if not magical) aspects. In these pieces, we search, in life or faith, but certainly within the music itself, for heightened feelings — of ecstasy, euphoria, meditation, transcendence . . . peace.

As Franz Welser-Möst has said, “For this evening we explore music writt ten specifically around religious ecstasy, of music that was written to extend and amplify spiritual or meditative feelings — of music as a means to lose yourr self, and to find your way.”

The concert is performed with one intermssion and, so as not to break the atmosphere or mood, the audience is asked to hold your applause until the end of the first half. The music ranges from 16th-century antiphonal brass to a 21st-century choral setting, with a variety of stops and steps between. A Bach cantata, focused and quirky in its textual pleas, begins the second half of the concert, which then ends with the fireworks of a longer solo organ work, in which Franz Liszt powerfully circles around (but never quite voices) a pilgrim’s chorale from a popular 19th-century French opera.

The ideas — and musical conceptions — are mixed and varied.

Each piece holds spiritual potential, between the notes and within the musicians’ breaths and bowings. The experience is, in part, entirely up to you — how you listen, what you are looking for. Open Opposite: your mind, and momentarily set the real world “The Angel Standing in the Sun,” aside. Breathe. Meditate. Contemplate. detail of oil painting by J. M.W. Turner, circa 1845. Tate Britain, London.

—Eric Sellen

April 28

concert ends (approx.)

5:00 p.m.

7:00 p.m.

8:00 p.m.

Preview w Severance Restaurant and Opus Café open

(30 mins)

CONCER T PR E V IE W

“Meet the Artists”

9:45 p.m.

(50 minutes) INTERMISSION (20 minutes)

with organist Paul Jacobs and trumpeter Michael Sachs

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About the Concert: Divine Ecstasy

P OS T- CO N CE R T Severance Restaurant and Opus Café open with dessert/drink service

77

ANDREA GABRIELI GIOVANNI GABRIELI

Selections from Sacrae symphoniae and other works brass arrangements by Timothy Higgins

Andrea

GABRIELI (circa 1532-1585)

Canzon per Sonar Septimi Toni No. 2 (brass) Canzon per Sonar in Echo Duodecimi Toni (brass) O Magnum Mysterium (brass) Fantasia Allegra del duodecimo tono (organ) Omnes gentes plaudite (chorus, brass, and continuo) T H E M U L T I - V O I C E D M U S I C cultivated at Saint Mark’s Ca-

Giovanni

GABRIELI (circa 1554-1612)

78

thedral in Venice during the late 16th century has never been equaled for its richness of musical sound. (“Multi-voiced,” in this context, referring to different groupings of musicians producing sound, whether voice or instrumental.)

The wide-spread galleries of the cathedral and the building’s splendidly reverberant acoustics gave this music a special sonority that must have made Venetians think they were in the presence of choirs of angels, just like those their painters portrayed in such magnificence.

The main purveyors of this music in the 16th century were Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, uncle and nephew, who were born and died in Venice during the period of the city’s glorious political power and wealth. Andrea, the uncle, who served on the music staff at Saint Mark’s Cathedral from 1566 until his death two decades years later, engaged ever larger numbers of brass players to support the singers, playing cornetti and tromboni, a group which his nephew employed to magnificent effect, especially because this kind of music could be sung by chorus alone (a cappella) or with the support of instruments, either brass or organ, or both.

Timothy Higgins, a trombonist who has done much to promote brass ensemble music, has arranged many Gabrieli pieces for modern brass instruments. From Giovanni Gabrieli’s 1597 publication titled Sacrae symphoniae, which contained fourteen pieces called “Canzon” and two “Sonatas,” the first two Canzonas illustrate the antiphonal style of this music. (The terms “Septimi toni” and “Duodecimi toni” refer to the complex Renaissance system of modes understood — even at that time — only by theorists. Modes are somewhat akin to what we today think of as musical key signatures, but can be more complex, as was true About the Music: Divine Ecstasy

The Cleveland Orchestra

for the “system” developed of mode and mode relationships during the Renaissance.)

The Canzon per Sonar Septimi Toni No. 2 is a joyful, festive piece in eight parts, divided into two groups of four which sometimes respond to each other and sometimes join forces. Like most instrumental music of this period, the pulse alternates between a four-pulse bar and a three-pulse bar, giving the music some variety by breaking up the initial flow.

The Canzon per Sonar in Echo Duodecimi Toni is in ten parts divided into two groups of five, creating a gloriously rich sound. One group repeatedly echoes the other, although neither group is “near” or “far” as such; rather, they take turns to be the echo. The upper instruments have some swift passages, while the lower instruments are generally confined to longer notes.

O Magnum Mysterium is a motet for voices by Giovanni Gabrieli, here played by instruments in eight parts, as usual divided into two groups. The mystery of the virgin birth is expressed in the alternation of major and minor, with a celebratory Alleluja in triple time at the end.

The Fantasia Allegra del duodecimo tono [in twelve tones] for solo organ is by Andrea Gabrieli, published in 1596 in Venice after the composer’s death in a book titled Ricercari. In a later age, a “ricercare” would be called a fugue, and here the treatment is similar to a Baroque fugue — with a subject (a melody) presented on its own at the beginning, with responses following in the lower voices. A notable characteristic of this subject is the little burst of sixteenth notes, like an ornamental flourish. Halfway through the piece, a new subject is introduced and then also treated like a fugue. The final part of the Fantasia is taken over by an almost constant stream of sixteenth notes creating a blur against solid chords in the other hand.

The last of these many-voiced Gabrieli pieces is the great motet Omnes gentes plaudite by Giovanni Gabrieli, with the modern performing version basing the vocal parts on Paul Hindemith’s edition of 1959, with the instrumentation by Timothy Higgins. It is in sixteen voices divided into four groups, which take turns in introducing the verses of Psalm No. 47. Once again Gabrieli turns to triple time for celebration, in this case at the line “God is gone up with a shout.” (See next page for sung text and translation.)

Severance Hall 2017-18

About the Music: Divine Ecstasy

“Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice,” painting

by Carlo Grubacs, circa 1845.

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S U N G

T E X T

Omnes gentes plaudite musical setting by Andrea Gabrieli Omnes gentes plaudite manibus; jubilate Deo in voce exultationis.

Quoniam Dominus excelsus terribilis; rex magnus super omnem terram.

Subjecit populos nobis et gentes sub pedibus nostris: Elegit nobis hereditatem suam, speciem Iacob quam dilexit.

Ascendit Deus in iubilo et Dominus in voce tubae.

Alleluja

O clap your hands, all ye people; shout unto God with the voice of triumph.

For the Lord most high is terrible; he is a great King over all the earth.

He shall subdue the people under us, and the nations under our feet.

He shall choose our inheritance for us, the excellency of Jacob whom he loved.

God is gone up with a shout, and the Lord with the sound of a trumpet.

Alleluja.

Magnificat musical setting by Arvo Pärt Magnificat anima mea Dominum; Et exsultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo, Quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae; Ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent omnes generationes.

Quia fecit mihi magna Qui potens est, Et sanctum nomen ejus, Et misericordia ejus a progenie in progenies timentibus eum.

Fecit potentiam in brachio suo; Dispersit superbos mente cordis sui.

Deposuit potentes de sede, Et exaltavit humiles, Esurientes implevit bonis, Et divites dimisit inanes.

Suscepit Israel, Puerum suum, Recordatus misericordiae suae, Sicut locutus est ad patres nostros, Abraham et semini ejus in saecula.

Magnificat anima mea Dominum.

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My soul magnifies the Lord’s greatness. and exults my spirit to rejoice in God my Savior. for he looks on his humble servant with favor.

Behold, from now on all generations shall call me blessed.

For he who is mighty has magnified me — and holy is his Name. and he has mercy for those who fear him in every generation.

He has shown the strength of his arm, He has dispersed the proud dreams of the conceited.

He has removed the mighty from their thrones, and exalted the humble and meek.

He has filled the hungry with good food, and expelled the rich empty-handed.

For Israel his servant, he keeps his promise of mercy, sworn to our forefathers, to Abraham and his progeny forever.

My soul magnifies the Lord.

Sung Text: Gabrieli / Pärt

The Cleveland Orchestra

ARVO PÄRT

Magnificat for five-part choir T H I S S E T T I N G of the Magnificat was composed in 1989 in a

Arvo

PÄRT (b. 1935)

characteristic style that the Estonian Pärt had made his own at that point in his career. It is often known as the “tintinnabulation” style, whose features are a persistent stillness and softness, and a simple syllabic setting of the words. The effect is cumulative, so that although the sound level twice rises to forte, there is little variety in its sonority, and it has a compelling and haunting quality — especially in the sense of timelessness, and thus transcendence, which this music can generate in a receptive listener.

The sopranos repeatedly sing the same note, C, supported by one or more moving voices. Each line of the text has its own combination of voices who move together from syllable to syllable, with one of the voices tending to move melodically while the others remain static.

Pärt converted to the Russian Orthodox faith in the 1970s and his works have displayed a consistent attachment both to his Christian faith and to his quest for clarity and simplicity.

Late Night with Leonard Bernstein Late Night with Leonard Bernstein – hosted by his daughter Jamie and featuring acclaimed soprano Amy Burton and noted pianists John Musto and Michael Boriskin – is an affectionate, multi-media portrait of the personal side of this charismatic, singularly public figure.

Sunday, May 6 | 2 p.m. | FREE

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About the Music: Divine Ecstasy

81

ChamberFest Cleveland Presents Season 7, “In Search of Freedom” ChamberFest Cleveland, the celebrated summer music festival founded by Franklin Cohen, principal clarinetist emeritus of The Cleveland Orchestra, and his daughter, Diana Cohen, concertmaster of The Calgary Philharmonic, announces Season 7, “In Search of Freedom”. Featuring world-renowned artists, this lively chamber music festival will take place at 5 exciting venues throughout Cleveland from

June 14 through June 30, 2018.

FOR A FULL CONCERT LISTING AND TO PURCHASE TICKETS VISIT OUR WEBSITE WWW.CHAMBERFESTCLEVELAND.COM OR PURCHASE BY PHONE AT 216.471.8887 ChamberFest Cleveland Funded In Part By:

AARON JAY KERNIS

“I Cannot Dance, O Lord” (No. 3, from Ecstatic Meditations) A A R O N J AY K E R N I S is a versatile composer with an immense

Aaron Jay

KERNIS (b. 1960)

list of works, mostly for orchestra or for voices. His music has been played by many leading American orchestras, and his String Quartet No. 2 won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998. He has not written for the stage. He teaches at the Yale School of Music.

Ecstatic Meditations, composed in 1999 for Philip Brunelle and the Plymouth Music Series Ensemble, draws on a remarkable poetic source — the mystical writings of Mechthild of Magdeburg, a Cistercian nun and a member of the Beguine sisterhood, who lived about 1210-1285. This was a semi-monastic community devoted to helping the poor. Her writings, collected as The Flowing Light of the Godhead, include prayers, hymns, and love poems, expressing her quest for ecstasy and mystical joy.

In “I Cannot Dance, O Lord,” the writer imagines God’s love playing the human soul as an instrument and inviting the soul to dance, an image that Kernis catches perfectly in his intricate, feverish play of voices rising to great cries of “whirling!”

I cannot dance, Lord, unless you lead me.

If you wish me to leap joyfully, Let me hear you dance and sing.

Then I will leap into love, and from love into knowledge, and from knowledge into the Harvest, that sweetest Fruit beyond human sense.

There will I stay with You, whirling, whirling, whirling . . .

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About the Music: Divine Ecstasy

83

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

Cantata No. 170: “Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust” (for alto voice, organ, oboe d’amore, and strings) T H I S C A N T A T A was first performed on the Sixth Sunday after

Johann Sebastian

BACH

(1685-1750)

Trinity, on July 28, 1726, a year in the latter part of which Bach was particularly productive, with a new cantata composed, rehearsed and performed almost every week. No. 170 is shorter than most, and it requires only one singer. It is thought that Bach also included a cantata by his cousin in that day’s worship service, which kept the choir busy.

This work follows the standard sequence of an Italian secular cantata, with arias and recitatives in alternation. The text is taken from a book of sacred poems from 1711 by George Christian Lehms. It concentrates on sin and the sinfulness that is all around us, leading to the third aria in which the Christian voice longs for death, sung in music that expresses only joy. Only in heavenly thoughts, the singer muses, does the soul find rest from sin.

Bach devises some unusual instrumentation, with an oboe d’amore running with the first violins in the obbligato line of the opening aria, which is pastoral and reflective in character. The second aria gives the violins and violas the bass line, while the organist’s two hands provide intricate and sometimes piercing counterpoint to the singer’s line. The bass line being an octave higher than usual, unsupported by a continuo keyboard instrument, represents the “perverted hearts” that have abandoned God. After a recitative that is accompanied by the full strings, the third aria brings back the oboe d’amore, and the organ has some showy interjections (probably originally played by Bach himself). All three arias are in da capo form, thus “returning” to the opening music after a contrasting middle section.

See sung text and translation on pages 86-87.

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About the Music: Divine Ecstasy

The Cleveland Orchestra

FRANZ LISZT

Fantasy and Fugue on the chorale “Ad nos, ad salutarem undam” (from Meyerbeer’s opera Le Prophète)

M E Y E R B E E R ’ S grand opera Le Prophète was the sensation of

Franz

LISZT (1811-1886)

Severance Hall 2017-18

the year 1849, especially since it had been eagerly anticipated in the press for nearly twenty years. At the time, the test of an opera’s popularity — and commercial reach — was the number of fantasies and variations on tunes from each opera that appeared in immediate circulation. In the case of Meyerbeer’s previous hits, the numbers were in the hundreds, always including a Fantasy for piano by Franz Liszt.

