The Cleveland Orchestra May 11-20, 2023 Concerts

MAY 11–20, 2023

concerts, conversations & ideas

Making American Dreams come true, that’s you.

Inspirational music, dazzling opera performances, and community-wide discussions all need your support. Now is the time to make your debut as a star supporter.

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The Girl of the Golden West

Capturing the Spirit of the Time

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The Humanities & the Human Experience

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Dreams of SelfInvention & Belonging

Biographies about the Music Director, Festival Curator, and participating musicians and collaborators

Welcome from the Cleveland Orchestra President & CEO

harnessing the power of arts & culture

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Letter from the Mandel Foundation

About the Festival

Opera in Three Acts

(La Fanciulla del West)

Opera Synopsis Opera Program Note

Daring to Dream

by Kunio Hara

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Concert

by Festival Curator Elena Dubinets

Festival Calendar

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Keynote Speaker

Isabel Wilkerson

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Revisiting Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West

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Dreams We’ve Dreamed; Songs We’ve Sung; Hopes We’ve Held

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Concert Program Note, Part I

Dreams Deferred, Dreams Transmogrified

by Kira Thurman

concert Program Note, Part II

by Douglas W. Shadle

About the Artists

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About The Cleveland Orchestra

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About The Cleveland Orchestra Chorus

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About Your Visit & Partner Institutions Scan the QR code for more festival information & details.

by Music Director Franz Welser-Möst

The Cleveland Orchestra is grateful to the following organizations for their ongoing generous support of The Cleveland Orchestra: the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and to the residents of Cuyahoga County through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

The Cleveland Orchestra is proud of its long-term partnership with Kent State University, made possible in part through generous funding from the State of Ohio.

The Cleveland Orchestra is also proud to have its home, Severance Music Center, located on the campus of Case Western Reserve University, with whom it has a long history of collaboration and partnership.

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from Th e Clevelan d Orch estra Presi dent & CEO

harnessing the power of arts & culture WELCOME TO THE INAUGURAL Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Opera Festival: The

American Dream. Over nine days, this ambitious festival will explore this theme through music, theater, art, film, literature, and conversation in more than a dozen events presented in partnership with 10 great institutions across Greater Cleveland.

The opening of this festival also marks the realization of a dream for the Orchestra.

For many years, we have wanted to grow our annual opera presentations­—­which are always highlights of the season­—­into a broader, community-wide dialogue. Opera with its ability to weave together music, poetry, philosophy, history, and just about any other subject, offers a unique opportunity to reach across boundaries and foster meaningful conversation. We are deeply thankful to the Mandel Foundation for embracing this vision as part of its longstanding support of the humanities as foundational to understanding the human experience.

We cannot ask for a better steward of this festival than Music Director Franz Welser-Möst, who already started The Cleveland Orchestra on this path more than 20 years ago. From his first days in Cleveland, Franz has championed opera for its musical, intellectual, and emotional qualities. With The Girl of the Golden West, he has chosen a superb opera that will once again delight both our Cleveland audience and our guests

left: Photo by Carl F. Waite, courtesy of The Cleveland Orchestra Archives | above: photo by Don Snyder

from all over the country, while inspiring a meaningful investigation of the identity of this country from 1910 through today.

With the keen insight of festival curator Elena Dubinets, we have assembled an impressive array of composers, writers, scholars, musicians, and thinkers across the humanities to investigate the concept of the American Dream. In her research, Elena discovered an uncanny coincidence: the term “the American Dream” was coined in 1931, the same year Severance Hall opened, both offering a bold vision for the future and the permission to strive for greatness. Nearly a century later, we revisit and reassess this promise that all people, regardless of their backgrounds, can fulfill their potential.

We are grateful to our partners who embraced the mission of this festival and have enriched it tremendously: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland Public Library, Local masons put the finishing touches on Henry Herring’s Art Deco design for the stone pediment that crowns Severance Music Center. Many of the artisans who worked on the construction of the building, which opened in 1931, were immigrants seeking a better life in the US.

Chautauqua Institution, the City Club of Cleveland, Ideastream Public Media, Karamu House, and Western Reserve Historical Society. I must also express my heartfelt gratitude to the musicians, staff, board, and volunteers of The Cleveland Orchestra, as well as everyone joining us in this ambitious and important endeavor.

André Gremillet President & CEO The cleveland orchestra

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f r o m t h e J a c k, J o s e p h a n d M o r t o n M a n d e l F o u n d at i o n

the humanities & the human experience AS WE EMBARK ON THE JOURNEY of this inaugural Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel

photo by Roger Mastroianni

Opera & Humanities Festival: The American Dream, we are given a unique opportunity to reflect on the meaning, purpose, and enduring spirit of the humanities.

We listen to music to feel inspired, to express joy, to process grief. We view works of art to witness beauty in its physical form. We immerse ourselves in literature, desiring to be transported to another world. We study language to communicate, to build connections outside of ourselves. We use the humanities as means to understand and enrich our own human experience in myriad ways.

We don’t need to look far to find examples of the intersectionality of the humanities, and their inextricable link to the human experience. Earlier this season when we heard the Orchestra perform Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, we met a man, grief-stricken at the loss of his dear friend, turning to Shakespeare to articulate his thoughts in print, and composing a suite of piano music to describe how his friend’s artwork made him feel. We don’t need to understand musical composition to understand the sentiment — the humanities are a powerful tool for seeking, exploring, and at times grappling with the meaning of life.

Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel identified the humanities as a pillar of their philanthropy because they understood them as embedded in the very fabric of daily life, for all of us. It is our hope that, through the Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival: The American Dream, audience members will engage with the themes on a personal level, using the performances and programming as a catalyst to reflect on, explore, and share their own lived experiences.

We would like to express our appreciation and congratulations to André Gremillet, Franz Welser-Möst, Elena Dubinets, and the talented musicians and dedicated staff of The Cleveland Orchestra as we look forward to what is certain to be an extraordinary inaugural festival.

Franz Welser-Möst leads The Cleveland Orchestra in a staged production of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen in May 2014.

Directed by Yuval Sharon, the popular production featuring animated scenery was revived in 2017.

Dr. Jehuda Reinharz President & CEO the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation Stephen H. Hoffman Chairman the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation

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a b o u t t h e f e s t i va l

Daring to Dream Elena Dubinets Festival Curator

The inaugural Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival explores how the American Dream shaped both Cleveland and the musical world of today

GIACOMO PUCCINI’S LA FANCIULLA DEL WEST (1910) was the first opera premiered by

the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Three years before that debut, Puccini made his first visit to New York to supervise the performances of Manon Lescaut and his most recent work, Madama Butterfly, at the same theater. At the time, he was looking for a subject for his next project when he came across David Belasco’s Broadway play The Girl of the Golden West. This typical Gold Rush-era story about love, penance, and redemption would soon be turned into a radically modern opera full of fascination with the New World by the famous Italian composer. The Met, America’s most important opera house, offered Puccini a lucrative contract to stage the first performances of La Fanciulla del West. It would have been a dream for any composer.

That same year and 10 blocks south, the well-known American ragtime pianist Scott Joplin finished working on his first opera. Titled after its young female protagophoto courtesy of the metropolitan opera archives

nist who led the way to education in her community, the opera Treemonisha was set on a former slave plantation in Texas and intended to celebrate African American The world premiere of La Fanciulla del West took place at the Metropolitan Opera in 1910, featuring tenor Enrico Caruso and soprano Emmy Destinn.

The opera captured the composer’s ideas of the American Dream through the Gold Rush-era story about love, penance, and redemption in the New World.

culture in the post-slavery era. But the New World’s establishment was not ready to embrace an opera on such a subject by a Black composer, and it was never produced in the composer’s lifetime. He spent his life savings on self-publishing the score of Treemonisha — all in vain — and died in poverty five years later. The opera was only rediscovered in 1970 and given its long-awaited world premiere in 1972. Though he was lauded as the “King of Ragtime,” Joplin could not attain recognition as a composer of classical opera and ballet, more “prestigious” genres than jazz and ragtime to which many Black musicians were pigeonholed. He was denied his ambitious American Dream.

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The examples of these two operas and their composers tell us much about the era of their creation and such essential topics as the underlying social contract in the United States, access to education, cultural placement and representation, and racism.

From May 11 to May 20, the inaugural Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival will explore the nature of the American Dream, showcasing composers who embodied it alongside those for whom it was kept out of reach. Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West — the focus of our festival — presents a particular (and rather narrow) view of what would come to be called the American Dream. The example of Joplin’s Treemonisha demonstrates the illusory nature of this concept; even though he created lasting, meaningful art, Joplin could not overcome structural barriers to achieve success.

The phrase “American Dream” was coined by James Truslow Adams in 1931 reflecting “…that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man.” It remains a thriving aspirational concept related to the promise

Historian James Truslow Adams coined the term “the American Dream” in his 1931 book The Epic of America. This aspirational concept expressed the idea of “... a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man.”

of this country that embraces optimism for the future and the ability to shape it, as well as recognition of every person’s potential as a dignified human being. However, for many the American Dream was and has been a dream, a cruel illusion, an unfilled promise. Some American composers were not able to, or chose not to, follow a traditional European classical music path but still managed to create masterworks in a completely individual idiom. It is their music that we will be exploring throughout this festival while addressing questions of race, gender, meritocracy, access, and chance in relation to the ideas that constitute the American left: photo courtesy of GRANGER

Dream: hope, promise and opportunity.

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Daring to Dream

The phrase “American Dream” was coined by James Truslow Adams in 1931 reflecting “…that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man.”

These lofty ideals are intrinsic to the creation of The Cleveland Orchestra. Founded Photo by Koss-Ertler Inc., courtesy of The Cleveland Orchestra Archives

in 1918 by the city’s early industrialist families, it was initially comprised of immigrants fleeing conflict and persecution in Europe. All seven of its music directors were born outside the US but found success within this country. For more than 100 years, the Orchestra has been an integral part of America’s cultural fabric and has functioned as the musical beating heart of a city that was one of the main destinations of the Great Migration as African Americans moved from the agrarian South to the industrial North in search of the American Dream. European musicians and American farm workers alike brought their talents to this city seeking to enrich their lives and to realize personal hopes and ambitions.

The Cleveland Orchestra’s home, Severance Hall, opened in 1931, the same year that the phrase “American Dream” was coined.

But how did this process shape Cleveland and the musical world of today? What does the future look like? Throughout the 10-day festival, we will examine these questions through performances, discussions, visual art, and many other events across Northeast Ohio.

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within the context of our festival. A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of the discourse-changing books Caste and The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, she brings an impassioned voice for demonstrating how history can help us understand ourselves, our country, and our current era of upheaval.

Her presentation will be complemented by musical works from the period of the Great Migration performed by musicians of The Cleveland Orchestra. Throughout the festival, we will hear music by composers who have, or have not, achieved their American Dream, performed by the Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, musicians and choruses from the Greater Cleveland community, and our esteemed guest soloists.

Among the main shortcomings of the American Dream that we are addressing at our festival is inequality: the likelihood of achieving the Dream often depends on circumstances out of one’s control, such as resources and opportunities available at birth. Social circles, access to education and health programs, as well as perceptions about race and gender create a gap in cultural expectations, which provides access to the American Dream for some individuals at the expense of others. The festival 10

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Daring to Dream

This family from Florida was part of the 6 million Black Southerners who fled Jim Crow laws to find greater opportunities in cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, and New York during the Great Migration. photo by Jack Delano, 1940 / courtesy of the Library of Congress

Our keynote speaker, Isabel Wilkerson, will situate the American Dream idea

programs underline the importance of African American musicians in the history of “classical” American music, celebrating such composers as Scott Joplin, Julia Perry, William Grant Still, and Florence Price, all of whom did not have the same access to resources as their white contemporaries. Also featured is the 2022 Pulitzer Prizewinning piece Voiceless Mass by Raven Chacon, a composer from the Navajo Nation.

