Sat 7/1 @ 8PM
Summer at Blossom Music Center with the Cleveland Orchestra means trotting out the program staples, the familiar pieces and composers every fan of orchestral music loves.
And there couldn’t be a more familiar and beloved pieces than Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 (“Choral”), which opens the orchestra’s 2023 Blossom season. I’ll bet you can even sing a chunk of it! I know I can.
That warhorse concludes an evening that continues a project embraced by some many orchestras and other classical music groups today: programming music by overlooked and underrepresented composers. African-American composer William Grant Still, whose short piece from 1943, Mother and Child, opens the evening, was a prolific 20th century composer, who attended both Wilberforce University and Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. We’ve heard more of his music here in the last couple of years than we had in decades.
Following it on the program is 20th-century American composer Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, written in 1947 to a poem by author James Agee, which waxes nostalgic about the pace and intimacy of family life in a small town with lyrics about lying on quilts in the yard with “my father, my mother, my uncle, my aunt” as Knoxville native Agee reflects in the voice of the child, “The stars are wide and alive/They seem each like a smile/Of great sweetness/And they seem very near.” Only four years later, Knoxville endured a race riot provoked by a lynch mob, one of many during that “Red Summer,” causing an exodus of Black citizens who weren’t seeing smiles of great sweetness in the Knoxville stars.
Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki leads the orchestra, the Blossom Festival Chorus, and soloists, soprano Felicia Moore, mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong, tenor Issachah Savage and bass Solomon Howard.
Get tickets here.