In the case of Le Prophète, it was five years before Liszt composed such a piece, and when it did appear it was very different from his earlier Fantasies — since it was composed for the organ, not the piano, and was based on only one theme, not a selection of different melodies from the opera. Furthermore, it was much longer than usual, extending to nearly half an hour. Liszt had recently completed his famous Sonata in B minor for piano, which was in a very long single movement, so that a structure combining slow and fast music, fantasy, recitative, and fugue was very much in line with his creative thinking.

In the Fantasy, the Chorale tune from Le Prophète is never heard in its literal form. Rather, it is hinted at throughout the work, which moves from key to key and from tempo to tempo, never in a hurry to conclude the rhapsodic treatment of fragments that Liszt’s improvisatory style favored. The main sections of the work are the Fantasy at the beginning, an Adagio that presents a version of the theme almost unaccompanied, then a final Fugue and an exultant Finale.

Liszt liked to play the organ, although he never took on an organist’s duties. He favored the expanded range of manuals and stops that were being built in the mid-19th century, offering a new range of sonorities, some of which were intended to imitate orchestral instruments or even voices. His organ compositions demand a virtuoso pedal technique for the feet and some of the dexterity in the hands familiar from his piano music. In this work, he is surprisingly restrained in his indications of dynamics, and there are no registrations prescribed, allowing for much interpretation.

—program notes by Hugh Macdonald

About the Music: Divine Ecstasy

85

S U N G

T E X T

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

Cantata No. 170: “Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust” Cantata for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity

1. A R I A Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust, Dich kann man nicht bei Höllensünden, Wohl aber Himmelseintracht finden; Du stärkst allein die schwache Brust.

Drum sollen lauter Tugendgaben In meinem Herzen Wohnung haben.

Delightful rest, beloved pleasure of the soul, you cannot be found among the sins of hell, but rather where there is heavenly harmony; you alone strengthen the weak breast.

Therefore the gifts of pure virtue shall dwell in my heart.

2. R E C I T A T I V E Die Welt, das Sündenhaus, Bricht nur in Höllenlieder aus Und sucht durch Haß und Neid Des Satans Bild an sich zu tragen.

Ihr Mund ist voller Ottergift, Der oft die Unschuld tödlich trifft, Und will allein von Racha! sagen.

Gerechter Gott, wie weit Ist doch der Mensch von dir entfernet; Du liebst, jedoch sein Mund Macht Fluch und Feindschaft kund Und will den Nächsten nur mit Füßen treten.

Ach! diese Schuld ist schwerlich zu verbeten.

The world, which houses sin, breaks out only in hellish singing, and attempts, through hatred and envy, to embrace Satan’s image.

Its mouth is filled with snake’s venom, which too often kills the innocent, and alone cries out: “Fie on you!”

Righteous God, how far have we humans estranged ourselves from you.

You proclaim love, yet their mouths spit out curses and hatred and wish only to trample their neighbors underfoot.

Alas! this guilt is difficult to resolve through prayer.

3. A R I A Wie jammern mich doch die verkehrten Herzen, Die dir, mein Gott, so sehr zuwider sein; Ich zittre recht und fühle tausend Schmerzen, Wenn sie sich nur an Rach und Hass erfreun.

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How unhappy I feel for these wayward hearts, who, my God, are so set against You; I truly tremble and feel a thousand pangs, when they rejoice only in vengeance and hatred.

Sung Text: Bach Cantata

The Cleveland Orchestra

S U N G

Gerechter Gott, was magst du doch gedenken, Wenn sie allein mit rechten Satansränken Dein scharfes Strafgebot so frech verlacht.

Ach! ohne Zweifel hast du so gedacht: Wie jammern mich doch die verkehrten Herzen!

T E X T

Righteous God, what must You be thinking, when they, with truly Satanic intrigue, scorn Your strict commandments so boldly.

Alas! without a doubt You have thought: how I am cursed by these perverted hearts!

4. R E C I T A T I V E Wer sollte sich demnach Wohl hier zu leben wünschen, Wenn man nur Hass und Ungemach Vor seine Liebe sieht?

Doch, weil ich auch den Feind Wie meinen besten Freund Nach Gottes Vorschrift lieben soll, So flieht Mein Herze Zorn und Groll Und wünscht allein bei Gott zu leben, Der selbst die Liebe heißt.

Ach, eintrachtvoller Geist, Wenn wird er dir doch nur sein Himmelszion geben?

Who, with all of this, should wish to live here, when only hatred and misfortune respond to God’s love?

Yet, I should treat my enemy, like my best friend, loving according to God’s commandment, thus releasing my heart from anger and bitterness, and wishing only to live for God, who is Love itself.

Ohh! universal spirit, if only You will at last grant heaven’s blessing?

5. A R I A Mir ekelt mehr zu leben, Drum nimm mich, Jesu, hin!

Mir graut vor allen Sünden, Laß mich dies Wohnhaus finden, Woselbst ich ruhig bin.

Severance Hall 2017-18

It sickens me to continue living — take me away, Jesus!

I am horrified by all the sins, allow me to find a dwelling-place where I shall be at peace.

Sung Text: Bach Cantata

87

Vinay Parameswaran Assistant Conductor Elizabeth Ring and William Gwinn Mather Endowed Chair The Cleveland Orchestra

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Vinay Parameswaran joined The Cleveland Orchestra as assistant conductor with the 2017-18 season. He also serves as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra. He arrived in Cleveland following three seasons as associate conductor of the Nashville Symphony (2014-2017), where he led over 150 performances. In the summer of 2017, he was a Conducting Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center. Recent guest conducting engagements have included debuts with the symphony orchestras of Washington D.C., Milwaukee, Jackk sonville, Eugene, Rochester, Tucson, and Vermont. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Mr. Parameswaran played as a student for six years in the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra. He holds a bachelor of arts degree in music and political science from Brown University. At Brown, he began his conducting studies with Paul Phillips. He received a diploma from the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Otto-Werner Mueller as the Albert M. Greenfield Fellow.

Read Franz Welser-Möst’s bio on page 99.

Conductor

The Cleveland Orchestra

Paul Jacobs

Iestyn Davies

American organist Paul Jacobs has garnered extraordinary praise from audiences and critics alike for his technical skills and stage presence and for the nuance and depth of his musical performances. He made his Severance Hall debut in October 2005, and returned in February 2015 and again in October 2016. He studied at the Curtis Institute of Music, double-majoring in organ with John Weaver and on the harpsichord with Lionel Party, and studied at Yale University with Thomas Murray. He made musical history at the age of 23 when he played J. S. Bach’s complete organ works in an 18-hour marathon performance on the 250th anniversary of the composer’s death. He has also performed the complete organ works of Olivier Messiaen, and recently reached the milestone of having performed in each of the 50 United States. He is a fierce advocate of new music and of classical music in general, which he fears is being diluted in a popular culture. One year after joining the Juilliard School’s faculty in 2003, Mr. Jacobs was named chair of the organ department. He was awarded Juilliard’s William Schuman Scholar’s Chair in 2007. For more information, visit www.pauljacobsorgan.com.

British countertenor Iestyn Davies has sung on the world’s top opera stages, including New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera, La Scala Milan, London’s Royal Opera House, English National Opera, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, and Welsh National Opera. His concert appearances have included engagements at La Scala Milan, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Zurich’s Tonhalle, Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, New York’s Lincoln Center, and at the BBC Proms. He has sung in concert and recital at Carnegie Hall and performs regularly at London’s Wigmore Hall. He recently appeared before London and New York theater audiences singing the role of Farinelli in Farinelli and the King. His artistry can be heard on an expanding discography, which has garnered a number of awards.

After graduating in archaeology and anthropology from Cambridge’s Saint John’s College, Mr. Davies studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He made his Cleveland Orchestra debut in October 2014 singing in Bach’s Mass in B minor, and returned in 2017 in performances of Bach’s Saint John Passion. For more information, visit www.iestyndavies.com.

Severance Hall 2017-18

Guest Artists

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Lisa Wong Acting Director of Choruses Frances P. and Chester C. Bolton Endowed Chair The Cleveland Orchestra

north W point portfolio managers c o r p o r a t i o n Ronald J. Lang Diane M. Stack Daniel J. Dreiling

440.720.1102 440.720.1105 440.720.1104

to Cleveland.

The Immigration Law Group at Nicola, Gudbranson & Cooper, LLC Brad Ortman | ortman@nicola.com Karen Moss | moss@nicola.com

Lisa Wong was appointed acting director of choruses for The Cleveland Orchestra with the start of the 2017-18 season. She had become assistant director of choruses for The Cleveland Orchestra in 2010.

With the 2012-13 season, she took on the added position of director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Chorus. In addition to her duties at Severance Hall, Ms. Wong is an associate professor of music at the College of Wooster, where she conducts the Wooster Chorus and the Wooster Singers and teaches courses in conducting, choral literature, and music education. She previously taught in public and private schools in New York, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. Active as a clinician, guest conductor, and adjudicator, she serves as a music panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts. Recent accolades have included work in Nairobi, Kenya, and Stockholm, Sweden. Ms. Wong holds a bachelor’s degree in music education from West Chester University and master’s and doctoral degrees in choral conducting from Indiana University.

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Conductor

The Cleveland Orchestra

Cleveland Orchestra Chorus Lisa Wong, Acting Director Daniel Singer, Acting Assistant Director

Joela Jones, Principal Accompanist

The Cleveland Orchestra Chorus is one of the few professionally-trained, all-volunteer choruses sponsored by a major American orchestra. Founded at the request of George Szell in 1952 and following in the footsteps of a number of earlier community choruses, the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus has sung in hundreds of performances at home, at Carnegie Hall, and on tour, as well as in more than a dozen recordings. Its members hail from nearly fifty Cleveland-area communities and together contribute over 15,000 volunteer hours each year.

DIVINE ECSTASY SOPRANOS

ALTOS

TENORS

BASSES

Amy F. Babinski Claudia Barriga* Kimberly Brenstuhl* Florence Brodowski Yu-Ching Ruby Chen* Anna K. Dendy Emily Engle* Lisa Rubin Falkenberg Lisa Fedorovich* Sarah Gaither Samantha Garner* Sarah Gould Rebecca S. Hall* Lisa Hrusovsky Shannon R. Jakubczak* Hope Klassen-Kay* Kate Macy Jessica M. May Julie Myers-Pruchenski* S. Mikhaila Noble-Pace Jennifer Heinert O’Leary* Lenore M. Pershing* Cassandra E. Rondinella Meghan Schatt Monica Schie* Kay Tabor Jane Timmons-Mitchell Sharilee Walker* Mary Wilson Constance D. Wolfe

Alexandria Albainy Emily Austin* Laura Avdey* Debbie Bates* Julie A. Cajigas* Brianna Clifford Barbara J. Clugh Carolyn L. Dessin* Amanda Evans Diana Weber Gardner Ann Marie Hardulak Betty Huber* Karen Hunt Melissa Jolly* Kate Klonowski Lucia Leszczuk Danielle S. McDonald* Karla McMullen* Clare Mitchell Peggy A. Norman Dawn Ostrowski* Marta Perez-Stable Ina Stanek-Michaelis Martha Cochran Truby* Gina L. Ventre* Laure Wasserbauer Leah Wilson* Lynne Leutenberg Yulish*

Vincent L. Briley* David Ciucevich Corey Hill*5 Peter Kvidera* Adam Landry* Tod Lawrence Rohan Mandelia James Newby Ryan Pennington* Matthew Rizer* Ted Rodenborn* John Sabol Lee Scantlebury* James Storry Charles Tobias William Venable* Michael J. Ward* Allen White

Christopher Aldrich* Brian Bailey* Jack Blazey Sean Cahill Kevin Calavan* Peter B. Clausen Nick Connavino Kyle Crowley* Christopher Dewald* Jeffrey Duber Matthew Englehart Richard Falkenberg Joshua Jones* David Keller* Joel Kincannon* Jason Levy* Scott Markov* Tyler Mason Roger Mennell Robert Mitchell Stephen Mitchell* Tom Moormann Keith Norman Tremaine Oatman* Francisco X. Prado* John Riehl Jarod Shamp* Wiley Livingston Smith James B. Snell Stephen Stavnicky*5

Carolyn Dessin, Chair, Cleveland Orchestra Chorus Operating Committee Jill Harbaugh, Manager of Choruses

Severance Hall 2017-18

Cleveland Orchestra Chorus

* = Cleveland Orchestra Chamber Chorus 5 = Shari Bierman Singer Fellow

91

Norton Memorial Organ Specification of the E.M. Skinner Pipe Organ, Opus 816, at Severance Hall Great Organ

16' 8' 8' 8' 8' 8' 8' 8' 5 1/3' 4' 4' 2 2/3' 2'

16' 8' 4'

6" Wind Pressure Double Diapason First Diapason Second Diapason Th ird Diapason [enclosed in Choir] Harmonic Flute Gedeckt [enclosed in Choir] Viola [enclosed in Choir] Erzähler Quinte Octave Flute [enclosed in Choir] Twelft h Fifteenth Chorus Mixture VII (15-19-22-26-29-33-36) Harmonics IV (17-19-fl at21-22) Trumpet — 10” Wind Tromba — 10” Wind Clarion — 10” Wind Chimes (Solo) Solo High Pressure Reeds (Solo)

Organ

Organ Layout

61 pipes 61 pipes 61 pipes 61 pipes 61 pipes 61 pipes 61 pipes 61 pipes 61 pipes 61 pipes 61 pipes 61 pipes 61 pipes 427 pipes

1 1/3 '

244 pipes 61 pipes 61 pipes 61 pipes

16' 8' 8' 8'

Swell Organ

16' 8' 8' 8' 8' 8' 8' 8' 8' 4' 4' 2' 16' 8' 8' 8' 4' 8'

6” Wind Pressure Melodia Diapason Rohrflöte Flauto Dolce Flute Celeste [TC] Salicional Voix Celeste Echo Gamba Echo Gamba Celeste Octave Flute Triangulaire Flautino Mixture V (15-19-22-26-29) Cornet V (12-15-17-19-22) Waldhorn — 10” Wind Trumpet — 10” Wind French Trumpet Oboe d'A more Clarion — 10” Wind Vox Humana Tremolo Harp (Choir) Celesta (Choir)

92

6” Wind Pressure Gamba Geigen Concert Flute Dulciana Gamba Dulcet II Octave Flute Gambette Nazard Piccolo Tierce

61 pipes 183 pipes 73 pipes 73 pipes 61 pipes 61 bars

Solo Organ

73 pipes 73 pipes 73 pipes 73 pipes 61 pipes 73 pipes 73 pipes 73 pipes 73 pipes 73 pipes 73 pipes 61 pipes 305 pipes 305 pipes 73 pipes 73 pipes 73 pipes 73 pipes 73 pipes 73 pipes

Choir Organ

16' 8' 8' 8' 8' 8' 4' 4' 4' 2 2/3 ' 2' 1 3/5 '

Larigot Carillon III (12-17-22) Fagotto Orchestral Trumpet Orchestral Oboe Clarinet 73 pipes Tremolo Harp 10” Wind Celesta (ext.)