In this work, Chacon considers the spaces in which we gather, the land upon which these spaces are built, and the voices of the suppressed people — all urgent subjects that need to be discussed with candor. In contrast, there are featured works by two well-known composer-immigrants to the U.S. who managed to successfully achieve their American Dream: the first-generation immigrant Edgard Varèse and the second-generation immigrant Bernard Herrmann.

In addition to orchestral, choral, and jazz concerts, there are a number of humanities events in close collaboration with wonderful partners in Cleveland. The Cleveland Museum of Art is offering guided tours of the artworks in its collection that consider aspects of the American Dream. Poetry of Langston Hughes and Julia De Burgos will be read at the Cleveland Public Library as part of the Youth Poetry Reading. The

Among the main shortcomings of the American Dream that we are addressing at our festival is inequality: the likelihood of achieving the Dream often depends on circumstances out of one’s control, such as resources and opportunities available at birth.

Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque has organized a screening of a film about John Adams’s opera Girls of the Golden West, which was inspired in part by librettist Peter Sellars’s research for a production of La Fanciulla del West. Karamu House is presenting The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin, a show about a Black woman’s path towards personal acceptance. A full festival calendar can be found on pages 12-14.

Finally, on the last day of the festival we are offering a pair of panel discussions: Examining the American Dream at Case Western Reserve University, exploring musical issues related to La Fanciulla del West and examining the social and cultural discourse of the American Dream idea as it has manifested itself in Cleveland. Throughout this afternoon and in culmination of our festival, presenters and audiences alike will acknowledge and fearlessly engage with difficult subjects, illusions, and limitations underlying one of the key concepts still uniting and dividing our society.

Elena Dubinets is curator of the Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival: The American Dream.

An author and musicologist, she is also artistic director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival

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festival calendar THURSDAY

May 11 | 7:30PM Also running: Friday, May 12, at 7:30pm Saturday, May 13, at 7:30pm Sunday, May 14, at 3:00pm

FRAGMENTS 1 MANDEL CONCERT HALL AT SEVERANCE MUSIC CENTER

THE CLEVELAND FOUNDATION JELLIFFE THEATRE AT KARAMU HOUSE

Spanning three decades, Kristen Childs’s play follows Viveca Stanton as she blithely sails through the confusing worlds of racism, sexism, and Broadway showbiz until she’s forced to face the devastating effect that self-denial has had on her life. Nina Domingue directs this humorous musical that questions the toll assimilation takes on the Black artist in America.

Presented through a special agreement with Dramatist Play Service, Inc.

Cellist Alisa Weilerstein (above) juxtaposes movements from Bach’s cello suites with newly commissioned works, including a piece by Cleveland Orchestra Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow Allison Loggins-Hull, in an immersive production by director Elkhanah Pulitzer. A conversation with Weilerstein and her creative team follows the performance.

Alisa Weilerstein’s performance is sponsored by Tony and Diane Wynshaw-Boris.

festival calendar

MANDEL CONCERT HALL AT SEVERANCE MUSIC CENTER

SATURDAY

May 13 | 7:30pm

FRIDAY

May 12 | 7:30pm The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin

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United in Song!

A Free Community Choral Celebration

Ensembles from across the Greater Cleveland community including Humbly Submitted Gospel Chorus (above), Andy Andino and Voces Hispanas, Tri-C Vocal Arts Academy, Cleveland Orchestra Children’s Chorus, and others join host Orlando Watson for a joyful afternoon of song representing the diversity of the area.

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SATURDAY

May 13 | 2:00–4:00pm

The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin THE CLEVELAND FOUNDATION JELLIFFE THEATRE AT KARAMU HOUSE

l-r: photo by Lisa Sakulensky | photo courtesy of thisiscleveland.com | photo courtesy of facebook.com/humblysubmitted

THURSDAY

May 11 | 7:30pm

The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin

SATURDAY

Keynote Speaker: Isabel Wilkerson

ONGOING PROGRAMS

MANDEL CONCERT HALL AT SEVERANCE MUSIC CENTER

The American Dream: Community Voices

May 13 | 7:30pm

The acclaimed author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration and Caste speaks on themes of the inaugural Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival.

The program, moderated by Dan Moulthrop of the City Club of Cleveland, includes chamber music from members of The Cleveland Orchestra. A book signing with Ms. Wilkerson will immediately follow.

Presented in partnership with the City Club of Cleveland and livestreamed in collaboration with the Chautauqua Institution and Ideastream Public Media.

SUNDAY

May 14 | 3:00pm

THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART

In conjunction with the Opera & Humanities Festival, the Cleveland Museum of Art invited a variety of Cleveland residents and prominent figures in the community to each select a work of art from the museum’s collection that resonates with them around the festival’s multifaceted exploration of the American Dream. From May through August 2023, visitors to the Museum will find more than 20 pieces of art selected by community members and be able to read their thoughts about how such works evoke the American Dream in all its complexities. Tours of American Dream works of art selected and interpreted by community members will occur beginning in May and throughout the summer.

For tour schedules, visit clevelandart.org.

Also running: Wednesday, May 17, at 7:30pm Saturday, May 20, at 7:30pm

The Girl of the Golden West

l-r: photo by Roger Mastroianni | image courtesy of the cleveland museum of art

MANDEL CONCERT HALL AT SEVERANCE MUSIC CENTER

Music Director Franz Welser-Möst leads The Cleveland Orchestra and an acclaimed cast of today’s best opera singers in Giacomo Puccini’s opera — a story of love, loneliness, and attaining one’s dream — set during the California Gold Rush.

Samuel Robinson Gifford’s A Home in the Wilderness (1866), will be among the featured works at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Cleveland Reads

SUNDAY

May 14 | 3:00pm The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin THE CLEVELAND FOUNDATION JELLIFFE THEATRE AT KARAMU

The Cleveland Public Library and The Cleveland Orchestra are partnering with Cleveland Reads Citywide Reading Challenge to encourage everyone to pick up The Warmth of Other Suns by festival keynote speaker Isabel Wilkerson. The goal of the challenge is to collectively read 1 million books in 2023.

For more information, visit clevelandreads.com.

HOUSE

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May 16 | 7:00pm Land of Gold CLEVELAND INSTITUTE OF ART CINEMATHEQUE

This screening presents Jon Else’s documentary that goes behind the scenes of the 2017 premiere of Girls of the Golden West by the director/librettist Peter Sellars and composer John Adams. While working on a production of Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West, Sellars conceived of a new opera that tells often-ignored stories of the brutal collision between Indigenous cultures, European frontiersmen, freed slaves, and other immigrants in 19th-century California.

WEDNESDAY

May 17 | 7:30pm The Girl of the Golden West MANDEL CONCERT HALL

book, Blues People: Negro Music in White America, the performance will include Duke Ellington’s Come Sunday, Herbie Hancock’s Dolphin Dance, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, and Reid’s original compositions.

FRIDAY

May 19 | 12:00–1:00pm Youth Poetry Reading: Works of Langston Hughes and Julia De Burgos CLEVELAND PUBLIC LIBRARY, MAIN BRANCH

Cleveland Public Library writerin-residence Dr. Raquel M. Ortiz hosts this program featuring the poetry of Langston Hughes and Julia De Burgos read by middle school students from the Cleveland Metropolitan School District and accompanied by live music.

FRIDAY

AT SEVERANCE MUSIC CENTER

May 19 | 7:30pm

THURSDAY

Festival Concert: Dreams We’ve Dreamed; Songs We’ve Sung; Hopes We’ve Held

May 18 | 6:00pm Finding the Dream CLEVELAND HISTORY CENTER

Western Reserve Historical Society presents a solo concert by tenor Steven Weems with opening remarks from Dr. Regennia N. Williams, the Society’s Distinguished Scholar of African American History & Culture.

MANDEL CONCERT HALL AT SEVERANCE MUSIC CENTER

Julian Davis Reid — a pianist, producer, and composer — presents a reflection of his own experience as a Black musician, the descendent of voluntary and involuntary migrants.

Engaging with Amiri Baraka’s

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Examining the American Dream CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY, TINKHAM VEALE UNIVERSITY CENTER, BALLROOM A

12:00 — 2:00pm Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West and Its Influences Composer Allison Loggins-Hull and scholars Kira Thurman and Douglas W. Shadle address institutional problems related to underrepresented composers in the United States. Moderated by festival curator Elena Dubinets.

3:00 — 5:00pm Cleveland’s Cultural DNA and the American Dream: Past, Present, and Future Ideastream Public Media host Rick Jackson moderates an examination of how the American Dream has played out in Cleveland.

Dr. Regennia N. Williams (Western Reserve Historial Society), Cynthia Connolly (the City Club of Cleveland), Michael Jeans (Growth Opportunity Partners), Marcia Moreno (AmMore Consulting), and Karis Tzeng (MidTown Cleveland) join.

SATURDAY

The Girl of the Golden West MANDEL CONCERT HALL AT SEVERANCE MUSIC CENTER

SUNDAY

May 18 | 7:30pm

REINBERGER CHAMBER HALL AT SEVERANCE MUSIC CENTER

May 20 | 12:00–5:00pm

May 20 | 7:30pm

THURSDAY

The American Dream, the American Nightmare, and Black American Music

SATURDAY

May 21 | 2:00pm Franz Welser-Möst leads The Cleveland Orchestra in a program featuring works by Scott Joplin, Julia Perry, William Grant Still, Bernard Herrmann, Raven Chacon, and Edgard Varèse, representing a multiplicity of backgrounds, experiences, and viewpoints.

A pre-concert discussion between scholars Kira Thurman and Douglas W. Shadle will take place at 6:30pm in Reinberger Chamber Hall.

Honoring Black Composers THE CLEVELAND FOUNDATION JELLIFFE THEATRE AT KARAMU HOUSE

Allison Loggins-Hull, The Cleveland Orchestra’s Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow, curates a chamber music program highlighting the work of Black musicians that reflect the festival’s theme of the American Dream, featuring musicians of The Cleveland Orchestra.

photo by Roger Mastroianni

TUESDAY

key event

SATURDAY, MAY 13 | 7:30 PM Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center

KEYNOTE SPEAKER:

Isabel Wilkerson Moderated by Dan Moulthrop, CEO of The City Club of Cleveland Cleveland Orchestra musicians Wei-Fang Gu, Jeffrey Zehngut, and Isabel Trautwein (violins), Eliesha Nelson (viola), and David Alan Harrell (cello) perform works by Carlos Simon, Dolores White, and Florence Price. A book signing with Ms. Wilkerson immediately follows the event.

Over the decades, perhaps the wrong questions have been asked about the Great Migration. Perhaps it is not a question of whether the migrants brought good or ill to the cities they fled to or were pushed or pulled to their destinations, but a question of how they summoned the courage to leave in the first place or how they found the will to press beyond the forces against them and the faith in a country that had rejected them for so long.

By their actions, they did not dream the American Dream, they willed it into being by a definition of their own choosing. They did not ask to be accepted but declared themselves the Americans that perhaps few others recognized but that they had always been deep within their hearts.

— Isabel Wilkerson, excerpt from The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of American’s Great Migration

photo by Ron Sachs/CNP, courtesy of dpa picture alliance/Alamy Stock Photo

Presented in partnership with the City Club of Cleveland.

Ms. Wilkerson’s appearance is supported in part

by Jayne Zborowsky.

Additional funding is provided by Cathy Lincoln as part of her support for the Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival.

