Cleveland Orchestra Announces 2021-22 Season Return to Severance Hall

Last spring, I was taking a walk through Lake View Cemetery and met another woman out for a breath of fresh air. We stopped to talk about our mutual interests, and she, an avid musician, expressed her disappointment that at that point the Cleveland Orchestra had cancelled the remainder of its 2019-2020 season and was eagerly looking forward to the fall.

Alas, there was to be no live 2020-2021 season either, although the orchestra ramped up its digital presence with its Adella ap and online offerings such as its the Cleveland Orchestra: In Focus series.

But now things have changed and the orchestra has announced a full, live 104th season, kicking off at Severance Hall (The digital offerings will continue; as with many presenters, it discovered that these allowed it to reach a much-expanded audience). The season will open on Thursday October 14 with a concert appropriately titled “New Beginnings,” with music director Franz Welser-Möst conducting and cellist Alisa Weilerstein featured in Joan Tower’s Cello Concerto, co-commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra in its debut performance by the orchestra. That program will also include Sergei Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5 and Richard Strauss’s Macbeth, a  Symphonic Poem After Shakespeare’s Drama, also a Cleveland Orchestra premiere.

That program is indicative of a season with a renewed focus on the “new,” including an unprecedented number of new commissions and premieres, many by women composers such as Tower, Gabriella Smith and Sofia Gubaidulina. The orchestra will play thirty pieces it had never performed previously. In addition, ten musicians will be making their Cleveland Orchestra debuts.

The beloved holiday concerts will return with a full schedule. And the season will conclude in May 2022 with an opera festival around its performances of Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello, postponed from May 2021.

For complete information about the entire season and subscription and ticket information, go to clevelandorchestra/seasons-and-series/2021-22-severance/.

 

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