73 pipes 73 pipes 73 pipes 73 pipes 73 pipes 146 pipes 73 pipes 73 pipes 73 pipes 61 pipes 61 pipes 61 pipes

8' 8' 8' 4' 16' 8' 8' 8' 8' 4'

10 ” Wind Pressure Flauto Mirabilis Gamba Gamba Celeste Orchestral Flute Corno di Bassetto Tuba Mirabilis — 20” Wind French Horn — 20” Wind Corno di Bassetto (ext.)

English Horn Tuba Clarion — 20” Wind Tremolo Chimes

73 pipes 73 pipes 73 pipes 73 pipes 85 pipes 73 pipes 73 pipes 73 pipes 73 pipes 25 bells

Pedal Organ

32' 16' 16' 16' 16' 16' 16' 16' 8' 8' 8' 8' 4' 32' 32' 16' 16' 16' 8'

6” Wind Pressure Major Bass 56 pipes Diapason 32 pipes Contra Bass 56 pipes Diapason (Great) Bourdon (ext. Major Bass) Melodia (Swell) Dulciana 32 pipes Gamba (Choir) Octave (ext. Contra Bass) Gedeckt (ext. Major Bass) Cello (Choir 16' Gamba) Still Gedeckt (Swell 16' Melodia) Super Octave (ext. Contra Bass) Mixture IV (10-12-fl at14-15) — 5” Wind 128 pipes 56 pipes Bombarde — 20” Wind 12 pipes Fagotto 1-12 — 10” Wind (ext. Bombarde) Trombone — 15” Wind Waldhorn (Swell) Fagotto (Choir) Tromba (ext. Bombarde) Chimes

Norton Memorial Organ

The Cleveland Orchestra

Norton Memorial Organ The Norton Memorial Organ at Severance Hall is considered among the finest concert hall organs ever built. Designed specifically for symphonic use and specifically for Severance Hall, the Norton Memorial Organ was created by the renowned organ builder Ernest M. Skinner in Boston in 1930, and then installed just before the hall’s opening in February 1931.

The organ is named in memory of Mr. and Mrs. David Z. Norton, recognizing a contribution from their children — Miriam Norton White, Robert Castle Norton, and Laurence Harper Norton — to build the organ. David Norton and his wife had served on the board of trustees of The Cleveland Orchestra and Mr. Norton was the first president of the Orchestra’s non-profit governing corporation.

Originally located high above the stage, the organ was removed and restored by the Schantz Organ Company of Ohio during the renovation and restoration of Severance Hall (1998-2000). Thanks to the generosity of hundreds of musiclovers from across Northeast Ohio who donated specifically toward the organ’s restoration and future upkeep, the instrument was reinstalled in its new location surrounding the stage and then rededicated in January 2001.

The 94-rank Norton Memorial Organ has 6,025 pipes, made of lead and tin alloy, zinc, or wood. The largest pipe, made of wood, is 32 feet in length, and the smallest, made of metal, is approximately seven inches in length.

To learn more about supporting the longterm maintenance and upkeep of Severance Hall’s Norton Memorial Organ, please contact Legacy Giving by calling 216-231-7556 or by email at legacygiving@clevelandorchestra.com.

Severance Hall 2017-18

Norton Memorial Organ

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Together, we’re greater.

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We’ve seen how far we’ve come. We envision how far we will go. And we know that UNITED is the only way we can continue to achieve the Greater Cleveland we all believe in. Please join us. Together, we’re greater.

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The Cleveland Orchestra

MUSICAL ARTS ASSOCIATION

as of January 2018

operating The Cleveland Orchestra, Severance Hall, and Blossom Music Festival O F F I C E R S A ND E XEC UT I VE C O MMIT T E E Richard K. Smucker, President Dennis W. LaBarre, Chairman Richard J. Bogomolny, Chairman Emeritus Alexander M. Cutler Hiroyuki Fujita David J. Hooker Michael J. Horvitz Douglas A. Kern

Norma Lerner, Honorary Chair Hewitt B. Shaw, Secretary Beth E. Mooney, Treasurer

Virginia M. Lindseth Nancy W. McCann Larry Pollock Alfred M. Rankin, Jr. Audrey Gilbert Ratner

Barbara S. Robinson Jeffery J. Weaver Meredith Smith Weil Paul E. Westlake Jr.

R E S I D E NT TR U S TE ES Richard J. Bogomolny Yuval Brisker Jeanette Grasselli Brown Helen Rankin Butler Irad Carmi Paul G. Clark Robert D. Conrad Matthew V. Crawford Alexander M. Cutler Hiroyuki Fujita Robert K. Gudbranson Iris Harvie Jeffrey A. Healy Stephen H. Hoffman David J. Hooker Michael J. Horvitz Marguerite B. Humphrey Betsy Juliano Jean C. Kalberer Nancy F. Keithley

Christopher M. Kelly Douglas A. Kern John D. Koch Dennis W. LaBarre Norma Lerner Virginia M. Lindseth Milton S. Maltz Nancy W. McCann Stephen McHale Thomas F. McKee Loretta J. Mester Beth E. Mooney John C. Morley Meg Fulton Mueller Katherine T. O’Neill Rich Paul Larry Pollock Alfred M. Rankin, Jr. Clara T. Rankin Audrey Gilbert Ratner

Charles A. Ratner Zoya Reyzis Barbara S. Robinson Steven M. Ross Luci Schey Spring Hewitt B. Shaw Richard K. Smucker James C. Spira R. Thomas Stanton Russell Trusso Daniel P. Walsh Thomas A. Waltermire Geraldine B. Warner Jeffery J. Weaver Meredith Smith Weil Jeffrey M. Weiss Norman E. Wells Paul E. Westlake Jr. David A. Wolfort

N O N- R E S I D E NT TR U S T E E S Virginia Nord Barbato (New York) Wolfgang C. Berndt (Austria)

Laurel Blossom (California) Richard C. Gridley (South Carolina)

Herbert Kloiber (Germany) Paul Rose (Mexico)

T RU S TE E S E X- O F F I C I O Faye A. Heston, President, Volunteer Council of The Cleveland Orchestra Patricia Sommer, President, Friends of The Cleveland Orchestra Elizabeth McCormick, President, Blossom Friends of The Cleveland Orchestra T RU S TE E S E M E R I TI George N. Aronoff Dr. Ronald H. Bell David P. Hunt S. Lee Kohrman Charlotte R. Kramer Donald W. Morrison Gary A. Oatey Raymond T. Sawyer PA S T PR E S I D E NT S D. Z. Norton 1915-21 John L. Severance 1921-36 Dudley S. Blossom 1936-38 Thomas L. Sidlo 1939-53

Carolyn Dessin, Chair, Cleveland Orchestra Chorus Operating Committee Beverly J. Warren, President, Kent State University Barbara R. Snyder, President, Case Western Reserve University

H O N O RARY T RUS T E E S FOR LIFE Robert P. Madison Gay Cull Addicott Robert F. Meyerson Charles P. Bolton The Honorable John D. Ong Allen H. Ford James S. Reid, Jr. Robert W. Gillespie Dorothy Humel Hovorka* Alex Machaskee * deceased

Percy W. Brown 1953-55 Frank E. Taplin, Jr. 1955-57 Frank E. Joseph 1957-68 Alfred M. Rankin 1968-83

Ward Smith 1983-95 Richard J. Bogomolny 1995-2002, 2008-09 James D. Ireland III 2002-08 Dennis W. LaBarre 2009-17

THE CLEVEL AND ORCHESTR A Franz Welser-Möst, Music Director

Severance Hall 2017-18

André Gremillet, Executive Director

Musical Arts Association

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T H E

C L E V E L A N D

Franz Welser-Möst M U S I C D I R E C TO R

CELLOS Mark Kosower*

Kelvin Smith Family Chair

SECOND VIOLINS Stephen Rose * FIRST VIOLINS William Preucil CONCERTMASTER

Blossom-Lee Chair

Jung-Min Amy Lee ASSOCIATE CONCERTMASTER

Gretchen D. and Ward Smith Chair

Peter Otto FIRST ASSOCIATE CONCERTMASTER

Jessica Lee ASSISTANT CONCERTMASTER

Clara G. and George P. Bickford Chair

Takako Masame Paul and Lucille Jones Chair

Wei-Fang Gu Drs. Paul M. and Renate H. Duchesneau Chair

Kim Gomez Elizabeth and Leslie Kondorossy Chair

Chul-In Park Harriet T. and David L. Simon Chair

Miho Hashizume Theodore Rautenberg Chair

Jeanne Preucil Rose Dr. Larry J.B. and Barbara S. Robinson Chair

Alicia Koelz Oswald and Phyllis Lerner Gilroy Chair

Yu Yuan Patty and John Collinson Chair

Isabel Trautwein Trevor and Jennie Jones Chair

Mark Dumm Gladys B. Goetz Chair

Katherine Bormann Analisé Denise Kukelhan

Alfred M. and Clara T. Rankin Chair James and Donna Reid Chair

Bryan Dumm Muriel and Noah Butkin Chair

Eli Matthews 1 Patricia M. Kozerefski and Richard J. Bogomolny Chair

Sonja Braaten Molloy Carolyn Gadiel Warner Elayna Duitman Ioana Missits Jeffrey Zehngut Vladimir Deninzon Sae Shiragami Scott Weber Kathleen Collins Beth Woodside Emma Shook Dr. Jeanette Grasselli Brown and Dr. Glenn R. Brown Chair

Yun-Ting Lee Jiah Chung Chapdelaine VIOLAS Wesley Collins* Chaillé H. and Richard B. Tullis Chair 1

Charles M. and Janet G. Kimball Chair

Stanley Konopka 2 Mark Jackobs Jean Wall Bennett Chair

Arthur Klima Richard Waugh Lisa Boyko Richard and Nancy Sneed Chair

Lembi Veskimets The Morgan Sisters Chair

Eliesha Nelson Joanna Patterson Zakany Patrick Connolly

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The GAR Foundation Chair

Charles Bernard 2 Helen Weil Ross Chair

Emilio Llinás 2

Lynne Ramsey

Louis D. Beaumont Chair

Richard Weiss 1

The Musicians

Tanya Ell Thomas J. and Judith Fay Gruber Chair

Ralph Curry Brian Thornton William P. Blair III Chair

David Alan Harrell Martha Baldwin Dane Johansen Paul Kushious BASSES Maximilian Dimoff * Clarence T. Reinberger Chair

Kevin Switalski 2 Scott Haigh 1 Mary E. and F. Joseph Callahan Chair

Mark Atherton Thomas Sperl Henry Peyrebrune Charles Barr Memorial Chair

Charles Carleton Scott Dixon Derek Zadinsky HARP Trina Struble * Alice Chalifoux Chair This roster lists the fulltime members of The Cleveland Orchestra.

The number and seating of musicians onstage varies depending on the piece being performed.