The livestream of this event on adella.live and

by Chautauqua Institution on CHQ Assembly at assembly.chq.org, is presented in partnership with Ideastream Public Media.

Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, has become a leading figure in narrative nonfiction, an interpreter of the human condition, and an impassioned voice for demonstrating how history can help us understand ourselves, our country, and our current era of upheaval.

Through her writing, Wilkerson brings the invisible and the marginalized into the light and into our hearts. Through her lectures, she explores with authority the need to reconcile America’s karmic inheritance and the origins of both our divisions and our shared commonality.

Her debut work, The Warmth of Other Suns, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the Lynton History Prize from Harvard and Columbia Isabel Wilkerson being presented the 2015 National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama at the White House on September 22, 2016.

the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival

Universities, and the Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize and was shortlisted for both the Pen-Galbraith Literary Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

She is a native of Washington, DC, and a daughter of the Great Migration, the mass movement that she would go on to write about. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1994, as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times, making her the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism. She then devoted 15 years and interviewed more than 1,200 people to tell the story of the six million people, among them her parents, who defected from the Jim Crow South.

Her most recent book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, was called by the venerable British bookseller, Waterstone, an “expansive, lyrical and stirring account of the unspoken system of divisions that govern our world.”

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Revisiting Puccini’s

the girl of the

golden west

Puccini’s tale of love and loneliness set in the American West is a bold vision by one of the greatest musical dramatists Franz Welser-Möst cleveland orchestra Music Director, Kelvin Smith Family Chair

THERE ARE TWO MAIN REASONS for choosing Puccini’s La Fanciulla

del West as the center of the inaugural Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival. As with all of the operas we’ve presented over the years, I first look for pieces that I would love to hear The Cleveland Orchestra play, and this Puccini opera has so much to offer musically.

The second reason is that Fanciulla is often thought of as a kitschy “Cowboy Opera,” which does not do it justice. This festival presents the opportunity to listen to its remarkable score with open ears and consider anew its themes of loneliness, belonging, and redemption. ΩΩΩ

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I first conducted Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West while I was music director at the Zurich Opera House. I was on my way back to Switzerland after guest conducting in Chicago when I got a phone call that the conductor of the upcoming production of Fanciulla had dropped out. I had only heard the piece once in my life before, but being music director you sometimes have to play fire brigade and step in at a moment’s notice.

I immediately arranged for someone to meet me at the airport with the score. In this special case, I also asked for a recording — which I rarely use — but was necessary days. I had to learn the entire opera over that time.

As luck would have it, I conducted another Italian verismo opera, Giordano’s Madame Sans-Gêne, the year before with the greatest teacher of the genre: the legendary soprano Mirella Freni. Unlike many musicians who take liberties with this style by elongating a phrase here or embellishing a passage there, Mirella Freni was extremely meticulous in following the score. Her advice was: “these guys, Verdi and Puccini, knew absolutely what they wrote. Just do what’s on the page.”

So much of Puccini’s music gets reduced to hits such as the first tenor aria in La Bohème or “Nessun dorma,” and can easily descend into well-worn clichés. By taking his music extremely seriously and following his instructions to the detail, the inherent drama in the score naturally comes out to riveting effect. Like Mirella Freni, conductor Arturo Toscanini, who led the premieres of Fanciulla and later Turandot, was meticulous.

The same also can be said of his contemporary, Victor de Sabata, a great Italian conductor. When you listen to their recordings, you hear none of these sugary, overly sentimental affectations, but rather purposeful music that transports you to a specifically rendered time and place.

Puccini could describe the furniture on stage with his music. For instance, in Act I of Fanciulla when the Wells Fargo carriage is about to arrive, the orchestra’s music imitates a galloping horse. Later in the act, when Minnie is reading the Bible to the miners you hear the pages of their books turning in the orchestra. He is so descriptive 20

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Revisiting Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West

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by Frederic Edwin Church is among the many works included in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Community Voices initiative, on view from May to August 2023. See page 13 for more information. above: Giacomo Puccini (left) and Arturo Toscanini captured in 1910, when both were in New York for the premiere of The Girl of the Golden West. right: In creating The Girl of the Golden West, Puccini used a familiar source: playwright David Belasco who also penned Madame Butterfly.

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because rehearsals started in three

the audience can immediately and entirely visualize the scene he is painting.

Likewise, he is a master of distilling the flavor of a particular place and had a genius for absorbing its distinctive characteristics, of course in his own Italian way. La Bohème radiates the charms of Paris, while Madama Butterfly depicts some of the essence of Japan.

For The Girl of the Golden West, he looked to America for inspiration.

That inspiration came when Puccini traveled to New York in 1907 for the first productions of Madama Butterfly

right: image courtesy of INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo | above, l-r: image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons | image courtesy of Lebrecht Music & Arts/Alamy Stock Photo

and Manon Lescaut at the Metropolitan Opera. During his visit, he went to see the Broadway show The Girl of the Golden West by David Belasco (who coincidently also wrote the source material for Butterfly). The themes

[Puccini] is master of distilling the flavor of a particular place and had a genius for absorbing its distinctive characteristics… and compelling love story of the play along with the vibrant and diverse sounds of New York stuck with Puccini, and on his way back to Italy, he requested an Italian translation of Belasco’s script.

Right from the opening of the opera, we hear that Broadway flair, and as the miners and cowboys enter the scene Puccini draws an almost Coplandesque soundscape more than 30 years before Appalachian Spring was written. Sometimes the opera has an almost jazzy inflection, and we know that Puccini referenced traditional and Indigenous music from the United States as he was writing the score.

I should note that it is also terribly difficult to conduct because there are so many tempo changes. Most people don’t believe me, but I find the first act of Fanciulla harder to conduct than Berg’s Wozzeck. It’s true!

Set in an isolated camp in California, a state that Puccini never visited, Fanciulla examines the corrosive nature of loneliness and contrasts it with the redemptive qualities of companionship the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival

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and love. The second act is anchored by a soaring love duet — along the lines of what we expect from Puccini — but this music is so moving and so well-crafted that, in the 1950s, Dimitri Mitropoulos performed the entire second act in Florence without singers to prove just how great an orchestral composer Puccini was. Hearing The Cleveland Orchestra perform this music will be a great delight.

At the same time, Puccini was very aware of the changing culture around him. He attended the Austrian premiere of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome in 1906 — which had caused a scandal at its first performances in Dresden — and he saw it again a year later in Naples while writing Fanciulla. He was familiar with the music of Debussy, saw the second performance ever of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and attended Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. At the beginning of the 20th century, as the world was going in so many different directions, Puccini tried to keep in touch with all of them.

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Revisiting Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West

Giacomo Puccini was fascinated by both cultural and technological advances of the modern age. Along with seeking out performances of new, influential works, he bought this state-of-theart De Dion Bouton at the 1901 World’s Fair in Milan.

photo courtesy of INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo

At the beginning of the 20th century, as the world was going in so many different directions,Puccini tried to keep in touch with all of them.

Though he found inspiration in these new soundworlds, Puccini never resorted to pastiche. Instead, he synthesized them within his own style to great dramatic effect.

One such example is the introduction of Act Three, which opens in the midst of a manhunt for the tenor Dick Johnson while the opera’s heroine and his love interest, Minnie, agonizes over his fate. Puccini describes how bereft the souls of the main characters are using this stark modern language.

In choosing an American subject and premiering it in an opera house in the US, Puccini became the first opera composer of his stature to seek success in this country.

From this history springs the theme of our festival: The American Dream, a concept that resonates throughout the opera. The miners, who are hoping to find fortunes during the California Gold Rush, remind us that they are immigrants and sing of their loved ones back in their homelands. Puccini also shows that their ambitions of striking gold and getting rich come at the expense of characters who are indigenous to California, whose claim to their native lands has been usurped. It’s astonishing to think that Puccini absorbed these societal issues into his work more than a century ago.

Great art transcends its time and place, and Puccini’s La Fanciulla is much more than a quaint cowboy opera set in the American frontier. In its characters we see our need for companionship, acceptance, and love; in its music we hear the fusion of old world and new in a bold artistic vision by one of our greatest musical dramatists; and

image courtesy of the cleveland museum of art

its themes, which infuse this festival, continue to provoke debate and dialogue.

First violinist Isabel Trautwein selected William Sidney Mount’s The Power of Music (1847) as one of the Community Voices featured at the Cleveland Museum of Art from May to August. Mount’s painting vividly depicts the uniting quality of music despite racial divisions of the time. See page 13 for more information.

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SUNDAY, MAY 14 | 3:00 PM WEDNESDAY, MAY 17 | 7:30 PM SATURDAY, MAY 20 | 7:30 PM Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center

The Girl of the Golden West

(La Fanciulla del West) Opera in Three Acts The Girl of the Golden West is presented with support from the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation and The National Endowment for the Arts.

Giacomo Puccini composer Guelfo Civinini and Carlo Zangarini librettists Based on the play The Girl of the Golden West

by David Belasco

C AS T Tamara Wilson, Minnie Roman Burdenko, Jack Rance Limmie Pulliam, Dick Johnson Tony Stevenson, Nick Scott Conner, Ashby Iurii Samoilov, Sonora Owen McCausland, Trin Joseph Lattanzi, Sid

The Cleveland Orchestra

Benjamin Taylor, Bello

Franz Welser-Möst conductor

Joseph Tancredi, Harry Alex McKissick, Joe Joseph Barron, Happy Kyle Miller, Jim Larkens Zachary Altman, Billy Jackrabbit

photo by Roger Mastroianni

Brynn Baudier Production Stage Manager Jacqueline Kaminski Assistant Stage Manager Tamara Wilson and Limmie Pulliam return to The Cleveland Orchestra for their role debuts as Minnie and Dick Johnson.

Chris Auerbach-Brown Supertitle Operator

Taylor Raven, Wowkle John Brancy, Jake Wallace Michael Adams, Jose Castro Men of the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus

SuperTitle System courtesy of DIGITAL TECH SERVICES, LLC

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Synopsis

The Girl of the Golden West ACT I: THE POLKA SALOON AT DUSK | 60 MINUTES INTERMISSION | 20 MINUTES ACT II: MINNIE’S CABIN LATER THAT EVENING | 45 MINUTES ACT III: THE CALIFORNIA REDWOOD FOREST A FEW WEEKS LATER | 30 MINUTES

ACT I

THE POLKA SALOON AT DUSK Set during the California Gold Rush of 1849–50, the opera opens as the miners return back to camp after a long day. Nick, the bartender at the Polka Saloon, greets them. A traveling minstrel, Jake Wallace, sings a sentimental song. It provokes one of the miners, Jim Larkens, to yearn for his homeland of Cornwall. A collection is taken up to provide him with funds to travel home.

A group of men playing cards accuse Sid of cheating. Sheriff Jack Rance intervenes and pins a pair of cards to Sid’s jacket as a sign of his deceit.

A Wells Fargo agent named Ashby then shows up with news that he’s been tracking the notorious bandit called Ramerrez. Rance toasts Minnie, the owner of the Polka Saloon, as his future wife causing Sonora to be jealous, and the two men brawl. Tensions are calmed when Minnie enters the saloon with her Bible, which she reads to the men. When they are alone, Rance confesses his feelings to Minnie, but she says that she’s waiting for true love.

A stranger named Dick Johnson, claiming he’s from Sacramento, enters the bar. Minnie recognizes him as someone she once met. Rance orders him to leave, but Minnie wishes for Johnson to stay, which he does. As Johnson leads Minnie in a waltz, a member of the Ramerrez gang, Castro, is dragged into the bar. Professing that he has no loyalty to Ramerrez, Castro offers to lead Ashby to the bandit’s camp. In an aside, Castro tells Johnson, whose true identity as Ramerrez in now revealed to the audience, that this is a ruse to empty out the saloon in an attempt to rob it. He instructs Johnson to whistle when the coast is clear. Castro leads Ashby and the other men away.

