Apollo’s Fire, Cleveland’s baroque orchestra, is calling its 30th season “A Journey of Discovery,” although one might say that name appropriately belonged to its 2020-2021 season when it had to adapt to rapidly changing pandemic conditions — yet still managed to present much of the music it had planned.
The new season will including 31 subscription concerts of seven programs, as well as return engagements at Carnegie Hall and Severance Hall, and performances in Chicago; Sonoma, California; Vail/Beaver Creek, Colorado; Winston-Salem, North Carolina; and Worcester, Massachusetts. And the ensemble’s Founding Artistic Director Jeannette Sorrell will make her guest-conducting debut with the New York Philharmonic, joined by the Apollo’s Singers, for Handel’s Messiah December 14-18. That’s a nice clapback to those who told her three decades ago that women couldn’t conduct, leading to her formation of her own ensemble.
The season launches October 21-25 with “Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Rediscovered,” a celebration of the 18th-century Italian peasants who inspired Vivaldi’s music. It will perform “Violin Fantasy: Tracing the Path from Biber to Back” November 11-14. And they’ll perform Handel’s Messiah locally December 8-12 before taking it to New York. Programs for 2022 include “Lift Every Voice” (February 4-6); “Israel in Egypt: A Dramatic Oratorio (February 17-20); “Virtuoso Bach and Vivaldi (March 18-22); and “Mozart and the Chevalier (May 6-8).
Although much of the past season was virtual, Apollo’s Fire found that drove subscriptions to record numbers.“Thanks largely to AF’s new Watch-at-Home video series, launched in October 2019, Apollo’s Fire now enters its 30th Anniversary Season with a dramatically increased audience,” they share. “Subscriptions in the 2020-21 season grew by an extraordinary 30%, thus breaking all past records for number of subscribers.” In April 2020, they launched their “Attend in the Concert in Person or At Home” model, giving concertgoers the option to access the music in the way that felt most comfortable for them. They’ll continue to offer the option for five of its seven 2021-22 programs.
The ensemble’s busy season will also include the release of three new CDs: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons; O Jerusalem! – Crossroads of Three Faiths, and an album of Bach Cantatas.
For more information go to apollosfire.org.