The Cleveland Orchestra

2O1 7-18

O R C H E S T R A FLUTES Joshua Smith * Elizabeth M. and William C. Treuhaft Chair

Saeran St. Christopher Marisela Sager 2 Austin B. and Ellen W. Chinn Chair

Mary Kay Fink PICCOLO Mary Kay Fink Anne M. and M. Roger Clapp Chair

OBOES Frank Rosenwein * Edith S. Taplin Chair

Corbin Stair Jeffrey Rathbun 2 Everett D. and Eugenia S. McCurdy Chair

Robert Walters

Samuel C. and Bernette K. Jaffe Chair

CLARINETS Afendi Yusuf * Robert Marcellus Chair

Robert Woolfrey Victoire G. and Alfred M. Rankin, Jr. Chair

Daniel McKelway

HORNS Michael Mayhew § Knight Foundation Chair

Jesse McCormick Robert B. Benyo Chair

Hans Clebsch Richard King Alan DeMattia TRUMPETS Michael Sachs * Robert and Eunice Podis Weiskopf Chair

Jack Sutte Lyle Steelman 2 James P. and Dolores D. Storer Chair

Michael Miller CORNETS Michael Sachs *

ENGLISH HORN Robert Walters

2

Robert R. and Vilma L. Kohn Chair

Yann Ghiro E-FLAT CLARINET Daniel McKelway Stanley L. and Eloise M. Morgan Chair

BASS CLARINET Yann Ghiro BASSOONS John Clouser * Louise Harkness Ingalls Chair

Gareth Thomas Barrick Stees 2 Sandra L. Haslinger Chair

Jonathan Sherwin CONTRABASSOON Jonathan Sherwin

Severance Hall 2017-18

CENTENNIAL SEASON

Mary Elizabeth and G. Robert Klein Chair

PERCUSSION Marc Damoulakis* Margaret Allen Ireland Chair

Donald Miller Tom Freer Thomas Sherwood KEYBOARD INSTRUMENTS Joela Jones * Rudolf Serkin Chair

Carolyn Gadiel Warner Marjory and Marc L. Swartzbaugh Chair

LIBRARIANS Robert O’Brien Joe and Marlene Toot Chair

Donald Miller

Michael Miller

ENDOWED CHAIRS CURRENTLY UNOCCUPIED

TROMBONES Massimo La Rosa *

Sidney and Doris Dworkin Chair Sunshine Chair George Szell Memorial Chair

Gilbert W. and Louise I. Humphrey Chair

Richard Stout Alexander and Marianna C. McAfee Chair

Shachar Israel 2 BASS TROMBONE Thomas Klaber

* Principal § 1 2

Associate Principal First Assistant Principal Assistant Principal

EUPHONIUM AND BASS TRUMPET Richard Stout

CONDUCTORS Christoph von Dohnányi

TUBA Yasuhito Sugiyama*

Vinay Parameswaran

Nathalie C. Spence and Nathalie S. Boswell Chair

TIMPANI Paul Yancich * Otto G. and Corinne T. Voss Chair

MUSIC DIRECTOR LAUREATE ASSISTANT CONDUCTOR

Elizabeth Ring and William Gwinn Mather Chair

Lisa Wong ACTING DIRECTOR OF CHORUSES

Frances P. and Chester C. Bolton Chair

Tom Freer 2 Mr. and Mrs. Richard K. Smucker Chair

The Musicians

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P H OTO BY M I C H A E L P O E H N

Franz Welser-Möst Music Director Kelvin Smith Family Endowed Chair The Cleveland Orchestra

Franz Welser-Möst is among today’s most distinguished conductors. The 2017-18 season marks his sixteenth year as music director of The Cleveland Orchestra, with the future of this acclaimed partnership extending into the next decade. The New York Times has declared Cleveland under Welser-Möst’s direction to be the “best American orchestra“ for its virtuosity, elegance of sound, variety of color, and chamber-like musical cohesion.

The Cleveland Orchestra has been repeatedly praised for its innovative programming, support for new musical works, and for its renewed success in semi-staged and staged opera productions. Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra are frequent guests at many prestigious concert halls and festivals around the world, including regular appearances in Vienna, New York, and Miami, and at the festivals of Salzburg and Lucerne. In the past decade, The Cleveland Orchestra has been hugely successSeverance Hall 2017-18

Music Director

ful in building up a new and, notably, younger audience through groundbreaking programs involving families, students, and universities.

As a guest conductor, Mr. WelserMöst enjoys a close and productive relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic.

His recent performances with the Philharmonic have included critically-acclaimed opera productions at the Salzburg Festival (Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier in 2014, Beethoven’s Fidelio in 2015, Strauss’s Die Liebe der Danae in 2016, and Reimann’s Lear in 2017), as well as appearances at New York’s Carnegie Hall, at the Lucerne Festival, and in concert at La Scala Milan.

He has conducted the Philharmonic’s celebrated annual New Year’s Day concert twice, viewed by millions worldwide. Last season, he led the Vienna Philharmonic in performances in Vienna and America, featuring three concerts at Carnegie Hall. He returns to the Salzburg Festival in 2018 for a new production of Strauss’s Salome.

Mr. Welser-Möst also maintains relationships with a number of other European orchestras and opera companies.

His 2017-18 schedule includes concerts with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Zurich’s Tonhalle Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw, and Milan’s Filarmonica della Scala, as well as leading a gala with the Shanghai Grand Opera.

From 2010 to 2014, Franz WelserMöst served as general music director of the Vienna State Opera. His partnership with the company included an acclaimed new production of Wagner’s Ring cycle and a series of critically-praised new pro-

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ductions, as well as performances of a wide range of other operas, particularly works

by Wagner and Richard Strauss. Prior to his years with the Vienna State Opera, Mr. Welser-Möst led the Zurich Opera across a decade-long tenure, conducting more than forty new productions and culminating in three seasons as general music director (2005-08).

Franz Welser-Möst’s recordings and videos have won major awards, including a Gramophone Award, Diapason d’Or, Japanese Record Academy Award, and two Grammy nominations. The recent Salzburg Festival production he conducted of Der Rosenkavalier was awarded with the Echo Klassik for “best opera recording.“ With The Cleveland Orchestra, his recordings include DVD recordings of live performances of five of Bruckner’s symphonies and a multi-DVD set of major works by Brahms, featuring Yefim Bronfman and Julia Fischer as soloists. A companion video recording of Brahms’s German Requiem was released in 2017.

This past summer, Mr. Welser-Möst was awarded the 2017 Pro Arte Europapreis for his advocacy and achievements as a musical ambassador. Other honors and awards include the Vienna Philharmonic’s “Ring of Honor” for his longstanding personal and artistic relationship with the ensemble, as well as recognition from the Western Law Center for Disability Rights, honorary membership in the Vienna Singverein, appointment as an Academician of the European Academy of Yuste, a Decoration of Honor from the Republic of Austria for his artistic achievements, and the Kilenyi Medal from the Bruckner Society of America.

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ABOVE In December 2015, Franz Welser-Möst

led the prestigious Nobel Prize Concert with the Stockholm Philharmonic.

“Franz Welser-Möst, music director of the subtle, responsive Cleveland Orchestra — possibly America’s most memorable symphonic ensemble — leads operas with airy, catlike grace.”

—New York Times “Franz Welser-Möst has managed something radical with The Cleveland Orchestra — making them play as one seamless unit. . . . The music flickered with a very delicate beauty that makes the Clevelanders sound like no other orchestra.”

—London Times “There were times when the sheer splendor of the orchestra’s playing made you sit upright in awestruck appreciation. . . . The music was a miracle of expressive grandeur, which Welser-Möst paced with weight and fluidity.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

Music Director

The Cleveland Orchestra

Honoring those who gave their lives The Catholic Cemeteries Association has been guiding veterans and their families through the burial planning process for over 150 years.

Our masses and prayers remember those who have given their lives in service to our country.

Join us for Memorial Day Mass to honor our fallen men and women of service.

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Faith, Hope, and Remembrance

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The Cleveland Orchestra

CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA THE

December 1919, Grays Armory

From the Start

A Mission for Greatness in Community, Education, & Music

by E R I C S E L L E N

A

2O1 7-18 CENTENNIAL SEASON

cclaimed for decades among the world’s top symphonic ensembles, The Cleveland Orchestra celebrates its 1OOth year during the 2017-18 season.

Such fame and acclaim did not come without a plan. From the very beginning, the private citizens who created this public institution fully intended to foster a great musical ensemble that would carry the exceptional can-do spirit of the city of Cleveland far and wide. Generations have carried through on the hard work required to forge and sustain the Orchestra’s mission to share extraordinary musical experiences, to foster a love of music in students of all ages, and to proudly carry the name of the city it represents.

The Early Decades: Creation, Growth, and the Construction of Severance Hall At the time the ensemble was created, in 1918, Cleveland was a rising industrial metropolis heavily involved in the steel industry and rivalling Detroit in car manufacturing. Rich magnates put the money together for the Orchestra’s early seasons, including John L. Severance, an acquaintance of John D. Rockefeller.

Unusually for the era, a woman, Adella Prentiss Hughes, was the

Severance Hall 2017-18

About the Orchestra

103

guiding light behind the efforts to create a hometown band — and she worked tirelessly and with great political finesse to launch it on a trajectory toward being “as good as any orchestra in America.”

Nikolai Sokoloff, the Orchestra’s first music director (1918-33), is often overlooked in light of his better-known suc-

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cessors. He was, however, certainly good enough to pull the group together and guide them forward for more than a decade. Those years saw the start of many education programs that continue today — the Orchestra has introduced more than 4 million young people to classical music across its first century — as well as extensive touring across the United States and to Cuba, and its first concerts at New York’s famed Carnegie Hall.

Perhaps the biggest push in the early years came from John L. Severance when he donated money toward the ensemble’s permanent home concert hall, named to honor both Severance and his wife when it opened in 1931. Severance Hall was among the very first such buildings designed with radio broadcasting capability in its original schematics and quickly gave the musical ensemble a new sense of permanence, style, and purpose.

Artur Rodzinski came next as music director (1933-43), injecting a new level of energy into the Orchestra’s music making.

A gifted if mercurial leader, who may (or may not) have had a pistol strapped to him onstage when he conducted, Rodzinski had big ambitions and started out strong. For four seasons in the mid-1930s, the Orchestra’s season featured fully-staged opera productions at Severance Hall, with some of the day’s most-renowned stars, including Lotte Lehmann and Friedrich Schorr.

However, the cost of presenting four or five operas each year, in the midst of the Depression, eventually forced their discontinuation. Rodzinski moved forward nevertheless, with recordings alongside new and rediscovered works. Finally, he left CleveThe Cleveland Orchestra

land to pursue his own career in the bigger cities of New York and, later, Chicago.

For Erich Leinsdorf, the next music director (1943-46), timing was everything — and World War II largely precluded him from making much impact in Cleveland.

Many of the ensemble’s musicians were on leave for military duty, and Leinsdorf himself was away part of the time for military service. Evenso, he made some solid recordings, led a variety of radio broadcasts, and re-affirmed his own bona fides for the high-powered international career he enjoyed in the ensuing decades.

The Szell Era: Rise to International Fame George Szell, music director from 1946 until his death in 1970, took a credibly good orchestra and made it great. It’s not that he put The Cleveland Orchestra on the map, for it had been touring around the U.S. for years. It was more that he took the stage and insisted that Cleveland could be — in real fact, would become — as good

as any orchestra anywhere. His legendary standards focused 100 musicians toward a kind of peerless perfection that dazzled many ears. Just as a great restaurant grows its reputation through delivering consistent excellence, Szell was concerned with repeatability. Day in and day out, critics and audiences around the world could more and more count on The Cleveland Orchestra to deliver a great performance, everytime, anywhere. That predictability, coupled with the rise of audiophile home listening equipment (and stereo sound) turned Cleveland into a powerhouse in the recording studio, creating an outstanding catalog across the standard repertoire, many selections from which still hold their own as much as half a century later.

The Orchestra’s ambitions also grew along with Szell’s tenure, touring internationally to amaze Europeans unaccustomed to such constant perfection in live performance. A ten-week tour in 1965 included a month in the Soviet Union, which became legendary among Cleveland’s musicians,

Education has long been a fundamental part of The Cleveland Orchestra’s programs each year, including teaching and coaching future musicians — such as these young students in 1929.

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About the Orchestra

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2O1 7-18

THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA

CENTENNIAL SEASON

Second Century Celebration We are deeply grateful to the visionary philanthropy of the sponsors listed here who have given generously toward The Cleveland Orchestra’s 1OOth season in support of bringing to life a bold vision for an extraordinary Second Century — to inspire and transform lives through the power of music.

Presenting Sponsors

Leadership Sponsors Ruth McCormick Tankersley Charitable Trust

Sponsors

Calfee, Halter & Griswold LLP National Endowment for the Arts The Sherwin-Williams Company

Westfield Insurance KPMG LLP PwC

Global Media Sponsor

Series and Concert Sponsors We also extend thanks to our ongoing concert and series sponsors, who make each season of concerts possible: American Greetings Corporation BakerHostetler Buyers Products Company Dollar Bank Foundation Eaton Ernst & Young LLP Forest City Frantz Ward LLP The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company Great Lakes Brewing Company Hahn Loeser & Parks LLP Hyster-Yale Materials Handling, Inc. NACCO Industries, Inc. Jones Day KeyBank The Lincoln Electric Foundation Litigation Management, Inc. The Lubrizol Corporation Materion Corporation Medical Mutual MTD Products, Inc. North Coast Container Corp.

Ohio Savings Bank Olympic Steel, Inc. Parker Hannifin Foundation PNC Bank Quality Electrodynamics (QED) RPM International Inc. The J. M. Smucker Company Squire Patton Boggs (US) LLP The Sherwin-Williams Company Thompson Hine LLP Tucker Ellis

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Second Century Century Sponsors Second

Severance HallOrchestra 2017-18 The Cleveland

staff, and board members for the Orchestra’s unflagging ability to put on a great performance for wildly enthusiastic audiences — even with circumstances of lessthan-optimal hotels, transportation, and backstage facilities.

Despite his reputation, the steel-eyed taskmaster Szell was not entirely without emotion and understanding of those around him or of humanity as a collective society. Stories abound of small gestures of sympathy and understanding at fateful moments in the lives of longtime Orchestra musicians. And, having escaped in the 1930s from a Europe-turned-afoul, he was well-tuned to world politics and changing times — and to the need for public statements in times of crisis. Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, he led the Orchestra in a moving performance of the Funeral March from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, making a statement of solidarity and caring with the ongoing struggle for human justice.

Planning and foresight by the Orchestra’s leadership also brought about increased performance opportunities. In 1968, the opening of the Orchestra’s parklike countryside summer home, Blossom Music Center, ensured the musicians of a year-round employment contract, further bonding them with their hometown audiences (who also lined up by the thousands at Blossom for rock-n-roll concerts by the era’s other big-name musical legends).

Forging Ahead: Boulez and Maazel Upon Szell’s death, Pierre Boulez was appointed to an interim position as musical advisor for two seasons (1970-72). Boulez Severance Hall 2017-18

made his professional American debut with the Cleveland ensemble in 1965. His relationship as a friend and influence on the podium in Cleveland eventually extended to nearly half a century. He brought daring programming of new music along with new ideas to clear the accumulated earwax from old ways of listening to classics. His astute musical judgement and his extraordinary laser-like precision on the podium eventually won Cleveland five Grammy Awards. By example and with keen intellect and approach, he effortlessly encouraged the musicians across a widening spectrum of the repertoire.