Left alone, Minnie tells Johnson of her life and invites him to her cabin for dinner. She also shows him where the miners store their gold. A whistle is heard from outside, but Johnson does not return it.

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ACT II

MINNIE’S CABIN LATER THAT EVENING The second act opens on Minnie’s servant Wowkle, a Native American, singing a lullaby to her child while squabbling with the father of the child, Billy Jackrabbit. Minnie enters ahead of Johnson and begins to tidy — she’s never hosted a male visitor before. Johnson arrives and expresses his love, and the two kiss. Snow begins to fall, and Minnie suggests Johnson stay for the night.

But soon shots are heard outside, and Johnson hides. Rance, Ashby, and several men enter the cabin on the heels of Ramerrez, who they discovered was the stranger at the saloon. Minnie denies having seen him, and the men leave. Hurt at his lies, Minnie confronts Johnson and throws him out of her home. Another shot rings out, and Johnson stumbles back to the cabin; he is wounded. Minnie takes him in and hides him in the attic this time. Rance returns following Johnson’s trail, powers his way into cabin, and forces himself on Minnie. She is able to fight him off, and he is about to leave a second time when a drop of blood lands on his hand. Minnie now pleads for Johnson’s life.

She challenges Rance to a game of poker: if he wins, she will be his; if he loses, Johnson goes free. She hides winning cards in her stockings when Rance isn’t looking and the con produces a winning hand. Thwarted, Rance leaves.

ACT III

THE CALIFORNIA REDWOOD FOREST A FEW WEEKS LATER Johnson’s wounds have healed, and he is on the run again from Rance’s men and Ashby, who eventually capture him. They prepare to hang him. Johnson’s only request is to not tell Minnie of his capture so that she can continue to believe that he is free and far from danger. But as the noose is lowered over his head, Minnie rides in carrying a gun. Her pleas for Johnson’s release are ignored. She reminds the miners of all that she has done for them, and they relent freeing their prisoner. Johnson and Minnie ride off together.

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o p era p ro g ra m n ot e

Dreams of Self-Invention & Belonging Kunio Hara Associate Professor of Music History, University of South Carolina

Puccini’s opera finds resonance in the evolving notion of the American Dream

THE PHRASE “AMERICAN DREAM” WAS COINED by James Truslow Adams in his book

The Epic of America published in 1931 during the onset of the Great Depression. The idea of the American Dream, the aspiration for self-improvement and upward social mobility attained through individual hard work in an egalitarian society, turns out to be a resilient one, adaptable to changing circumstances over the years. Nevertheless, applying this term anachronistically to Giacomo Puccini’s 1910 opera, La Fanciulla del West, could be considered a stretch. In fact, it is probably safe to say that Puccini did not seek to present any coherent interpretation he may have had of the American Dream with the work. Yet, because the opera is based on American playwright David photo courtesy of the metropolitan opera archives

Belasco’s popular frontier drama, The Girl of the Golden West (1905), and it received its world premiere in New York at the Metropolitan Opera, La Fanciulla del West does engage with cultural and social concerns that circulated in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. One of them is the perception of the American Western Frontier as an open space for self-renewal and self-actualization that resonates with the idea of the American Dream. Indeed, in Belasco’s play and Puccini’s opera, we witness Emmy Destinn performed the role of Minnie in the world premiere of La Fanciulla del West at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1910.

individuals struggling to transform themselves, to shed their pasts and to fashion new lives against the majestic backdrop of the Wild West. Their dreams, however, are not singular but diverse and often in conflict with each other, forcefully propelling the drama of the opera forward.

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Following the convention of 19th-century Italian opera, La Fanciulla del West opens with a crowd scene where the miners camping in the foothills of the Cloudy Mountains gather in Minnie’s tavern, the Polka. Puccini and his librettists, Guelfo Civinini and

The miners of the opera manifest dreams of wealth, betterment, and upward mobility.

Carlo Zangarini, do not spell out the ambitions of these men except for their almost seem to strive for their goals through the acquisition of wealth, whether through the backbreaking work of mining that tests their physical strength or through a game of chance that challenges their mental agility and good fortunes. In both Belasco’s play and Puccini’s opera, the miners also attend Minnie’s makeshift Bible school in which they willingly receive rudimentary instructions in literacy and strive to attain gentlemanly manners, pointing to the important role that education plays in the process of upward social mobility. At the same time, the miners’ propensity to blow off steam through drinking, dancing, and gambling reminds us of the host of money-draining distractions in their daily lives.

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photo courtesy of the metropolitan opera archives

unanimous desire to obtain an emotional intimacy with Minnie. Nevertheless, they

Another somewhat surprising obstacle that the miners face in their quest for selfactualization is homesickness. The sentiment plagues Larkens, a melancholic miner who longs to be reunited with his folks back home on their farm, across the Atlantic Ocean in Cornwall. His pain is exacerbated by the on-stage performance of Jake Wallace, the wandering camp minstrel, whose aria “Che faranno i vecchi miei” (What will my old folks do) reflects on the lives of the families, friends, and pet dogs that the miners have left behind. At the conclusion of the aria, Larkens breaks down in tears begging his fellow miners to take him home. Moved by his show of raw emotions, another miner, Sonora, starts a collection for him. This moving act of compassion and generosity points to the strong fraternal bond that binds this community of miners. Yet this gesture also posits a dilemma that the miners face between being persuaded by the communally oriented act of charity and upholding the individually driven ideal of self-reliance.

While Larkens obtains his desire to return home through his show of emotion and the kindness of others, the three main protagonists of the opera — Jack Rance, Dick Johnson, and Minnie — resort to darker means of brute force and trickery to realize their dreams. However, the dreams they espouse do not fit the conventional mold of the American Dream, measured through the acquisition of material wealth and social standing. Instead, their desires are largely directed toward obtaining a fulfilling romantic relationship, which suggests Puccini’s concession to the conventions of 19th-century operatic narrative. Yet their aspirations do resonate with the notion of the American Dream in that they all see such romance as a necessary step for self-renewal and self-fulfillment.

…the dreams they espouse do not fit the conventional mold of the American Dream, measured through the acquisition of material wealth and social standing.…

Yet their aspirations do resonate with the notion of the American Dream in that they all see such romance as a necessary step for self-renewal and self-fulfillment.

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When he is left alone on the stage with Minnie halfway through Act I, Jack Rance, the dour and brooding sheriff of the mining camp, communicates his love for Minnie and offers her $1,000 for a single kiss. Minnie tries to deflect his approach with humor and irony. At one point she reminds him of his wife back home, but Rance continues to pester her with escalating demands, even making an offer to marry her. The exchange continues until Minnie flashes the pistol she keeps to protect herself. Rance backs off but also makes his feelings heard in a brief aria, “Minnie, dalla mia casa son partito” (Minnie, when I left my home), a surprisingly candid and vulnerable confession from an otherwise emotionally stoic character. Not only does he claim that he feels no regrets about leaving his home, he also confesses that nobody has ever loved him where he came from. Now, finding himself alone in the Wild West, his embittered heart only trusts in what gold can achieve. Yet for a single kiss from Minnie, Rance proclaims, he would give a fortune.

In the dialogue between Minnie and Rance leading up to this aria, Puccini explores a novel harmonic language, filled with whole-tone sonorities and parallel chords, that perfectly matches the unsettling mood of the scene. Once Rance starts his monologue, however, Puccini shifts to a more conventional, chromatically enriched harmonic language under a broad melody that casts Rance’s emotional outpouring in a more familiar light. Combining with the arching phrases that gradually push Rance’s voice to its upper limit, these musical components cannot but add to the sense of longing for an unattainable ideal that seems to haunt the Sheriff.

In the Wild West, Rance appears to have achieved his American Dream. He has succeeded in climbing up the social ladder of the mining camp and transformed himself into a sheriff with a title that now guarantees him respect and influence among the community of men. Yet, Rance is a solitary man still desperately unhappy about his sense of isolation. He seeks to connect with Minnie and through her achieve a true sense of belonging within the community. This is the unceasing drive that motivates him to pursue Minnie and to eliminate his chief obstacle to achieving that goal, the mysterious gentleman from Sacramento, Dick Johnson.

…Puccini explores a novel harmonic language, filled with whole-tone sonorities and parallel chords, that perfectly matches the unsettling mood of the scene.… Combining with the arching phrases… these musical components cannot but add to the sense of longing for an unattainable ideal….

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Like Rance does before him, Johnson reveals his secret desire in a crucial confrontation with Minnie. This scene takes place halfway through Act II, right after Johnson’s identity as the bandit Ramerrez has been revealed to Minnie. In an understandable fit of rage, Minnie commands Johnson to leave her cottage. Johnson pleads with her to grant him a moment to explain himself with the line “Una parola sola!” (Only one word!). The ensuing monologue is a strikingly unconventional aria that pieces together disparate musical fragments in rapid succession that captures the dramatic tension of the scene and Johnson’s desperate state of mind.

As his true surname Ramerrez indicates, Johnson is a native Californiano of Spanish heritage whose family presumably has lived in the area long before the arrival of the miners in the camp. However, his family’s fortunes worsened over time, forcing his father to secretly run the gang of bandits to maintain their lifestyle. Johnson discovers all of this upon the death of his father and finds himself now bound to the life of criminality. “Era quello il mio destino!” (It was my destiny!) is how Johnson explains his decision to turn himself into the notorious bandit. Yet, on the very day that he met Minnie, he recalls, a new dream entered his heart. Having been reunited with her, he now wishes to start his life anew with Minnie in a faraway place and to redeem himself in a life of labor and love.

photo courtesy of the metropolitan opera archives

Following the cues of Belasco’s play Puccini included two Native American characters in his opera, Wowkle (right) and Billy Jackrabbit (not pictured). While these roles draw on stereotypes, he also incorporated Cree and Zuni melodies to great effect.

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Precisely at this moment, when Johnson articulates his version of the American Dream — to sever himself from the shackles of his family misfortunes and to remake himself through a romantic union with Minnie — Puccini inserts a pair of sustained restatements of previously heard melodies with significant emotional associations.

The first is the insistent falling and rising figure that Puccini introduces in the brief instrumental prelude and repeats throughout the first two acts of the opera. The musical idea returns in an ardent, dramatic fashion in Act II shortly after Johnson and Minnie embrace each other in a passionate kiss. Puccini resorts to a string-heavy orchestral texture that speaks to the emotional intensity of the scene. When the tune returns at the end of Johnson’s soliloquy, however, it transforms once again into music representing his aspiration for a better life. Starting softly it becomes increasingly assertive and grandiose. This melodic recall moves seamlessly into the final musical reminiscence, a broad pentatonic melody heard in the duet earlier in the act, in which the two sing ecstatically of their love for each other. However, almost as soon as Johnson verbalizes his dream to Minnie, Puccini brings his aria to an abrupt end.

We see only a glimpse of Minnie’s dream in her Act I aria “Laggiù nel Soledad” (Down There in Soledad), in which she fondly recalls her parents’ affectionate interactions with each other. As the opera unfolds, her desire to find true love gradually takes on a concrete form in the figure of Johnson, but it is shattered when his identity is revealed to her in the middle of Act II. Minnie initially expels Johnson from her cottage, but as soon as she realizes that he has been shot by the posse of miners, she quickly changes her mind and tries to save his life by hiding him away in the attic of the cottage.

She has made up her mind. From this point on, Minnie is determined to defend Johnson to pursue a new life with him using whatever means necessary.

