Sat 6/4 @ 7PM
Chances are all the free tickets for the Cleveland Orchestra’s annual MLK Day concert will be snapped up by the time you read this. (And no, we’re not talking about 2023 — the January 2022 concert was postponed due to the pandemic surge.)
But you can still hear it, because the Orchestra will be offering multiple ways to listen at home. It’ll be livestreamed for free on the Orchestra’s Adella app, Adella.Live, and youtube.com/clevelandorchestra and it will be broadcast live on 90.3 WCLV Classical 104.9, 89.7 WKSU, ideastream.org, and on Ideastream Public Media’s app.
The concert will focus on the music of Black composers including Dolores White, Mary D. Watkins, Carlos Simon, Brian Raphael Nabors, William Grant Still, and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, as well as traditional African-American gospel tunes such as “Deep River,” “He’s Got the Whole World,” “Seek the Lord,” and “Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit.” It will end with the Black National Anthem: James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
Vinay Parameswaran conducts the evening, which features soprano Jacqueline Echols Karamu’s Tony Sias narrating, with Dr. Williams Henry Caldwell directing the Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Chorus.
clevelandorchestra.com/community/mlk-42nd-celebration/