Lorin Maazel, the next music director (1972-82), stirred things up a bit for The Cleveland Orchestra. His high-energy leadership and fascinating programming, along with a compelling (if at times headstrong) conducting style also dared the musicians to make music in new ways. International touring continued, including the Cleveland’s first trips to South America and to Australia and New Zealand — with the Orchestra’s global reach becoming a true reality beyond its well-deserved reputation.

The ensemble’s recordings also continued, with Maazel leading large swaths of the repertoire and helping the Orchestra pioneer digital recording.

A New Golden Era: Dohnányi and a Restored Severance Hall Christoph von Dohnányi, the sixth music director (1982-2002), brought artistic leadership for a second “Golden Age,” as well as, finally, some critical distinction beyond being “the Orchestra that Szell built.”

Dohnányi focused on both precision and

About the Orchestra

107

warmth of sound, while presenting intriguing programming of standard works mixed together with lesser-known repertoire. Touring became an annual part of the Orchestra’s calendar, including regular residencies in Salzburg, performances throughout Europe, and first performances in China.

These years also coincided with the final era of growth in commercial recording. The Cleveland Orchestra laid claim to being the “most-recorded orchestra in America” for nearly a decade, turning out album after album annually to wide acclaim and sales. In addition, Dohnányi revived the Orchestra’s operatic traditions, though mostly with in-concert presentations, and devoted his work to further polish and amalgamate the musicians’ gifted artistry and ensemblework.

One of the greatest long-term achievements of Dohnányi’s tenure was the renovation and expansion of Severance Hall, which restored what many have called “America’s most beautiful concert hall” to visual interior splendor while simultaneously enhancing its famously clear and intimate acoustics.

The work also restored the hall’s original 6,025-pipe concert organ, making it once again usable (from a new location within the hall) for the first time in half a century.

Accelerando con moto: Welser-Möst and a New Century Franz Welser-Möst became The Cleveland Orchestra’s seventh music director in the autumn of 2002. His charge has been to carry the ensemble forward

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— first into the new millennium and now into the Orchestra’s own Second Century.

His playbook has been to build on the best traditions of the past while steering clearly and with passionate directness to argue for music’s renewed relevance in a changing world.

He has expanded repertoire while further honing the Orchestra’s flexibility for modern (and older) music. The Orchestra’s long operatic tradition has been augmented with the return of fullystaged opera productions to Severance Hall, including cutting-edge presentations filled with 21st-century technological know-how and wonder — all in service to telling the plotlines of challenging works in compelling ways and with superb casts.

Welser-Möst has also led The Cleveland Orchestra in a series of acclaimed video and other recordings, further enlarging the ensemble’s storied recorded legacy. He has advocated for a renewed and extended focus aimed at serving the people of Cleveland, through expanded education offerings and a new diversity of programming and concert formats.

Special ticketing programs offer free tickets for families to bring children with them to concerts, with a notable increase of younger people attending performances — with 20% of audiences now aged 25 and younger.

In the past decade, the Orchestra has also extended its work as Cleveland’s ambassador to the world, regularly showcasing its extraordinary musicianship in music capitals and at festivals and in residencies across Europe and on tour in the

About the Orchestra

The Cleveland Orchestra

PHOTO BY ROGER MASTROIANNI

United States.

With his contract extended to encompass a tenure of at least two decades, Welser-Möst continues to prepare The Cleveland Orchestra for its Second Century, serving the art of music and the people of its hometown earnestly and with the utmost dedication to harness the power of music to change lives and to inspire creativity and understanding.

Tellingly, throughout the Orchestra’s history, there has been a strong tradition of leadership continuity, not just artistically (with only seven Music Directors in 100 years), but also in Presidents of the governing non-profit Board of Trustees (just twelve), and staff Executive Directors (only nine), providing a steady but focused progression of guidance propelling the Orchestra forward. Contrasted with the shifting sands at some other well-known ensembles, this unity of purpose and personnel has helped carry the Orchestra forward institutionally as a tireless agent for inspiring its hometown through great music.

For, in truth, the Orchestra’s greatest strength remains the citizens of its hometown and the region surrounding Cleve-

land, whose forebears imagined such a world-famous orchestra could exist and then set about to make it happen. Individuals and corporations financed the Orchestra’s growth while insisting on excellence as the goal, not just musically, but in programs for educating and inspiring the city’s youth.

That support continues today at uniquely high levels, boasting the greatest generosity of per capita donations for any major American orchestra.

Thus, the extraordinary dream continues — marching The Cleveland Orchestra into a Second Century of achievement and success, arm in arm with the community whose name it carries.

CONGRATULATIONS TO

The Cleveland Orchestra on celebrating their

CENTENNIAL SEASON

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About the Orchestra

109

THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA

Individual Annual Support The Cleveland Orchestra is sustained through the annual support of thousands of generous patrons.

The leadership of those listed on these pages (with gifts of $2,000 and more) shows an extraordinary depth of support for the Orchestra’s music-making, education presentations, and community initiatives.

Giving Societies gifts during the year prior to July 1, 2017 Adella Prentiss Hughes Society

gifts of $50,000 to $99,999

gifts of $100,000 and more Musicians of The Cleveland Orchestra+ (in-kind support for community programs and opportunities to secure new funding) Mr. Richard J. Bogomolny and Ms. Patricia M. Kozerefski+ Dr. and Mrs. Hiroyuki Fujita+ Mr. and Mrs. Michael J. Horvitz+ James D. Ireland IV The Walter and Jean Kalberer Foundation+ Dr. and Mrs. Herbert Kloiber (Europe) Mr. and Mrs. Dennis W. LaBarre+ Mrs. Norma Lerner and The Lerner Foundation+ Mrs. Emma S. Lincoln+ Milton and Tamar Maltz John C. Morley+ Mr. Patrick Park (Miami) Mr. and Mrs. Albert B. Ratner James and Donna Reid Mr. and Mrs. Richard K. Smucker+ Mr. and Mrs. Franz Welser-Möst+

With special thanks to the Leadership Patron Committee for their commitment to each year’s annual support initiatives: Barbara Robinson, chair Robert N. Gudbranson, vice chair Ronald H. Bell Iris Harvie James T. Dakin Faye A. Heston Karen E. Dakin Brinton L. Hyde Henry C. Doll David C. Lamb Judy Ernest Larry J. Santon Nicki N. Gudbranson Raymond T. Sawyer Jack Harley

88 110

George Szell Society

Mr. William P. Blair III+ Blossom Friends of The Cleveland Orchestra The Brown and Kunze Foundation Jeanette Grasselli Brown and Glenn R. Brown+ Mr. and Mrs. Alexander M. Cutler+ Mrs. John A Hadden Jr. T. K. and Faye A. Heston Mr. and Mrs. Donald M. Jack, Jr. Elizabeth B. Juliano Giuliana C. and John D. Koch+ Toby Devan Lewis Virginia M. and Jon A. Lindseth Mr. and Mrs. Alex Machaskee+ Ms. Nancy W. McCann+ Ms. Beth E. Mooney+ Rosanne and Gary Oatey (Cleveland, Miami)+ The Honorable and Mrs. John Doyle Ong+ Mr. and Mrs. Alfred M. Rankin, Jr. Mrs. Alfred M. Rankin, Sr. Charles and Ilana Horowitz Ratner+ Barbara S. Robinson (Cleveland, Miami)+ Sally and Larry Sears+ Mary M. Spencer (Miami)+ Mrs. Jean H. Taber* Barbara and David Wolfort (Cleveland, Miami)+

+ Multiyear Pledges Multiyear pledges support the Orchestra’s artistry while helping to ensure a sustained level of funding. We salute those extraordinary donors who have signed pledge commitments to continue their annual giving for three years or more. These donors are recognized with this symbol next to their name: +

Individual Annual Annual Support Individual

The Cleveland Orchestra

Elisabeth DeWitt Severance Society

Dudley S. Blossom Society gifts of $15,000 to $24,999

gifts of $25,000 to $49,999 Mr. and Mrs. William W. Baker Dr. and Mrs. Wolfgang Berndt (Europe) Mr. and Mrs. Charles P. Bolton+ Mr. Yuval Brisker Mary Alice Cannon Mr. and Mrs. David J. Carpenter+ Jill and Paul Clark Robert and Jean* Conrad+ Judith and George W. Diehl George* and Becky Dunn Friends of The Cleveland Orchestra (formerly the Women’s Committee of The Cleveland Orchestra) JoAnn and Robert Glick+ Mr. and Mrs. Geoffrey Gund Mr. and Mrs. Jeffrey Healy+ Mary and Jon Heider (Cleveland, Miami) Mrs. Marguerite B. Humphrey+ Junior Committee of The Cleveland Orchestra Mr. and Mrs. Joseph P. Keithley Mr. and Mrs. Douglas A. Kern Milton A. and Charlotte R. Kramer Charitable Foundation Margaret Fulton-Mueller+ Mrs. Jane B. Nord William J. and Katherine T. O’Neill Julia and Larry Pollock+ Mr. and Mrs. James A. Ratner Marc and Rennie Saltzberg Larry J. Santon and Lorraine S. Szabo+ The Ralph and Luci Schey Foundation+ Hewitt and Paula Shaw Richard and Nancy Sneed+ Jim and Myrna Spira R. Thomas and Meg Harris Stanton+ Ms. Ginger Warner (Cleveland, Miami) Anonymous (2)

Listings of all donors of $300 and more each year are published annually, and can be viewed online at CLEVELANDORCHESTRA . COM

Gay Cull Addicott+ Randall and Virginia Barbato Dr. Christopher P. Brandt and Dr. Beth Sersig+ Dr. Ben H. and Julia Brouhard Irad and Rebecca Carmi Mr. and Mrs. William E. Conway Mrs. Barbara Cook Mary Jo Eaton (Miami) Dr. and Mrs. Robert Ehrlich (Europe) Mr. Allen H. Ford Ms. Dawn M. Full Mr. and Mrs. Robert W. Gillespie Richard and Ann Gridley+ Robert K. Gudbranson and Joon-Li Kim+ Kathleen E. Hancock Sondra and Steve Hardis Jack Harley and Judy Ernest David and Nancy Hooker+ Joan and Leonard Horvitz Richard and Erica Horvitz (Cleveland, Miami) Allan V. Johnson Jonathan and Tina Kislak (Miami) Mr. Jeff Litwiller+ Mr. and Mrs. Thomas B. McGowan Mr. Thomas F. McKee Mr. and Mrs. Stanley A. Meisel The Miller Family+ Sydell Miller Lauren and Steve Spilman Stacie and Jeff Halpern Edith and Ted* Miller+ Mr. Donald W. Morrison+ Dr. Anne and Mr. Peter Neff Mr. and Mrs. James A. Saks Rachel R. Schneider+ Mrs. David Seidenfeld+ Kim Sherwin+ William* and Marjorie B. Shorrock+ Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Umdasch (Europe) Tom and Shirley Waltermire+ Mr. and Mrs. Fred A. Watkins+ Mr. and Mrs. Jeffery J. Weaver Meredith and Michael Weil Mr. and Mrs. Jeffrey M. Weiss Paul and Suzanne Westlake listings continue

Severance Hall 2017-18

Individual Individual Annual Annual Support Support

111 1

Frank H. Ginn Society gifts of $10,000 to $14,999 Mr. and Mrs. Dean Barry Laurel Blossom Irma and Norman Braman (Miami)+ Mr. D. McGregor Brandt, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. Marshall Brown J. C. and Helen Rankin Butler+ Richard J. and Joanne Clark Mrs. Barbara Ann Davis+ Dr. M. Meredith Dobyns Henry and Mary* Doll+ Nancy and Richard Dotson+ Mr. and Mrs. Robert P. Duvin Dr. and Mrs. Lloyd H. Ellis Jr. Mr. Brian L. Ewart and Mr. William McHenry Carl Falb+ Bob and Linnet Fritz Albert I. and Norma C. Geller Dr. Edward S. Godleski Patti Gordon (Miami) Amy and Stephen Hoffman

Thomas H. and Virginia J.* Horner Fund+ James and Claudia Hower Mrs. Elizabeth R. Koch Stewart and Donna Kohl Dr. David and Janice Leshner Don H. McClung Joy P. and Thomas G. Murdough, Jr. (Miami)+ Brian and Cindy Murphy+ Mr. Raymond M. Murphy+ Mr. J. William and Dr. Suzanne Palmer Douglas and Noreen Powers Audra* and George Rose+ Paul A. and Anastacia L. Rose Steven and Ellen Ross Mr. and Mrs. David A. Ruckman Dr. Isobel Rutherford Dr. and Mrs.* Martin I. Saltzman+ David M. and Betty Schneider Carol* and Albert Schupp Mr. and Mrs. Oliver E. Seikel

Seven Five Fund Mrs. Gretchen D. Smith+ The Stair Family Charitable Foundation, Inc. Lois and Tom Stauffer Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan M. Steingass Bruce and Virginia Taylor+ Mr. Joseph F. Tetlak Rick, Margarita, and Steven Tonkinson (Miami)+ Gary L. Wasserman and Charles A. Kashner (Miami) Pysht Fund The Denise G. and Norman E. Wells, Jr. Family Foundation+ Robert C. Weppler Sandy and Ted Wiese Sandy Wile and Joanne Avenmarg Tony and Diane Wynshaw-Boris+ Max and Beverly Zupon Anonymous (4)