…before the game starts, Minnie hides some cards in her stocking. At the critical point in the game, she… swaps her cards to produce a winning hand. Crucially, in this instance, she does not rely on hard work or good fortune to defend her American Dream, but rather on cunning.

When Rance discovers Johnson hiding in the attic, Minnie’s determination is challenged. She wagers her own life and freedom against Johnson’s in a game of cards with Rance. If she wins, Johnson goes free; if she loses, she will submit to Rance. But before the game starts, Minnie hides some cards in her stocking. At the critical point in the game, she pretends to faint and, while Rance is distracted, swaps her cards to produce a winning hand. Crucially, in this instance, she does not rely on hard work or 34

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good fortune to defend her American Dream, but rather on cunning. As if to heighten the discomfort of witnessing Minnie’s moral compromise in this moment, Puccini concludes the act with a disturbingly insistent chromatic motive, derived from none other than Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, over which she declares her victory.

Act III, which takes place in a clearing in a forest several days after the conclusion of the previous act, during which Minnie has helped restore Johnson’s health well enough for him to leave the mining camp for good. Soon after the opening of the act, however, the men of the camp announce that they have captured the bandit and gleefully prepare to hang him. When the miners are about to execute Johnson, Minnie’s heroic voice echoes through the forest. This powerful sonic presence paralyzes the men. When she finally appears, Minnie brandishes her pistol to put an end to the gruesome spectacle.

It seems for a moment that Minnie would rely on brute force to accomplish her wish.

However, she quickly starts to plead with individual miners to forgive Johnson, reminding them of the special bond that they have shared in the past. One by one, the miners warm up to Minnie’s request until they eventually release him. Minnie and Johnson bid farewell to the miners, to the mountains, and to California as they quietly disappear

photo courtesy of the metropolitan opera archives

into the distance to start their new lives together, to realize their American Dream.

Minnie uses her cunning to defend her American Dream as she wagers her life for Dick Johnson’s in a game of cards with Sheriff Rance.

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Throughout this moving passage, Puccini strings together fragmented musical recollections from earlier moments in the opera. Significantly, one of the most prominent musical reminisces is the melody from Jake Wallace’s aria of homesickness that points to the analogy between the departure of the lovers and that of Larkens, the melancholic minor who left the camp in Act I. Here too the opera reminds us that the attainment of Minnie and Johnson’s dream is predicated on the miners giving up something that

As Johnson is about to be executed, Minnie rides in, brandishing a pistol.

Rather than using brute force, she reasons with the miners and their own dreams of love and belonging to win his freedom.

is precious to them.

At the end of the opera, two characters remain unmoved on stage. The first is Rance, defeated and confounded by the miners’ incredible gesture of self-sacrifice and compassion. The other is Billy Jackrabbit, one of two Native American characters in the opera. In crafting his part, Puccini followed Belasco’s cues, producing words, music, and actions that reduced him to a demeaning stereotype. Yet when composing some of the most tuneful and musically satisfying moments in the opera, Puccini relied on two tunes he found in publications of Native American music. One is a Cree melody that appeared in American composer Harvey Worthington Loomis’s piano work.

Puccini adapts the tune to fashion the lyrical melody for Minnie and Johnson’s duet in the middle of Act II. The other is a Zuni tune transcribed, arranged, and published by Carlos Troyer. Puccini transforms it for Jake Wallace’s song of homesickness. Nevertheless, Puccini failed to recognize the humanity in the character who represents the group of Americans from whom so much has been stolen so that others can have their dreams. Being aware of this flaw gives us in the 21st century more reasons to reevaluate and reimagine the merits of Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West against the background of continually evolving notions of the American Dream.

Nevertheless, Puccini failed to recognize the humanity in the [Native American] character who represents the group of Americans from whom so much has been stolen so that others can have their dreams. Being aware of this flaw gives us in the 21st century more reasons to reevaluate and reimagine the merits of Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West against the background of continually evolving notions of the American Dream.

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photo courtesy of the metropolitan opera archives

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FRIDAY, MAY 19 | 7:30 PM Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center

Musical Reflections:

Dreams We’ve Dreamed; Songs We’ve Sung; Hopes We’ve Held A pre-concert discussion between scholars Kira Thurman and Douglas W. Shadle will take place at 6:30pm in Reinberger Chamber Hall.

The Cleveland Orchestra Franz Welser-Möst conductor

Scott Joplin (1868–1917) Overture to Treemonisha Julia Perry (1924–1979) Short Piece for Orchestra William Grant Still (1895–1978) Darker America Bernard Herrmann (1911–1975) Suite from Vertigo INTERMISSION

photo by Roger Mastroianni

Raven Chacon (b. 1977) Voiceless Mass

Playing opera “nutures the flexibility and singing qualities of the Orchestra,” says Music Director Franz Welser-Möst, who leads all performances of the opera and the festival concert.

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Edgard Varèse (1883–1965) Amériques (1929 Version) arr. Chou Wen-Chung This program is approximately 1 hour and 40 minutes long, including a 20-minute intermission.

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c o n c e r t p r o g r a m n o t e , pa r t I

Dreams Deferred, Dreams Transmogrified Kira Thurman Associate Professor of History, German Studies, and Musicology, University of Michigan

The works of four 20th-century American composers demonstrate how perception of and access to the American Dream varied widely

WHILE EUROPEAN COMPOSERS DOMINATED 19TH-CENTURY symphonic music, the dawn

of the 20th ushered in a wave of emerging musical creativity in the New World. Much of it, we recognize today, drew from Black music — incorporating traditions stemming back to West Africa or popular tunes of the time. African American composers such as Scott Joplin and William Grant Still composed some of the first formidable works in the American repertoire. Yet their musical excellence and achievements were not

image courtesy of Everett Collection, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo

enough to realize their dreams of being recognized on the same plane as white composers. Decades later, composer Julia Perry would also face these same barriers.

This first half of this concert program brings together noteworthy works by these three figures. They are presented alongside Suite from Vertigo by Bernard Herrmann, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, who explores the liminal space between a dream and a nightmare.

Scott Joplin, Overture to Treemonisha (1910) Saul Bass designed the iconic movie poster for the 1958 Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo, which featured an eerie score

by Bernard Herrmann.

Scott Joplin may be best remembered for his ragtime piano works such as “Maple Leaf Rag” and “The Entertainer,” but make no mistake: Joplin was also an ambitious composer of classical music. No piece better captures the composer’s dreams of a flourishing career in high art music than his opera, Treemonisha. Completed in 1910

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to sweeping, cinematic music. Set on an abandoned plantation in Arkansas in the 1880s, the opera follows Treemonisha, a daughter of formerly enslaved people, who received an education that allows her to read and write — a skill set denied to her parents and ancestors. The opera is a tale of the powers of enlightenment, for Treemonisha seeks to correct the superstitions of her local townsfolk — much to the ire of a group of “conjure men,” who have been using these superstitions to hold the town captive. They kidnap her, but she’s saved at the last minute by her valiant friend Remus. In the third and final act of the opera, Treemonisha returns back to the village — much to the relief of her loving parents. The townspeople capture two of the conjurers and seek to punish them, but Treemonisha and Remus successfully advocate for their forgiveness. The opera concludes with the neighborhood electing Treemonisha as its new leader, and celebrating with a closing dance. Reason and enlightenment triumph over superstition; the powers of education and knowledge — finally made more available to Black Americans — prevail over darkness and the suppression of truth.

Joplin’s dream of seeing his opera embraced was thwarted in his own lifetime, however.

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above: Scott Joplin (pictured circa 1911) was considered “the king of ragtime composers.”

However, he was also an ambitious composer of classical music.

Treemonisha, published in 1911, would not be fully performed until 1972: 55 years after his death. left: Treemonisha’s full performance at Houston Grand Opera in 1975, directed by Frank Corsaro and conducted by Gunther Schuller, was released on vinyl in 1976.

far left: image courtesy Deutsche Grammophon | above left: image courtesy of the new york public library | above right: image courtesy of the library of congress

and published in 1911, Treemonisha is a magnum opus, an Olympic feat, an adventure set

American composer Irving Berlin had most likely lifted one of its themes for his hit song, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” Most surprising, Treemonisha likely represents one of the first significant operas by an American composer, of any race. Yet Joplin’s identity as a Black composer — one who sought to elevate ragtime music, which had associations with Black popular music — meant that American culture did not take it seriously. Joplin never referred to his opera as a “ragtime” opera. Nor should we.

The overture of Joplin’s opera is a colorful roller-coaster ride that runs bright and fast from the moment it begins until its final note. The main theme appears first in the woodwinds, accompanied by the strings. Dizzying, whirlwind chromatic scales run up and down as the orchestra transitions to a slower and moving melody taken up by the strings. The return of the brass segues to the next theme: a charming solo violin and a flute duet. Muted trumpets, pizzicato basses, bells, and crash cymbals bring the latter half of the orchestra to life, as the themes from the overture come together one last time to reach the piece’s apex. It is dramatic, wild, and just plain fun. You’ll find yourself cheering the orchestra on as it races to the finish line.

Joplin’s identity as a Black composer — one who sought to elevate ragtime music, which had associations with Black popular music — meant that American culture did not take it seriously.

Julia Perry, Short Piece for Orchestra (1952)

Neoclassical composer Julia Perry’s life, career, and musical works also exemplify the power of dreams and their transformative nature. Raised in Akron, Ohio, Perry exhibited tremendous talent as a vocalist and pianist. She studied music at the University of Akron before absconding to the East Coast to study at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey. In college, she composed several choral works, and in 1947, Carl Fischer published one, Carillon Heigh-Ho. Following graduation, Perry took classes at Juilliard and studied voice at the Curtis Institute of Music until 1951. Like many talented African American musicians, she traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, where she studied with Luigi Dallapiccola in Italy and Nadia Boulanger in France, to follow her dreams and find support for her gifts.

Perry found success with her work, Stabat Mater (1951), which received performances throughout Europe. Bringing together medieval Italian poetry, Roman Catholic liturgy, and the spiritual urgency of the Civil Rights movement, it was quickly heralded as a masterpiece. Written one year later, Short Piece for Orchestra exhibits this same musical style: complex neoclassical harmonic writing; tense, discordant colors that resolve unconventionally; dissonant seventh, ninth, 11th, and 13th chords in parallel motion; fixed rhythms and free mixed meters; and ostinato patterns. Comprised of five the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival

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Ohio native Julia Perry moved to Florence, Italy, to find support for her music that was not available to her in the US. She composed her Short Piece for Orchestra during this time abroad.

Like many talented African American musicians, her dreams eventually took her across the Atlantic Ocean to find support for her gifts. contrasting sections, it begins like a clap of thunder before settling into a lyrical slower section. The main melody comes back several times — first by the flute, then the oboe, the clarinet, and lastly the horn. The final section brings back the same rigor as the opening, concluding the work. The piece is bursting with sharp contrasts and vibrant dissonance combined with moments of delicate, even romantic solo melody from the horn, or a lyrical line from a solo flute.

By the late 1960s, orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic were finally beginning to perform and record her works. But in the early 1970s, Perry began to experience debilitating strokes that ended her career prematurely. She continued to compose, teaching herself to write with her left hand. When she died in 1979 at age 55 in Akron, she left behind an astonishingly large and robust body of work, including 12 symphonies, two concertos, and three operas.

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photo by David Lees/Getty Images

Perry moved back to the US in 1959, eventually settling at the University of Akron.