The 1929 Society gifts of $5,000 to $9,999 Robert and Alyssa Lenhoff-Briggs Dr. and Mrs. D. P. Agamanolis Susan S. Angell Mr. William App William Appert and Christopher Wallace (Miami) Robert and Dalia Baker Fred G. and Mary W. Behm Mr. and Mrs. Jules Belkin Daniel and Trish Bell (Miami) Mr. William Berger Howard Bernick and Judy Bronfman Mr. David Bialosky and Ms. Carolyn Christian+ Suzanne and Jim Blaser Robert and Alyssa Lenhoff-Briggs Dr.* and Mrs. Jerald S. Brodkey Frank and Leslie Buck+ Ms. Maria Cashy+ Drs. Wuu-Shung and Amy Chuang+ Ellen E. & Victor J. Cohn+ Kathleen A. Coleman+ Diane Lynn Collier and Robert J. Gura+ Marjorie Dickard Comella The Sam J. Frankino Foundation Mr. and Mrs. Matthew V. Crawford Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Daugstrup Mr. and Mrs. Thomas S. Davis Pete and Margaret Dobbins+ Carl Dodge Mr. and Mrs. Paul Doman Mary and Oliver* Emerson Dr. D. Roy and Diane A. Ferguson William R. and Karen W. Feth+

112

Joseph Z. and Betty Fleming (Miami) Scott A. Foerster Joan Alice Ford Michael Frank and Patricia A. Snyder Barbara and Peter Galvin Joy E. Garapic Dr. and Mrs. Adi Gazdar Brenda and David Goldberg Mr. and Mrs. Randall J. Gordon+ Angela and Jeffrey Gotthardt Harry and Joyce Graham Mr. Paul Greig AndrĂŠ and Ginette Gremillet Ms. Nancy L. Griffith The Thomas J. and Judith Fay Gruber Charitable Foundation Robert N. and Nicki N. Gudbranson+ David and Robin Gunning Gary Hanson and Barbara Klante Mr. Robert D. Hart Clark Harvey and Holly Selvaggi+ Iris and Tom Harvie+ Henry R. Hatch Robin Hitchcock Hatch Dr. Robert T. Heath and Dr. Elizabeth L. Buchanan+ Janet D. Heil* Anita and William Heller+ Mr. Loren W. Hershey Patrick* and Jean Holden Steve and Mary Hosier Elisabeth Hugh+ David and Dianne Hunt Mr. and Mrs. Brinton L. Hyde

Individual Annual Support

Pamela and Scott Isquick+ Donna L. and Robert H. Jackson Mr. and Mrs. Richard A. Janus Joela Jones and Richard Weiss Andrew and Katherine Kartalis Milton and Donna* Katz Dr. Richard and Roberta Katzman Dr. and Mrs. Richard S. Kaufman Mr. and Mrs. Christopher Kelly Dr. and Mrs. William S. Kiser James and Gay* Kitson+ Mrs. Natalie D. Kittredge Rob and Laura Kochis Tim and Linda Koelz+ Mr. and Mrs.* S. Lee Kohrman Mr. Clayton R. Koppes Mr. James Krohngold+ Mr. and Mrs. Peter A. Kuhn+ Mr. and Mrs. Arthur J. Lafave, Jr. David C. Lamb+ Kenneth M. Lapine and Rose E. Mills+ Anthony T. and Patricia A. Lauria Dr. Edith Lerner Mr. Lawrence B. and Christine H. Levey+ Judith and Morton Q. Levin+ Dr. Stephen B. and Mrs. Lillian S. Levine+ Dr. Alan and Mrs. Joni Lichtin+ Mr. Rudolf and Mrs. Eva Linnebach+ Anne R. and Kenneth E. Love Robert and LaVerne* Lugibihl Elsie and Byron Lutman Ms. Jennifer R. Malkin Mr. and Mrs. Morton L. Mandel

The Cleveland Orchestra

Alan Markowitz M.D. and Cathy Pollard Mr. and Mrs. E. Timothy McDonel James and Virginia Meil Dr. Susan M. Merzweiler Loretta J. Mester and George J. Mailath Claudia Metz and Thomas Woodworth+ Lynn and Mike Miller+ Drs. Terry E. and Sara S. Miller Curt and Sara Moll Ann Jones Morgan+ Mr. John Mueller Lucia S. Nash Georgia and Carlos Noble (Miami)+ Richard and Kathleen Nord Thury O’Connor Mr. and Mrs. Peter R. Osenar Mr. Henry Ott-Hansen Mr. Robert S. Perry Nan and Bob Pfeifer+ Mr. and Mrs. Richard W. Pogue In memory of Henry Pollak Dr. and Mrs. John N. Posch+ Ms. Rosella Puskas Mr.* and Mrs. Thomas A. Quintrell

Mr. and Mrs. Roger F. Rankin Brian and Patricia Ratner Amy and Ken Rogat Carol Rolf and Steven Adler Dr. and Mrs. Michael Rosenberg (Miami) Dr. and Mrs. Ronald J. Ross Rosskamm Family Trust Robert and Margo Roth+ Dr. and Mrs. Robert C. Ruhl Mrs. Florence Brewster Rutter+ Drs. Michael and Judith Samuels (Miami) Patricia J. Sawvel Raymond T. and Katherine S. Sawyer Linda B. Schneider Dr. and Mrs. James L. Sechler Mr. Eric Sellen and Mr. Ron Seidman Vivian L. Sharp Mr. James E. Simler and Ms. Amy Zhang Naomi G. and Edwin Z. Singer+ The Shari Bierman Singer Family Drs. Charles Kent Smith and Patricia Moore Smith+ Roy Smith Mr. Eugene Smolik

Mr. and Mrs. William E. Spatz+ atz+ George and Mary Stark Mr. and Mrs. Donald W. Strang, rang, Jr. Stroud Family Trust Dr. Elizabeth Swenson+ Robert and Carol Taller+ Mr. and Mrs. Bill Thornton Dr. Russell A. Trusso Robert and Marti Vagi+ Robert A. Valente and Joan A. Morgensten+ Dr. Gregory Videtic and Rev. Christopher McCann Walt and Karen Walburn Dr. Beverly J. Warren Mr. and Mrs. Mark Allen Weigand+ Dr. Edward L. and Mrs. Suzanne Westbrook Tom and Betsy Wheeler Richard Wiedemer, Jr.+ Dr. and Mr. Ann Williams+ Bob and Kat Wollyung Anonymous

James Carpenter 2 seats (In memory of Christina) (Miami) Dr. Victor A. Ceicys Mr. and Mrs. James B. Chaney Dr. Ronald* and Mrs. Sonia Chapnick Mr. Gregory R. Chemnitz Mr. and Mrs. Homer D. W. Chisholm Dr. William and Dottie Clark Drs. John and Mary Clough Drs. Mark Cohen and Miriam Vishny Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Cohen (Miami) Mr. and Mrs. Mark Corrado Douglas S. Cramer / Hubert S. Bush III (Miami) Mr. and Mrs. Manohar Daga+ Karen and Jim Dakin Mrs. Frederick F. Dannemiller Mr. Kamal-Neil Dass and Mrs. Teresa Larsen+ Dr. Eleanor Davidson Mrs. Lois Joan Davis Michael and Amy Diamant Dr. and Mrs. Howard Dickey-White+ Dr. and Mrs. Richard C. Distad Maureen Doerner & Geoffrey White Carolyn J. Buller and William M. Doll Mr. George and Mrs. Beth Downes+ Ms. Mary Lynn Durham Mr. and Mrs. Ronald E. Dziedzicki Mrs. Mary S. Eaton Mr. and Mrs. Bernard H. Eckstein Esther L. and Alfred M. Eich, Jr.+ Erich Eichhorn and Ursel Dougherty Mr. S. Stuart Eilers Peter and Kathryn Eloff+ Harry and Ann Farmer

Mr. William and Dr. Elizabeth Fesler Mr. Paul C. Forsgren Richard J. Frey Mr. and Ms. Dale Freygang Peggy A. Fullmer Ms. Marilee Gallagher Mr. William Gaskill and Ms. Kathleen Burke Mr. Wilbert C. Geiss, Sr. Anne and Walter Ginn Dr.* and Mrs. Victor M. Goldberg Mr. and Mrs. David A. Goldfinger Dr. and Mrs. Ronald L. Gould Dr. Robert T. Graf Nancy F. Green (Miami) Ms. Anna Z. Greenfield Drs. Erik and Ellen Gregorie Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Griebling Dr. and Mrs. Franklin W. Griff Candy and Brent Grover Nancy and James Grunzweig+ Mr. and Mrs. John E. Guinness Mr. Davin and Mrs. Jo Ann Gustafson Dr. Phillip M. and Mrs. Mary Hall Douglas M. and Amy Halsey (Miami) Mr. and Mrs. David P. Handke, Jr. Elaine Harris Green Lilli and Seth Harris Barbara L. Hawley and David S. Goodman Matthew D. Healy and Richard S. Agnes In Memory of Hazel Helgesen Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Herschman The Morton and Mathile Stone Philanthropic Fund Dr. Fred A. Heupler Mr. Robert T. Hexter Dr. and Mrs. Robert L. Hinnes

Composer’s Circle gifts of $2,000 to $4,999 Mr. and Mrs. Charles Abookire, Jr. Ms. Nancy A. Adams Mr. and Mrs.* Robert J. Amsdell Mr. and Mrs. Jeffrey R. Appelbaum+ Mr. and Mrs. James B. Aronoff+ Art of Beauty Company, Inc. Ms. Patricia Ashton Steven Michael Auvil and Elise Hara Auvil Mr. and Mrs. Eugene J. Beer Dr. Ronald and Diane Bell Drs. Nathan A. and Sosamma J. Berger Mr. Roger G. Berk Barbara and Sheldon Berns Jayusia and Alan Bernstein (Miami) Margo and Tom Bertin John and Laura Bertsch Howard R. and Barbara Kaye Besser Ms. Deborah A. Blades Bill* and Zeda Blau Doug and Barbara Bletcher Georgette and Dick Bohr Mr. and Mrs. Richard H. Bole Irving and Joan M. Bolotin (Miami) Mrs. Loretta Borstein Lisa and Ronald Boyko Mr. and Mrs. David Briggs Mr. and Mrs. Henry G. Brownell Mrs. Frances Buchholzer J. C. Burkhardt Mr. and Mrs. Robert G. Busha Rev. Dr. Joan Brown Campbell and Rev. Dr. Albert Pennybacker Dr. and Mrs. William E. Cappaert John and Christine Carleton (Miami) Mrs. Millie L. Carlson+ Mr. and Mrs. Frank H. Carpenter

92 114

Individual Annual Annual Support Individual

The Cleveland Orchestra

Thomas and Mary Holmes Gail Hoover and Bob Safarz+ Dr. Keith A. and Mrs. Kathleen M. Hoover+ Dr. Randal N. Huff and Ms. Paulette Beech+ Ms. Laura Hunsicker Gretchen Hyland and Edward Stephens Jr. Ruth F. Ihde Dr. and Mrs. Scott R. Inkley William W. Jacobs Mr. and Mrs. Bruce D. Jarosz Robert and Linda Jenkins Dr. and Mrs. Donald W. Junglas Barbara and Michael J. Kaplan Mr. Donald J. Katt and Mrs. Maribeth Filipic-Katt Ms. Deborah Kaye The Kendis Family Trust: Hilary & Robert Kendis and Susan & James Kendis Bruce and Eleanor Kendrick Dr. Gilles* and Mrs. Malvina Klopman+ Fred* and Judith Klotzman Cynthia Knight (Miami) Drs. Raymond and Katharine Kolcaba+ Marion Konstantynovich Jacqueline and Irwin* Kott (Miami) Dr. Ronald H. Krasney and Vicki Kennedy+ Mr. Donald N. Krosin Alfred and Carol Lambo Mr. and Mrs. John J. Lane, Jr. + Mrs. Sandra S. Laurenson Dr. and Mrs. Arthur Lavin Michael Lederman Ronald and Barbara Leirvik Mr. and Mrs. Ernest C. Lemmerman Michael and Lois Lemr Irvin and Elin Leonard+ Mr. Alan R. Lepene Robert G. Levy+ Drs. Todd and Susan Locke Mary Lohman Ms. Mary Beth Loud Mrs. Idarose S. Luntz Damond and Lori Mace Ms. Linda Macklin David Mann and Bernadette Pudis Janet A. Mann Herbert L. and Ronda Marcus Martin and Lois Marcus Mr. and Mrs. Raul Marmol (Miami) Dr. and Mrs. Sanford E. Marovitz+ Ms. Dorene Marsh Dr. Ernest and Mrs. Marian Marsolais Mr. Fredrick Martin Ms. Amanda Martinsek Dr. and Mrs. William A. Mast Mr. Julien L. McCall Ms. Charlotte V. McCoy William C. McCoy Mr. and Mrs. Christopher J. McKenna Mr. and Mrs. Tom McLaughlin Ms. Nancy L. Meacham Mr. and Mrs. James E. Menger Mr. and Mrs. Trent Meyerhoefer Ms. Betteann Meyerson+ Beth M. Mikes Abby and Jake Mitchell Mr. and Mrs. William A. Mitchell+

Severance HallOrchestra 2017-18 The Cleveland

Mr. and Mrs. Thomas W. Morris Bert and Marjorie Moyar+ Susan B. Murphy Randy and Christine Myeroff Steven and Kimberly Myers+ Ms. Megan Nakashima Joan Katz Napoli and August Napoli Richard B. and Jane E. Nash Deborah L. Neale Robert D. and Janet E. Neary Steve Norris and Emily Gonzales Marshall I. Nurenberg and Joanne Klein Richard and Jolene O’Callaghan Mr. and Mrs. John Olejko Dr. and Mrs. Paul T. Omelsky Mr. Robert Paddock Mr. John D. Papp George Parras+ Dr. Lewis E. and Janice B. Patterson David Pavlich and Cherie Arnold Matt and Shari Peart Dr. and Mrs. Gosta Pettersson Henry Peyrebrune and Tracy Rowell Dr. Roland S. Philip and Dr. Linda M. Sandhaus+ Dale and Susan Phillip Maribel A. Piza (Miami)+ Mr. Carl Podwoski Dr. Marc A. and Mrs. Carol Pohl Brad Pohlman and Julie Callsen Mr. Robert and Mrs. Susan Price Ms. Sylvia Profenna Mr. Lute and Mrs. Lynn Quintrell Drs. Raymond R. Rackley and Carmen M. Fonseca+ Ms. C. A. Reagan Dr. Robert W. Reynolds Ms. Janet Rice David and Gloria Richards Ms. Carole Ann Rieck Mrs. Charles Ritchie Joan and Rick Rivitz Mr. D. Keith and Mrs. Margaret Robinson Mr. Timothy D. Robson+ Ms. Linda M. Rocchi Dick A. and Debbie Rose Mr. Kevin Russell (Miami) Mrs. Elisa J. Russo+ Fred Rzepka and Anne Rzepka Family Foundation Dr. Harry S. and Rita K. Rzepka+ Dr. Vernon E. Sackman and Ms. Marguerite Patton+ Fr. Robert J. Sanson Ms. Patricia E. Say+ Mr. Paul H. Scarbrough+ Robert Scarr and Margaret Widmar Bob Scheuer Don Schmitt and Jim Harmon Mr. James Schutte+ Mr. and Mrs. Alexander C. Scovil Dr. John Sedor and Ms. Geralyn Presti Ms. Kathryn Seider Charles Seitz (Miami) Drs. Daniel and Ximena Sessler+ Mr. Kenneth and Mrs. Jill Shafer Donna E. Shalala (Miami) Ginger and Larry Shane

Individual Annual Annual Support Support Individual

Harry and Ilene Shapiro Ms. Frances L. Sharp Larry Oscar and Jeanne Shatten+ Dr. and Mrs. William C. Sheldon+ Terrence and Judith Sheridan Mr. Richard Shirey+ Mr. and Mrs. Reginald Shiverick+ Michael Dylan Short Mr. Robert Sieck Laura and Alvin A. Siegal Howard and Beth Simon Ms. Ellen J. Skinner Ms. Anna D. Smith Ms. Janice A. Smith Sandra and Richey Smith+ Mr. and Mrs.* Jeffrey H. Smythe Mrs. Virginia Snapp Ms. Barbara Snyder Mr. Marc Stadiem Ms. Sharon Stahler Dr.* and Mrs. Frank J. Staub Mr. Alan L. Steffen Mr. Eduardo Stern (Miami) Frederick and Elizabeth Stueber Mr. Taras G. Szmagala, Jr. Kathy* and Sidney Taurel (Miami)+ Dr. and Mrs. Thomas A. Timko Mr.* and Mrs. Robert N. Trombly Steve and Christa Turnbull+ Mrs. H. Lansing Vail, Jr. Bobbi and Peter van Dijk Mrs. Stasia M. Vavruska Brenton Ver Ploeg (Miami) Teresa Galang-ViĂąas and Joaquin Vinas (Miami) Mr. and Mrs. Les C. Vinney George and Barbara von Mehren Mr. Norman Wain Ms. Laure A. Wasserbauer+ Margaret and Eric* Wayne+ Alice & Leslie T. Webster, Jr. Mr. Peter and Mrs. Laurie Weinberger Michael and Danielle Weiner Dr. Paul R. and Catherine Williams Ms. Claire Wills Richard and Mary Lynn Wills Elizabeth B. Wright+ William Ronald and Lois YaDeau Rad and Patty Yates Ken and Paula Zeisler Dr. William Zelei Mr. Kal Zucker and Dr. Mary Frances Haerr Anonymous (3)+ Anonymous (8)

+ has signed a multiyear

pledge (see information box earlier in this section)

* deceased

Thank You 115 93

THE

CLEVEL AND ORC HE STR A

2O1 7-18 CENTENNIAL SEASON

FRANZ WELSER-MÖST

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Perspectives

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SEVERANCE HALL

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AUTUMN

2026 Murray Hill Road, Suite 103, Cleveland, Ohio 44106 216.721.1800 email: info@livepub.com web: livepub.com

The Cleveland Orchestra

THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA

Corporate Support The Cleveland Orchestra extends heartfelt gratitude and partnership with the corporations listed on this page, whose annual support (through gifts of $2,500 and more) demonstrates their belief in the Orchestra’s music-making, education initiatives, and community presentations.

Annual Support gifts during the year prior to July 1, 2017 The Partners in Excellence program salutes companies with annual contributions of $100,000 and more, exemplifying leadership and commitment to musical excellence at the highest level.

PARTNERS IN EXCELLENCE $300,000 AND MORE

Hyster-Yale Materials Handling NACCO Industries, Inc. KeyBank The J. M. Smucker Company PARTNERS IN EXCELLENCE $200,000 TO $299,999

BakerHostetler Eaton Jones Day PNC Bank Raiffeisenlandesbank Oberösterreich (Europe) PARTNERS IN EXCELLENCE $100,000 TO $199,999

American Greetings Corporation Medical Mutual Nordson Corporation Foundation Squire Patton Boggs (US) LLP Thompson Hine LLP

The Cleveland Severance HallOrchestra 2017-18

$50,000 TO $99,999

DLR Group | Westlake Reed Leskosky Dollar Bank Foundation Forest City Litigation Management, Inc. Parker Hannifin Foundation Quality Electrodynamics (QED) Anonymous $15,000 TO $49,999

Buyers Products Company Case Western Reserve University Ernst & Young LLP Frantz Ward LLP The Giant Eagle Foundation Great Lakes Brewing Company Hahn Loeser & Parks LLP The Lincoln Electric Foundation The Lubrizol Corporation Materion Corporation MTD Products, Inc. North Coast Container Corp.

Ohio Savings Bank, A Division of New York Community Bank Olympic Steel, Inc. RPM International Inc. The Sherwin-Williams Company Tucker Ellis LLP

Corporate Annual Annual Support Support

$2,500 TO $14,999 Akron Tool & Die Company American Fireworks, Inc. BDI BestLight LED Brothers Printing Co., Inc. Calfee, Halter & Griswold LLP Cleveland Clinic Cleveland Steel Container Corporation The Cleveland Wire Cloth & Mfg. Co. Cohen & Company, CPAs Community Counselling Services Consolidated Solutions Cozen O’Connor (Miami) Dominion Energy Charitable Foundation Evarts Tremaine The Ewart-Ohlson Machine Company Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. Glenmede Adam Foslid/Greenberg Traurig (Miami) Gross Builders Huntington National Bank Littler Mendelson, P.C. Live Publishing Company Macy’s Miba AG (Europe) Northern Haserot Oatey Ohio CAT OMNOVA Solutions Oswald Companies Park-Ohio Holdings PolyOne Corporation RSM US, LLP Southern Wine and Spirits (Miami) Stern Advertising Struktol Company of America University Hospitals Ver Ploeg & Lumpkin (Miami) Anonymous (2)

87 117

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THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA

Foundation/Government Support The Cleveland Orchestra is grateful for the annual support of the foundations and government agencies listed on this page. The generous funding from these institutions (through gifts of $2,500 and more) is a testament of support for the Orchestra’s music-making, education initiatives, and community presentations.

Annual Support gifts during the year prior to July 1, 2017 $1 MILLION AND MORE

The Cleveland Foundation Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture $500,000 TO $999,999

The George Gund Foundation Ohio Arts Council $250,000 TO $499,999

Kulas Foundation John P. Murphy Foundation $100,000 TO $249,999

Paul M. Angell Family Foundation Elizabeth Ring Mather and William Gwinn Mather Fund David and Inez Myers Foundation The Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation $50,000 TO $99,999

The George W. Codrington Charitable Foundation GAR Foundation The Gerhard Foundation, Inc. Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation Martha Holden Jennings Foundation Myra Tuteur Kahn Memorial Fund of The Cleveland Foundation Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs (Miami) The Frederick and Julia Nonneman Foundation The Nord Family Foundation The Payne Fund

The Cleveland Severance HallOrchestra 2017-18

$15,000 TO $49,999

The Abington Foundation The Batchelor Foundation, Inc. (Miami) Mary E. & F. Joseph Callahan Foundation The Helen C. Cole Charitable Trust The Mary S. and David C. Corbin Foundation Mary and Dr. George L. Demetros Charitable Trust The Char and Chuck Fowler Family Foundation The Helen Wade Greene Charitable Trust National Endowment for the Arts Sandor Foundation Albert G. & Olive H. Schlink Foundation Jean C. Schroeder Foundation The Sisler McFawn Foundation Dr. Kenneth F. Swanson Fund for the Arts of Akron Community Foundation The Veale Foundation The Edward and Ruth Wilkof Foundation

$2,500 TO $14,999 The Ruth and Elmer Babin Foundation Dr. NE & JZ Berman Foundation The Bernheimer Family Fund of the Cleveland Foundation Eva L. and Joseph M. Bruening Foundation Cleveland State University Foundation The Cowles Charitable Trust (Miami) Elisha-Bolton Foundation The Harry K. Fox and Emma R. Fox Charitable Foundation The Jean, Harry and Brenda Fuchs Family Foundation, in memory of Harry Fuchs The Hankins Foundation The Muna & Basem Hishmeh Foundation Richard H. Holzer Memorial Foundation The Laub Foundation Victor C. Laughlin, M.D. Memorial Foundation Trust The Lehner Family Foundation The G. R. Lincoln Family Foundation The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation The Margaret Clark Morgan Foundation The M. G. O’Neil Foundation Paintstone Foundation Charles E. & Mabel M. Ritchie Memorial Foundation The Leighton A. Rosenthal Family Foundation SCH Foundation Miami-Dade County Public Schools (Miami) Harold C. Schott Foundation Kenneth W. Scott Foundation Lloyd L. and Louise K. Smith Memorial Foundation The South Waite Foundation The O’Neill Brothers Foundation The George Garretson Wade Charitable Trust The S. K. Wellman Foundation The Welty Family Foundation Thomas H. White Foundation, a KeyBank Trust The Wuliger Foundation Anonymous (2)

Foundation/Government Annual Foundation/Government Annual Support Support

85 119

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11001 Euclid Avenue Cleveland, Ohio 44106 CLEVELANDORCHESTRA.COM

LATE SEATING As a courtesy to the audience members and musicians in the hall, late-arriving patrons are asked to wait quietly until the first convenient break in the program, when ushers will help you to your seats. These seating breaks are at the discretion of the House Manager in consultation with the performing artists.

P H OTO BY S T E V E H A L L © H E D R I C H B L E S S I N G

PAGERS, CELL PHONES, AND WRISTWATCH ALARMS All electronic and mechanical devices — including pagers, cellular telephones, and wristwatch alarms — must be turned off while in the concert hall.

PHOTOGRAPHY AND SELFIES, VIDEO AND AUDIO RECORDING

of the world’s most beautiful concert halls, Severance Hall has been home to The Cleveland Orchestra since its opening on February 5, 1931. After that first concert, a Cleveland newspaper editorial stated: “We believe that Mr. Severance intended to build a temple to music, and not a temple to wealth; and we believe it is his intention that all music lovers should be welcome there.” John Long Severance (Cleveland Orchestra president, 1921-1936) and his wife, Elisabeth, donated the funds necessary to erect this magnificent building.

Designed by Walker & Weeks, its elegant Georgian exterior was constructed to harmonize with the classical architecture of other prominent buildings in the University Circle area. The interior of the building reflects a combination of design styles, including Art Deco, Egyptian Revival, Classicism, and Modernism. An extensive renovation, restoration, and expansion of the facility was completed in January 2000.

HAILED AS ONE

Severance Hall 2017-18

Severance Hall

Photographs of the hall and selfies to share with others can be taken when the performance is not in progress. However, audio recording, photography, and videography are prohibited during performances at Severance Hall. And, as courtesy to others, please turn off any phone or device that makes noise or emits light.

IN THE EVENT OF AN EMERGENCY Contact an usher or a member of house staff if you require medical assistance. Emergency exits are clearly marked throughout the building.

Ushers and house staff will provide instructions in the event of an emergency.

CHILDREN AND FAMLIES Regardless of age, each person must have a ticket and be able to sit quietly in a seat throughout the performance. Season subscription concerts are not recommended for children under the age of 8. However, there are several age-appropriate series designed specifically for children and youth, including: Musical Rainbows, (recommended for children 3 to 6 years old), and Family Concerts (for ages 7 and older).

CRYING CHILD? We understand that sometimes young children cannot sit quietly through a one-hour concert and need to get up and move or talk freely. For the listening enjoyment of those around you, we respectfully ask that you and your active child step out of the concert hall to stretch your legs (and baby’s lungs). An usher will gladly help you return to your seat at an appropriate break.

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orchestra news A.R.O.U.N.D T.O.W.N Recitals and presentations featuring Orchestra musicians Upcoming local performances by members of The Cleveland Orchestra include: A group of Cleveland Orchestra musicians are performing “an intimate evening of chamber music� as a benefit concert for the Broadway School of Music & th he Arts on Friday evening, April 27. Titled “An Evening in Paris,� the program is being held at the Polish p American Cultural Center (6501 Lansing Avenue, Cleveland 44105) and sstarts at 7:30 p.m. Cleveland Orchestra musicians involved are: Carolyn Gadiel Warner (piano), Mary Kay Fink (flute), Frank Rosenwein (oboe), Robert Woolfrey (clarinet), t Barrick Stees (bassoon), Jesse McCormick (horn), and Brian Thornton (cello), along with guest artist James Umble (saxophone) and stu-

THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA

dent artist Ania Lewis (cello). Bill O’Connell of ideastream WCLV will serve as host. Tickets are $70 per person, with a post-concert meet-thearrtists reception. More information by calling 216-641-0630 or by visiting www.broadwayschool.org.