William Grant Still, Darker America (1924)

Like Perry, composer William Grant Still’s Northeast Ohio connections abound. Called “the dean of Black composers,” Still grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, before coming to Ohio to study — first at Wilberforce College and later at Oberlin. He arrived in New York City in 1919, eager to join the Black Broadway scene, and performed as an oboist in the pit orchestra for Sissle and Blake’s Shuffle Along. When the company moved to Boston, so did Still. There, he sought out the mentorship of George Whitefield Chadwick, a prominent member of the “Second New England School,” which included Amy Beach, Arthur Foote, Edward MacDowell, and John Knowles Paine. Back in New York, Still joined and conversed with a group of emerging Black cultural elites who became the pivotal figures of what we now call the Harlem Renaissance. Both a dedicated pupil of avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse (who appears on the second half of this program) and a committed colleague of Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Countee Cullen, and others, Still began to compose African American art music in William Grant Still was the first African American to conduct a major US orchestra, and the first to compose a symphony performed by one of these orchestras. A major figure of the Harlem Renaissance, his work reflected themes of W.E.B. Du Bois’s writing.

earnest, dreaming of placing it on a higher plane in American society than ever before.

Darker America, Still’s first extended symphonic work, also represents a dream.

Composed in 1924 but premiered in 1926, it was Still’s first significant work showcasing and blending African American musical idioms with his quintessential modernist style.

In his program notes, Still states that “Darker America is representative of the American Negro, and suggests triumph over sorrows through fervent prayer.” Premiering the same year as Langston Hughes’s iconic poem, “I, Too,” its title is reminiscent of the concept of double-consciousness, so eloquently coined and expressed by W.E.B. Du Bois. To be African American, Du Bois stated, was to experience a two-ness in American society, being both American and Black. Much like Hughes’s statement that “I am the darker brother,” Still’s symphonic work illuminates the other, darker America that was often cast into the shadows of a mainstream white American society. The theme of the “American Negro” first appears in the strings.

photo by Carl Van Vechten/courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Other themes include “sorrow” (in the English horn), “hope” (the muted brass), and a prayer “of numbed rather than anguished souls” (oboe).

But triumph ultimately wins, celebrated at the end of the piece as the orchestra performs in tutti, blending together the previous three themes.

Still’s emerging musical styles are on display here.

Shirking the influence of Varèse, Still turns to jazz and the blues to wrench emotional anguish, joy, and solemnity from the orchestra. the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival

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Debuting the same year as Rhapsody in Blue, Darker America met a much colder welcome than Gershwin’s work. Still was expected to compose a certain kind of African American music — one that was overall more rhythmic, jazz-like, and catchy. Applause for modernist music was usually reserved for white composers, and an African American composer steeped in modernist musical language was, to many, a puzzle. There was no place for him. His dream eluded him — but it doesn’t have to slip outside of our grasp today.

Bernard Herrmann, Suite from Vertigo (1958)

The son of Russian-Jewish emigrants, Bernard Herrmann was far removed from the world of the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro movement. He comingled in the world of Aaron Copland and the Gershwin brothers. A composer first for radio, and a longtime collaborator of Orson Welles (the pair collaborated on the legendary 1941 film, Citizen Kane), Herrmann’s ability to seam music together with deeply psychological scenes marked him as one of Hollywood’s leading film composers of the 20th century.

Herrmann’s Suite from Vertigo fits with today’s program because of what the music represents. The Vertigo Suite might be less about the dreams of social ambition and more about how dreams can also be exquisite nightmares.

In the 1958 film, Scottie (played by Jimmy Stewart) has just left the police force after witnessing his partner fall to his death and developing a debilitating case of

Orson Welles (left) and Bernard Herrmann during their first collaboration on Citizen Kane (1941).

Herrmann’s score would earn an Oscar nomination.

But he beat himself out with his original music for All That Money Can Buy.

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photo courtesy of PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

vertigo, or fear of heights, as a result. Scottie is hired as a private investigator to follow

His work reminds us of the power of dreams — not only to ensnare us but also to liberate us from the worlds we inhabit. around a young woman named Madeleine (Kim Novak) — and the two fall in love. But when Madeleine climbs the tower of an old mission, Scottie’s vertigo inhibits him from chasing after her, and she jumps to her death. Shortly thereafter, Scottie meets another woman named Judy — who looks an awful lot like Madeleine. The story’s twists and turns are legendary, and worth keeping close to the chest so as to not spoil the ending.

Themes of love, death, and renewal are vital to the music of Vertigo Suite. Comprised of three movements, its atmospheric renderings are equally the stuff of dreams

Herrmann wrote scores for nine of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies, including Vertigo, Psycho, North by Northwest, and The Man Who Knew Too Much (above), in which he made a cameo as a conductor leading the London Symphony Orchestra in Royal Albert Hall.

and nightmares. The first movement (“Prelude”) begins with haunting arpeggios and bracing brass chords, followed by a heart-stopping apex in the strings. The second movement, “The Nightmare,” summons a military funeral march in the timpani and brass, and the third movement, “Scène d’amour” (“Love Scene”), exquisitely renders

film still from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much

the agony that only the combination of love and death can tease out of us. In this moment, the music bears striking similarities to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and its theme of Liebestod (love-death). This is no accident. New Yorker critic Alex Ross writes that Herrmann’s homage to Tristan “is a matter of deliberation and subtlety.

The main melodic contour is his own; the harmony is still his idiosyncratic construction. He is jogging the memory of those who know Tristan and the subconscious of those who don’t. His veiled citations indicate in their own way the unstoppable recurrence of the past.”

Herrmann’s quest to musically capture the psychological demons that we face, and occasionally seek to expel, transformed the Hollywood industry. His work reminds us of the power of dreams — not only to ensnare us but also to liberate us from the worlds we inhabit. the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival

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photo credit xxxxxxxx

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c o n c e r t p r o g r a m n o t e , pa r t I I

Capturing the Spirit of the Time Douglas W. Shadle Associate Professor of Musicology, Vanderbilt University

Edgard Varèse’s Amériques and Raven Chacon’s Voiceless Mass present opposite ends of the American experience

“SEDATE-LOOKING LADIES RESORTED TO CATCALLS,” one Philadelphia critic noted after

the April 1926 premiere of Edgard Varèse’s Amériques. “Discordant whistles mingled with prolonged hisses, there was some handclapping, and several persons abruptly and austerely marched out of the Academy when the number, placed first on the programme, was over, while a couple of others left before, and there were even a few reminiscent hisses when Mr. Stokowski came out to begin the next number.” If Varèse wanted to make an impression, he had certainly succeeded.

The French-born Varèse was already known as a paramount experimentalist unafraid of shocking audiences. In 1921, he had joined forces with harpist Carlos photo courtesy of Glasshouse Images/Alamy Stock Photo

Salzedo to form the International Composers’ Guild, or ICG, with the goal of supporting “composers who represent the true spirit of our time.” At the sixth ICG concert, given in New York in March 1923, so many audience members laughed at Varèse’s Hyperprism for wind, brass, and percussion that Salzedo jumped onstage to exclaim that the music was serious and that anyone who disagreed could leave. According to one account, “The piece was followed by several angry altercations at the back of the theatre and in the lobby and on the street outside, where groups could be seen vociferating and The sounds of New York City in the 1920s inspired French composer Edgard Varèse to capture the electric energy of the US in his tour-de-force Amériques.

gesticulating until they were lost to view in the throngs of Broadway.”

Ill-fated though it was, the Hyperprism premiere fed directly into Varèse’s efforts to define a quintessentially American musical style. By 1923, critics and composers had spent decades hotly debating what makes music sound American. Antonín Dvořák had

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argued in the 1890s that a national style depended on the integration of African American and Indigenous folk sources into conventional classical idioms. Several

Edgard Varèse in 1915, shortly after he moved to the US. Amériques crystalized a metropolis in sound, with Varèse as its architect.

composers, including Scott Joplin, Henry Gilbert, Zitkala-Šá, R. Nathaniel Dett, and Dennison Wheelock, explored this approach in subsequent decades.

The explosion of jazz into the national public consciousness during the Great War added a new variable to the equation.

In December 1923, the colossal bandleader Paul Whiteman threw down his own gauntlet by announcing an all-jazz concert in New York’s Aeolian Hall — a temple to classical music — on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday less than three months later. A panel of eminent judges would decide what American music truly was. Whiteman’s concert is known today for introducing George Gershwin’s beloved Rhapsody in Blue. But its title, “An Experiment in Modern Music,” was a not-so-subtle jab at Varèse. Only a few months earlier, Carlos Salzedo had written a flattering essay touting another piece by Varèse — Amériques — as “the symbol of American Music.” (Whiteman and Gershwin, of course, had other ideas.)

We might be hard-pressed to imagine the world of atomic weapons and space shuttles without the sirens and eruptions of Amériques.

Completed in 1922, Amériques slowly took on a mystical aura in the press as its gigantic score found a publisher before anyone ever heard it in performance. Writing for the Christian Science Monitor in April 1925, critic Winthrop Tryon remarked, “Uptown or downtown, Amériques parades itself to me, as I turn its mammoth leaves, a picture of New York.” For Tryon, the piece crystallized a metropolis in sound, with Still today, Amériques is truly a wonder to behold in performance, for the ear and the eye. The exceptionally large ensemble demanded by the score includes several unusual wind and percussion instruments — including a powerful siren emulating a fire engine — as well as a panoply of mutes and other tools used to create unconventional tone colors.

Working together as a weblike creature, the orchestra moves with a busy inner dynamism as the pulse, volume, and texture cross from one extreme to another in a kaleidoscopic array of combinations. Sinewy melodies, such as the opening line heard in the alto flute, occasionally leap from the web but recede just as quickly. While the work owes 50

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photo courtesy of the Library of Congress

Varèse as its architect.

a certain noticeable stylistic debt to Igor Stravinsky’s ballets, Varèse himself insisted that Amériques is nonrepresentational “absolute music,” or pure sound. It should come as no surprise, then, that audiences responded in kind—with catcalls, hisses, and even violence.

The noted political theorist Jacques Attali argued in his book Noise (1977) that music doesn’t reflect society but “makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things.” That is, music heralds and shapes what its creator imagines. While many listeners perceived the noisy Amériques just as Attali might have predicted — as reactionary guardians of an old order — New York Tribune critic Lawrence Gilman heard something profoundly different: “He has written music of an energy extraordinarily released, continually renewed: music of brutal impacts, sustained and swept by an immense exhilaration — music of power, pace, and stride. This music is raucous with a frenzy of challenge and ebullition, as of some monstrous mechanism in parturition, with its screaming sirens and its ecstasy of din, as if Mr. Varèse had determined to set a cosmic building boom to music, or the upheaval of the Sierra Nevadas out of the prehistoric slime, or, if you will, a birth of planets in the blue.” We might be hard-pressed to imagine the world of atomic weapons and space shuttles without the sirens and eruptions of Amériques.

Could anything sound more American?

photo Courtesy of the Chou Wen-chung archives

New York Tribune critic Lawrence Gilman wrote that Varèse’s music “is raucous with a frenzy of challenge and ebullition, as of ... the upheaval of the Sierra Nevadas out of prehistoric slime.”

In the mid-1930s, Varèse moved West, spending time in Santa Fe, depicted here, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

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Perhaps George Gershwin. As iconic as his music has become, it was also deeply rooted in a time and place. The taxi horns in An American in Paris (1928), for example, became a snide taunt toward Varèse as the concertgoing public had come to believe that Broadway taxis were “more euphonious” than the sirens of Hyperprism and Amériques.

(Varèse, incidentally, was a Parisian in America!) But Gershwin’s incorporation of jazz into classical idioms received its own share of negative criticism as certain white musicians perceived the inclusion of jazz, a style with African roots, as an affront to good taste and social propriety. A few months after the premiere of Rhapsody in Blue, conductor Frank Damrosch remarked that when white musicians encountered jazz, “it tended to degenerate them toward primitivity.” Hardly unique for its time, Damrosch’s racist stance toward noisy jazz was the inverse of Gilman’s reaction to Varèse’s monumental noise: not that it pointed toward a new future, but that it sustained an

photo Courtesy of the Chou Wen-chung archives

uncivilized past.

Amériques is truly a wonder to behold in performance, for the ear and the eye, with a powerful siren emulating a fire engine, a panoply of mutes, and other tools employed to create unconventional tone colors.

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Claims of Indigenous sovereignty, then, are not only about land, but also the radical humanity of musical sound.

A member of the Navajo nation, Miguelito, has his voice recorded in 1914.

Descendants of European cultures used tools to sever Indigenous groups from their culture, while also consuming this melodic material.

As music historian Glenda Goodman has shown, 17th-century English settler-colonists in Massachusetts viewed music as an important vehicle of conversion and cultural assimilation. They tended to acknowledge the inherent musicality of sacred Indigenous rituals but often described Indigenous vocalizations as “howling” and “yelling” — terms suggesting inhuman noise. European musical education thus became an allegedly civilizing tool in Indigenous communities, not only in the early colonial period but well into the 20th century at residential schools. Reflecting similar racist attitudes, white settler-colonists also criminalized drumming and other forms of musical expression among enslaved Africans. These noise ordinances were designed to prevent communi-

photo courtesy of Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo

cation and collective organization, ultimately stripping enslaved people of expressive ties to their home cultures.

Dylan Robinson, a music scholar of Stó:lō ancestry, has used the phrase “hungry listening” to describe the stances taken by white European settler-colonists toward the musical soundscapes they encountered elsewhere. On the one hand, settlers hungry for land and power used the tools at their disposal — education and the law — to sever Indigenous and African groups from their cultural inheritance as musical people. On the other, settlers also sought to consume this same musical inheritance by arranging melodic material into Western notation for the commercial sheet music market or, as noted earlier, by integrating it into Western classical idioms. Claims of Indigenous sovereignty, then, are not only about land, but also the radical humanity of musical sound. Voiceless Mass (2021) can only be understood in this context. the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival

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Raven Chacon’s Voiceless Mass, co-commissioned

by Present Music, was performed at its annual Thanksgiving concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, November 21, 2021.

This work received the Pulitzer Prize for Music the following year.

For much of his career, Raven Chacon, a composer and sound artist of Diné ancestry, has used music, silence, and sound — even noise — to critique colonialism’s ongoing legacies of economic extraction, forced migration, and environmental destruction. With an eye toward the site-specific possibilities of sonic engagement, his work moves seamlessly between granularity and broader human experience. In this regard, Voiceless Mass, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Music, is no exception. Co-commissioned by the Wisconsin Conference of the United Church of Christ, Plymouth Church UCC, and Present Music (a Milwaukee-based organization devoted to new music), Chacon wrote the piece for a Thanksgiving Day premiere at Milwaukee’s Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist. The symbolic potency of confronting the Roman Catholic Church’s historical suppression of Indigenous cultures, in its own sacred space, on a day memorializing early colonial encounters, proved to be an immediate spark for his creative imagination.

Even before a single note is heard, the title Voiceless Mass offers a profoundly dialectical reflection on Indigenous sovereignty. The inextricable bond between sacred music and sacred text has remained a defining feature of Roman Catholic worship from its earliest days. A voiceless Mass, therefore, appears to be a contradiction in terms,

Catholic Church suppressed the voices of Indigenous ancestors. Likewise, just as the historical silencing of ancestors could never destroy their spirits, the music of the voiceless Mass — its movement, its breath — manifests their songs in the resonant throat of the church building itself.

Like Amériques, Chacon’s Voiceless Mass is an arresting multisensory experience.

The score instructs the instrumentalists to spread out as far as possible, filling the 54

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Raven Chacon in his Albuquerque, NM, home in February 2022.

A composer and sound artist of Diné ancestry, he uses his work to critique colonialism’s ongoing destructive legacy toward Indigenous people.

photo by Samer Ghani for Present Music

for if there are no words to sing, the Mass loses meaning as a form of worship. But that erasure is precisely the point: Chacon suppresses the “voice” of the Mass just as the

physical space with sound but eliminating the possibility of occupying a single visual field. Sustained tones in the organ’s lowest register (using 32-foot bourdon pipes) and in piercing electronic sine waves engage the sense of touch with bone-rattling vibrations.

A conductor stands within view of every performer, but time and distance disrupt the singular power the conductor typically wields, as if the instrumental “voices” can only respond with extraordinary effort. Even the instruments themselves, in their slow movement and unusual tone colors, seem to hold an inner voice captive, like a once-living being trapped in amber. The pulse quickens at times, but never enough for an autonomous life to erupt from the texture. What we expect from a symphony — literally “voices together” — remains captive in instruments, voiceless technologies of wood and metal.

For all their noisy similarities, Amériques and Voiceless Mass present opposite portraits of the American experience. Varèse was a recent arrival who found the American continent (note the plural “Americas” in the work’s title) to be a place of endless possibility and vitality. The pioneering spirit animating Varèse had historically transformed the American continent into a place of endless destruction and death for Indigenous peoples. Yet Chacon’s music is not hopeless. If musical noise is prophetic, as Jacques Attali argued, Voiceless Mass anticipates a new era of Indigenous sovereignty and reconciliation — an America where the powerless set the birth of planets to music

photo by Adolphe Pierre-Louis/Albuquerque Journal

and the powerful listen quietly.

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bi o graph i es

Franz Welser-Möst Music Director

photo by Roger Mastroianni

kelvi n sm ith fam i ly c hai r

Franz Welser-Möst is among today’s most distinguished conductors. The 2022–23 season marks his 21st year as Music Director of The Cleveland Orchestra. With the future of their acclaimed partnership extended to 2027, he will be the longest-serving musical leader in the ensemble’s history. The New York Times has declared Cleveland under Mr. Welser-Möst’s direction to be “America’s most brilliant orchestra,” praising its virtuosity, elegance of sound, variety of color, and chamber-like musical cohesion.

With Mr. Welser-Möst, The Cleveland Orchestra has been praised for its inventive programming, ongoing support of new music, and innovative work in presenting operas. To date, the Orchestra and Mr. Welser-Möst have been showcased around the world in 20 international tours together. In 2020, the ensemble launched its own recording label and new streaming broadcast platform to share its artistry globally.

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In addition to his commitment to Cleveland, Mr. Welser-Möst enjoys a particularly close and productive relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic as a guest conductor. He has conducted its celebrated New Year’s Concert three times, and regularly leads the orchestra at home in Vienna, as well as on tours.

Mr. Welser-Möst is also a regular guest at the Salzburg Festival where he has led a series of acclaimed opera productions, including Rusalka, Der Rosenkavalier, Fidelio, Die Liebe der Danae, Aribert Reimann’s opera Lear, and Richard Strauss’s Salome. In 2020, he conducted Strauss’s Elektra on the 100th anniversary of its premiere. He has since returned to Salzburg to conduct additional performances of Elektra in 2021 and Giacomo Puccini’s Il Trittico in 2022.

In 2019, Mr. Welser-Möst was awarded the Gold Medal in the Arts by the Kennedy Center International Committee on the Arts. Other honors include The Cleveland Orchestra’s Distinguished Service Award, two Cleveland Arts Prize citations, the Vienna Philharmonic’s “Ring of Honor,” 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, and the Kilenyi Medal from the Bruckner Society of America.

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featured festival guests & contributors

Rick Jackson

m o d erato r

Cleveland’s Cultural DNA and the American Dream: Past, Present, and Future

Elena Dubinets festival curator

A high-profile artistic leader and music scholar, Elena Dubinets was named artistic director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 2021 having previously held top artistic planning positions at the Seattle and Atlanta Symphony orchestras. In 2022, she was also appointed curator of The Cleveland Orchestra’s annual Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival. In 2018, she was named one of Musical America’s Professionals of the Year.

She has held appointments on the Recording Academy Board of Directors and as chair of the City of Seattle Music Commission.

Ms. Dubinets is a caring impressaria whose goal is to mirror the values of the community in projects that bring people together to create and enjoy deep, meaningful explorations within classical music.

Harnessing social interaction around important issues is key to her work. She is a passionate and persistent promoter of BIPOC

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and female composers and artists, fostering through her work a culture of learning and undoing historic inequities. She has envisioned and brought to fruition successful premieres of more than 120 new works by composers from all over the globe, organized tours to four continents, and overseen multiple Grammy-winning recording projects.

Ms. Dubinets has taught at universities in the US, Russia, and Costa Rica, published five books, and written hundreds of articles, as well as liner and program notes in multiple languages. Her book Russian Composers Abroad, about historical and sociological aspects of musical emigration from Russia and the former USSR (Indiana University Press, 2021), was awarded Choice Review’s 2022 Outstanding Academic Title. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Sacher Stiftung and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others.

Ms. Dubinets received her MA and PhD degrees from the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Russia. She lived in the US from 1996 to 2021, when she moved to London, where she currently resides.

Broadcast news veteran Rick Jackson is Ideastream Public Media’s senior host and producer, and hosts WCPN’s the Sound of Ideas, as well as WVIZ’s NewsDepth, and special programs. Mr. Jackson joined Ideastream in 2003 after spending 22 years in commercial television; 2023 marks his 37th year being seen or heard on the air in Ohio.

Mr. Jackson has interviewed presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and both George Bushes, received more than 30 regional Emmy Award nominations, and won six Emmys. He was inducted into the Ohio Broadcasting Hall of Fame in 2001.

Allison Loggins-Hull c o m po ser/curato r FRAGMENTS 1 Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West and Its Influences Allison LogginsHull is a “powerhouse” (The Washington Post) flutist, composer, and producer whose work defies classification and has been described as “evocative” by The Wall Street Journal. She has been associated with acts across popular and classical music including Flutronix (which she co-founded with Nathalie Joachim), Hans Zimmer, Lizzo, Imani Winds, Alarm Will Sound, International Contemporary Ensemble, Alicia Hall Moran, and Jason Moran. Her music is resonant with social and political themes, encompassing motherhood, Blackness, and cultural identity.

This season marks the first year of Ms. Loggins-Hull’s three-year Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellowship, during which she will be commissioned to write for The Cleveland Orchestra, as well as work with staff and community partners to build engaging activities and initiatives across Northeast Ohio.

Dan Moulthrop

m o d erato r

Keynote Lecture Dan Moulthrop was appointed CEO of the City Club in 2013, after many years as a member, volunteer, and frequent forum moderator.

Prior to joining the City Club, he cofounded The Civic Commons, a pioneer in the field of social media for civic good. Mr. Moulthrop is also the former host of 90.3 WCPN’s Sound of Ideas and co-author, with Dave Eggers and Nínive Calegari, of the best-selling book Teachers Have it Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers (The New Press, 2005), which provided the basis for the 2011 documentary American Teacher. He’s an award-winning journalist, a former high school teacher, and a graduate of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in Shaker Heights with his wife and three children.

Raquel Ortiz

h o st

Youth Poetry Reading: Works of Langston Hughes and Julia De Burgos Dr. Raquel M. Ortiz is an anthropologist, educator, activist, songwriter, and author of several bilingual children’s books including Sofi and the Magic, Musical Mural (2015), Sofi Paints Her Dreams (2019), When Julia Danced Bomba (2019), and Vicki and

a Summer of Change! (2020). Her stories about Afro-Caribbean and Latinx culture invite children and adults to join in on adventures, featuring children as the protagonists so that they see and celebrate their creativity and valor. Dr. Ortiz has a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Salamanca and a masters in Puerto Rican studies from the Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe. She is currently writer-in-residence at Cleveland Public Library.