Cleveland Or Orchestra musicians Mary Kay Fink (flute), Beth Woodside (violin), Lisa Boyko (vio ola), and Ralph Curry (cello) are taking partt in a special “Bernstein Centennial� concert, presented by the Cleveland Cham mber Collective on Friday evening, M May 4, and Saturday evening, May 5. The performances are free and open to the public. The Friday concert is at 8::00 p.m. at the Bop Stop (2920 Dettroit Road, Cleveland 44113).

Satturday’s takes place at 7:00 p.m m. at John Carroll University’s Saiint Francis Chapel in University Heights. More information at www.cllevelandchamber.com.

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Cleveland Orchestra News

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orchestra news

THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA

Summer Musical Offerings . . .

Orchestra performs at Severance Hall, Blossom, and downtown

Annual free downtown concert celebrates 1OOth Birthday: July 6

2O18 summer season celebrates Blossom’s 5Oth Anniversary

The Cleveland Orchestra returns to downtown Cleveland this year on Friday, July 6, on Mall B. The event marks the Orchestra’s 29th annual free downtown community concert and is the official celebration of the Orchestra’s 1OOth birthday in 2018. Brought to you by Cuyahoga Arts & Culture, this summer’s “Star-Spangled Spectacular” will be conducted by music director Franz Welser-Möst and is sponsored by KeyBank.

Musical selections include works by Wagner, Rossini, and Johann Strauss, as well as pieces

by Copland and John Philip Sousa, plus Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Complete details are being announced this spring and will be available online at clevelandorchestra.com.

Blossom Music Center marks its 50th anniversary in 2018, and The Cleveland Orchestra is planning a special season and summer-long celebration at its summer home. For this milestone year, the annual Festival is presented by The J.M. Smucker Company, with BLOSSOM special 5Oth Anniversary CelM U S I C F E S T I VA L ebration events sponsored by The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. Highlights include a season-opening concert YEARS 1968- 2O18 led by Franz Welser-Möst, a special presentation (July 8) of Roger Daltrey Performs The Who’s “Tommy”” with The Cleveland Orchestra, as well as three movie showings featuring the Orchestra performing the complete score soundtracks for each film, plus the traditional Fourth-of-July band concerts led

by Loras John Schissel (July 3 and 4).

The summer’s special Blossom 50th Anniversary Celebrations include a special Benefit Evening: A Symphony of Food & Wine on Friday, July 13, presented by Blossom Friends of The Cleveland Orchestra and featuring dinner onstage in the Pavilion with a wine auction and performance by members of the Orchestra. Honorary Chairs for the benefit evening are Peter Van Dijk, who designed the music center’s award-winning Pavilion, and his wife, Bobbi.

Since it opened in 1968, Blossom Music Center has become one of our nation’s premier outdoor performing spaces for music of all genres, drawing more than 400,000 visitors each summer, with cumulative attendance of more than 20 million in Blossom’s 50-year history. Blossom Music Center was created as the summer home of The Cleveland Orchestra and opened in July 1968 with performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony conducted by George Szell.

Festival tickets go on sale Tuesday, May 1.

For complete details, visit clevelandorchestra.com.

Summers@Severance offers three Friday musical evenings The Cleveland Orchestra’s fifth year of Summers@Severance in 2018 offers three Friday night concerts. This popular summer series offers a unique, enjoyable atmosphere to hear the Orches tra and socialize with friends and family in the beauty of University Circle surrounding Severance Hall.

The series is sponsored by Thompson Hine LLP and for 2018 takes place on July 27, August 10, and August 24, featuring a range of music from Brahms and Bartók, to Haydn and Mozart.

Series tickets (all three concerts as a package) are now on sale through the Severance Hall Ticket Office or online. Individual concert tickets go on sale beginning Tuesday, May 1, 2018, in person or online at clevelandorchestra.com.

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Cleveland Orchestra News

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orchestra news Read about the music on your cellphone before coming to the concert by visiting ExpressProgramBook.com Earlier this year, The Cleveland Orchestra launched a new website specifically for reading about the music ahead of time, easily and conveniently on your mobile phone. The new service, available online at ExpressProgramBook.com, provides the program notes and commentary about the musical pieces, along with biographies of the soloists and other artists in a simple-to-read format. “This is designed with a clear format and purpose,” comments program book editor Eric Sellen. “Just the basic information, no fancy layout, with text sized to make reading on a phone or other mobile device easy.”

The service was tested for several months, and is now fully available, with information posted a few days prior to most concerts. The site features only the core musical content of each printed book. The complete program book is available online in a “flipbook” format, for view-

THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA

TH E CLE VE L AN D O RCH E STR A

ing on a desktop computer or tablet. But because the flipbook format is harder to read on a mobile phone, the Orchestra chose to work with its program book partner, Live Publishing Company, to create the ExpressBook for reading on phones.

Flipbooks are available from the Orchestra’s main website at clevelandorchestra.com going back several years. The ExpressBook only has current season programs, beginning the week of any given concert and looking back several concerts.

Feedback and suggestions are welcome and encouraged, and can be sent by emailing to esellen@clevelandorchestra.com.

ExpressProgramBook.com

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Cleveland Orchestra News

The Cleveland Orchestra

orchestra news

THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA

Acclaimed in New York and Florida . . .

Below are a selection of excerpts from the many positive reviews of The Cleveland Orchestra’s concerts at New York’s Carnegie Hall and in Florida (Miami and Sarasota) earlier this year: “ 100, The Cleveland Orchestra May (Quietly) Be America’s Best! Sound the trum“At pets, peal the bells! The Cleveland Orchestra, which many consider one of the finest ensembles in the nation and the world, turns 100 this year. . . . The orchestra has long been renowned for its sound — precise, lithe and transparent, yet not lacking in power or color — and its disciplined work ethic, both honed by a series of strong maestros in the modern era. . . . Skeptics say that touring orchestras are steeled and on their mettle when they visit Carnegie Hall, adding, ‘They don’t play that way every week at home.’ The Cleveland Orchestra, as I learned during a season (1988-89) spent as its program annotator and editor, plays that way every week, no matter what or where.”

—James Oestreich, New York Times — “To my ears, this performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony was bold, brave, even radical.

There was barely a hint of the regret, nostalgia and wallowing that has become the norm, as with Bernstein. Instead, at ferocious speeds and with dauntless control, there was anger, brutality and violence, on the way to an almost lonely, unwelcome death. No fond farewell, this: Mr. Welser-Möst looked physically and emotionally drained by the end.”

—David Allen, New York Times “I join my colleagues in having been deeply impressed by the Clevelanders’ Mahler, particularly the inner movements, which tingled with tension between rough-hewn aggression and Viennese elegance. I wish my colleague critics David Allen and James Oestreich could have been there on Wednesday for Haydn’s ‘The Seasons,’ its silky warmth a contrast with the previous evening’s discomfiting intensity. The dancing exuberance of Autumn was especially impressive; the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus — all-amateur! — sang with both airiness and pungency throughout.”

—Zachary Woolfe, New York Times “The profundity of the instrumental ensemble as a whole in Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 was astounding, the fluctuations from one mood to another, one tempo to another, were seamless and the ensemble sound was magical. This was the performance of the season.”

—Classical Musical Network (New York) “Rather than relying on the sheer weight and power of one of the world’s great orchestras, Welser-Möst emphasized a strong sense of forward momentum, transparent textures and carefully calibrated levels of intensity to express the force of Beethoven’s musical ideas. . . .

Under Welser-Möst’s baton, the orchestra took a fleeter, less obviously portentous approach than many interpretations, expressing the work’s energy through propulsive force rather than volume. . . . In Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony, the orchestra played with such dynamic and interpretative range that the performance carried unusual subtlety and depth.”

—South Florida Classical Review

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Musicians Emeritus of

T H E

O R C H E S T R A

C L E V E L A N D

R

E

T

I

R

E

D

M

U

S

I

C

I

A

N

S

Listed here are the living members of The Cleveland Orchestra who served more than twenty years, all of whom now carry the honorary title of Emeritus. Appointed by and playing under four music directors, these 44 musicians collectively completed a total of 1549 years of playing in The Cleveland Orchestra — representing the ensemble’s ongoing service to music and to the greater Northeast Ohio community.

Listed by instrument section and within each by retirement year, followed by years of service.

FIRST VIOLIN Keiko Furiyoshi 2005 — 34 years Alvaro de Granda 2 2006 — 40 years Erich Eichhorn 2008 — 41 years Boris Chusid 2008 — 34 years Gary Tishkoff 2009 — 43 years Lev Polyakin 2 2012 — 31 years Yoko Moore 2 2016 — 34 years SECOND VIOLIN Richard Voldrich 2001 — 34 years Stephen Majeske * 2001 — 22 years Judy Berman 2008 — 27 years Vaclav Benkovic 2009 — 34 years Stephen Warner 2016 — 37 years VIOLA Lucien Joel 2000 — 31 years Yarden Faden 2006 — 40 years Robert Vernon * 2016 — 40 years CELLO Martin Simon 1995 — 48 years Diane Mather 2 2001 — 38 years Stephen Geber * 2003 — 30 years Harvey Wolfe 2004 — 37 years Catharina Meints 2006 — 35 years Thomas Mansbacher 2014 — 37 years BASS Harry Barnoff 1997 — 45 years Thomas Sepulveda 2001 — 30 years Martin Flowerman 2011 — 44 years HARP Lisa Wellbaum * 2007 — 33 years

FLUTE/PICCOLO John Rautenberg § 2005 — 44 years Martha Aarons 2 2006 — 25 years OBOE Robert Zupnik 2 1977 — 31 years Elizabeth Camus 2011 — 32 years CLARINET Theodore Johnson 1995 — 36 years Franklin Cohen * 2015 — 39 years Linnea Nereim 2016 — 31 years BASSOON Ronald Phillips 2 2001 — 38 years Phillip Austin 2011 — 30 years HORN Myron Bloom * 1977 — 23 years Richard Solis * 2012 — 41 years TRUMPET/CORNET Charles Couch 2 2002 — 30 years James Darling 2 2005 — 32 years TROMBONE Edwin Anderson 1985 — 21 years Allen Kofsky 2000 — 39 years James De Sano * 2003 — 33 years PERCUSSION Joseph Adato 2006 — 44 years Richard Weiner * 2011 — 48 years LIBRARIAN Ronald Whitaker * 2008 — 33 years

* Principal Emeritus § 1 2

Associate Principal Emeritus First Assistant Principal Emeritus Assistant Principal Emeritus

listing as of January 2018

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Appreciation

The Cleveland Orchestra

orchestra news

THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA

M . U . S . I .C . I . A . N S . A . L . U .T. E

The Musical Arts Association gratefully acknowledges the artistry and dedication of all the musicians of The Cleveland Orchestra. In addition to rehearsals and concerts throughout the year, many musicians donate performance time in support of community engagement, fundraising, education, and audience development activities. We are pleased to recognize these musicians, listed below, who volunteered for such events and presentations during the 2016-17 season.

Mark Atherton Martha Baldwin Charles Bernard Katherine Bormann Lisa Boyko Charles Carleton Hans Clebsch John Clouser Kathleen Collins Ralph Curry Marc Damoulakis Alan DeMattia Vladimir Deninzon Scott Dixon Elayna Duitman Bryan Dumm Mark Dumm Tanya Ell Kim Gomez Wei-Fang Gu Scott Haigh David Alan Harrell Miho Hashizume Shachar Israel Mark Jackobs Dane Johansen Joela Jones Richard King Thomas Klaber Alicia Koelz Stanley Konopka Mark Kosower Analisé Kukelhan Paul Kushious Jung-Min Amy Lee Yun-Ting Lee Emilio Llinás

Takako Masame Eli Matthews Jesse McCormick Daniel McKelway Donald Miller Michael Miller Robert O’Brien Peter Otto Chul-In Park Joanna Patterson Zakany William Preucil Lynne Ramsey Jeffrey Rathbun Frank Rosenwein Marisela Sager Jonathan Sherwin Thomas Sherwood Emma Shook Joshua Smith Saeran St. Christopher Corbin Stair Lyle Steelman Richard Stout Yasuhito Sugiyama Jack Sutte Kevin Switalski Gareth Thomas Brian Thornton Isabel Trautwein Robert Walters Carolyn Gadiel Warner Scott Weber Richard Weiss Robert Woolfrey Derek Zadinsky Jeffrey Zehngut

Severance Hall 2017-18

Special thanks to musicians for supporting the Orchestra’s long-term financial strength The Board of Trustees extends a special acknowledgement to the members of The Cleveland Orchestra for supporting the institution’s programs by jointly volunteering their musical services for several concerts each season. These donated services have long played an important role in supporting the institution’s financial strength, and were expanded with the 2009-10 season to provide added opportunities for new and ongoing revenuegenerating performances by The Cleveland Orchestra.

“We are especially grateful to the members of The Cleveland Orchestra for this ongoing and meaningful investment in the future of the institution,” says André Gremillet, executive director. “These donated services each year make a measureable difference to the Orchestra’s overall financial strength, by ensuring our ability to take advantage of opportunities to maximize performance revenue. They allow us to offer more musical inspiration to audiences around the world than would otherwise be possible, supporting the Orchestra’s vital role in enhancing the lives of everyone across Northeast Ohio.”

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“The Kiss” woodblock print

by Peter Behrens, 1898

Love is the whole thing.

We are only pieces.

Love is the sea of no end.

We are a drop of it.

Love brings forth hundreds of proofs.

We can find our way only through them.

The sky turns only with Love.

Without Love, even the stars Are eclipsed, extinguished.

With Love, hunched back dal become elif.

Once elif loses Love, it turns into dal.

The word is the Fountain of Life, Because it originates From the Love of the knowledge Of the real truth of things.

Don’t keep Love away from your Soul, So that your good deeds may bear fruit And keep growing.

—Jalāl ad-Dīn Rumi, 13th century

I write music with

an exclamation mark!

â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner, 1871, Munich, by photographer Franz Hanfstaengl.

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