Julian Davis Reid

pianist/producer/ composer

The American Dream, the American Nightmare, and Black American Music Julian Davis Reid (MDiv, Candler School of Theology) is an artisttheologian who uses words and music to invite us into the restful lives we were created to live. A musician, speaker, and writer, Mr. Reid offers his contemplative-musical program Notes of Rest across the nation, and he plays internationally with various musical outfits including The JuJu Exchange and Isaiah Collier & The Chosen Few. He is a fellow of Theological Education Between the Times and consults with the grassroots organization Fearless Dialogues. Mr. Reid writes about faith, music, Blackness, and rest on his substack “Julian’s Note,” and his work has been featured in Sojourners and Downbeat. He and his wife, Carmen, live in his hometown of Chicago.

Douglas w. Shadle

musi c o lo g ist

Capturing the Spirit of the Time Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West and Its Influences Douglas W. Shadle’s award-winning scholarship interrogates the roles played by symphony orchestras and orchestral music in American culture, past and present. Valuable for scholars and classical music lovers

the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival

alike, his work has received coverage in major media outlets throughout the United States and Europe. He is an associate professor of musicology at Vanderbilt University and the author of two highly regarded books: Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise (Oxford, 2016) and Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony (Oxford, 2021).

A leading authority on composer Florence B. Price, he sits on the boards of directors of the American Musicological Society and the International Florence Price Festival.

Kira Thurman

musi c o lo g ist

Dreams Deferred, Dreams Transmogrified Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West and Its Influences A classically trained pianist who grew up in Vienna, Austria, Kira Thurman earned her PhD in history from the University of Rochester with a minor field in musicology from the Eastman School of Music. Her research focuses on the relationship between music and national identity, and Central Europe’s historical and contemporary relationship with the Black diaspora. She is the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, the Berlin Prize from the American Academy of Berlin, and a residential fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Her book, Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms (Cornell University Press, 2021), has won multiple honors, and NPR named it one of the Best Books of 2021. Together with colleagues across the United States and Europe and with the support of the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, she runs the public history website, blackcentraleurope.com.

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Orlando Watson

h o st

United in Song! A Free Community Choral Celebration Cleveland, Ohio, native Orlando Watson is currently senior director of programming at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center. He has established himself as a preeminent lyricist whose soulful, baritone voice is known to weave through words with uncanny rhythmic delivery. In 2015, Mr. Watson was awarded the prestigious “KenteCloth” by the Office of Diversity & Inclusion at Ohio State University, alongside acclaimed political commentator Dr. Marc Lamont Hill. In 2017, Mr. Watson released his debut EP, Everything’s Personal, followed by the full-length album, Corner Stories, in December 2021. Watson co-wrote Terence Blanchard’s Our Voices: Democracy Revisited suite, which was live-streamed on NPR’s Jazz Night in America. His poetry has been published in Linden Avenue Literary Journal as well as Five:2:One magazine, and he currently serves as associate director for the Tri-C JazzFest.

multi-season new project, FRAGMENTS, Ms. Weilerstein aims to rethink the concert experience and broaden the tent for classical music.

Ms. Weilerstein recently premiered Joan Tower’s new cello concerto, A New Day, at the Colorado Music Festival. The work was co-commissioned with The Cleveland Orchestra, with whom Weilerstein performed it in fall 2021, as well as with the Detroit and the National symphonies.

She has also premiered and championed important new works by composers including Pascal Dusapin, Osvaldo Golijov, and Matthias Pintscher. An authority on Bach’s music for unaccompanied cello, Ms. Weilerstein released a best-selling recording of his solo suites on the Pentatone label, and streamed them in her innovative #36DaysOfBach project. Other career milestones include a performance at the White House for President and Mrs. Obama.

Diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at nine years old, Ms. Weilerstein is a staunch advocate for the T1D community.

The girl of the golden west cast Tamara Wilson so pran o Minnie

Alisa Weilerstein c ello

FRAGMENTS 1 One of the foremost cellists of our time, Alisa Weilerstein is known for her consummate artistry, emotional investment, and interpretive depth, for which she was recognized with a MacArthur “genius grant” Fellowship in 2011. Today, her career is truly global in scope, taking her to the most prestigious international venues for solo recitals, chamber concerts, and concerto collaborations with all the preeminent conductors and orchestras worldwide. With her

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Soprano Tamara Wilson continues to garner international recognition for her interpretations of Verdi, Mozart, Strauss, and Wagner and is the recipient of the prestigious Richard Tucker Award. Other recent honors include an Olivier Award nomination and Grand Prize in the annual Francisco Viñas Competition held at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, Spain.

Her 2022–23 season highlights include debuts at the Dutch National Opera for a new production of Turandot directed by Barrie Kosky and the Wiener Staatsoper for Die Walküre. She also returns to Lyric

Opera of Chicago for Ernani, the Metropolitan Opera for a new production of Lohengrin directed by François Girard, Houston Grand Opera for Tosca, and The Cleveland Orchestra, where she previously performed in Otello, Ariadne auf Naxos, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9.

Ms. Wilson has sung in the world’s great opera houses including Teatro La Fenice, Santa Fe Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, LA Opera, Canadian Opera Company, Teatro alla Scala, Lyric Opera of Chicago, English National Opera, and Opernhaus Zürich, among others.

She has also been seen on its most renowned stages, such as the Royal Concertgebouw, Royal Albert Hall for the BBC Proms, the Edinburgh International Festival, Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and many others.

Roman Burdenko

barito n e Jack Rance

Born in Barnaoul in Russia, Roman Burdenko has won numerous prestigious singing competitions, including First Prize at the Competizione dell’Opera in Moscow, Second Prize in the 2011 Long-Thibaud-Crespin Competition in Paris, Third Prize in the 2012 World Opera Competition (Operalia), and Second Prize in the 2013 Hans Gabor-Belvedere Competition in Amsterdam.

This season he appears at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin as both Scarpia (Tosca) and as Don Carlo (La Forza del Destino), and Scarpia at the Paris Opera. He makes his Cleveland Orchestra debut with his first performances as Jack Rance (The Girl of the Golden West).

Past engagements include Luigi (Il Tabarro) at the Salzburg Festival in 2022; Alfio (Cavalleria Rusticana), Tonio (Pagliacci), and the title role in Nabucco at the Grand Théâtre de Genève; Prince Igor at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow; Stankar (Stiffelio)

at ABAO Bilbao Opera; Renato (Un Ballo in Maschera) at the Deutsche Oper; Enrico (Lucia di Lammermoor) in Las Palmas; and Alfio and Tonio at the Opernhaus Zürich. Other roles have included Tomsky (The Queen of Spades) and Germont (La Traviata) at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. He made his Bavarian State Opera debut in 2014 as Belcore (L’Elisir d’Amore). He has appeared at the Gergiev Festival in Rotterdam and the Glyndebourne Festival.

Limmie Pulliam

ten o r

Dick Johnson On December 17, 2022, Limmie Pulliam made his Metropolitan Opera debut in his first performances as Radamès in Aida, a culmination of his remarkable rise on the opera stage. It was one of several career highlights during the 2022–23 season for Mr. Pulliam during which he reprises the role of Radamès for Tulsa Opera’s 75th anniversary gala concert; makes his Carnegie Hall debut performing The Ordering of Moses in collaboration with his alma mater Oberlin College Conservatory of Music; and returns to The Cleveland Orchestra for his role debut of Dick Johnson.

Mr. Pulliam’s 2021-22 season included his debuts with LA Opera as Manrico in Il Trovatore, The Cleveland Orchestra as Otello, and the Philadelphia Orchestra in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. He also appeared with Lyric Opera of Kansas City and the Bard Music Festival.

A Missouri native, Mr. Pulliam studied with Richard Miller at Oberlin and participated in young artist programs at Cleveland Opera, OperaDelaware, and Opera Memphis.

He was the 2012 Artist Division Winner of the National Opera Association’s Vocal Competition and, in 2013, was a winner in the third Annual Concorso Internazionale di Canto della Fondazione Marcello Giordani in Catania, Sicily.

Tony Stevenson

ten o r

he performs the role of the King in The Love for Three Oranges with Des Moines Metro Opera.

Nick Tony Stevenson is a native of the Carolinas and graduated from Furman University in Greenville, SC. He won the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in 1992 and joined the Met’s Young Artist Program.

Mr. Stevenson made his Met debut in the fall of 1993 as First Prisoner in Fidelio. He has just completed his 30th season as a full-time principal artist at the Met and has sung more than 1,000 performances there.

He’s performed more than 50 roles including Beppe in Pagliacci, Pedrillo in Abduction from the Seraglio, Pang in Turandot, Goro in Madama Butterfly, Nick in La Fanciulla del West, Die Tanzmeister in Ariadne auf Naxos, Triquet in Eugene Onegin, and Spalanzani and the four servants in Tales of Hoffmann. Mr. Stevenson resides in West Orange, NJ, with his amazing wife and three crazy teenage boys.

Scott Conner

bass

Ashby

Iurii Samoilov

barito n e Sonora

This season, Ukrainian baritone Iurii Samoilov makes house debuts at Opéra National de Paris as Papageno (The Magic Flute) and at De Norske Opera, Oslo, as Eugene Onegin. He also returns to the Metropolitan Opera. In future seasons, he will make company debuts at the Gran Teatro del Liceu, Barcelona, and Houston Grand Opera and return to Staatsoper Hamburg, Teatro Real Madrid, and the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro.

Recent highlights include debuts at Michigan Opera Theatre (now Detroit Opera) and the BBC Proms.

He also sang the roles of Belcore (L’Elisir d’Amore) in Macerata; Billy Budd at the Bolshoi Theatre; Omar (Le Siège de Corinthe) at the Rossini Opera Festival; Masetto (Don Giovanni) at the Salzburg Festival and Dutch National Opera; and his house debut at the Teatro Real Madrid in The Golden Cockerel.

Kansas native, Scott Conner has appeared at the Metropolitan Opera, Opéra National de Paris, Santa Fe Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Royal Opera House (Covent Garden), Bayerische Staatsoper, Opernhaus Zürich, and San Francisco Opera, among many others. During the 2022–23 season, he returns to the Metropolitan Opera as the Police Commissioner in Der Rosenkavalier and as Neptune in Idomeneo. Mr. Conner makes his Canadian debut with the Canadian Opera Company as the Soldier in Salome. He also sings Bartolo in Le Nozze di Figaro with the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston. This summer,

the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival

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Owen McCausland

ten o r Trin

From Saint John, New Brunswick, Canadian tenor Owen McCausland returns to The Cleveland Orchestra after appearing in its Otello last season. Other highlights of recent seasons include Mozart’s Don Giovanni with Pacific Opera Victoria and the premiere of Cusson’s Fantasma with the Canadian Opera Company. His 2022–23 season sees returns to the Canadian Opera Company (Salome), Pacific Opera Victoria (Così fan tutte), as well as his role debut as Lucio Silla with Opera in Concert (Toronto), the world premiere of Frehner’s LEX with Soundstreams, and Mendelssohn’s Elijah with the Grand Philharmonic Choir and Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. Mr. McCausland was a finalist and winner of the Canadian Encouragement Award in the George London Singing Competition and a semi-finalist in the Montreal International Music Competition.

Joseph Lattanzi

barito n e Sid

A 2017 prize recipient from the Sullivan Foundation, Joseph Lattanzi portrayed the role of Hawkins Fuller in the world premiere of Greg Spears’s Fellow Travelers with Cincinnati Opera, followed by performances with Lyric Opera of Chicago, the PROTOTYPE Festival (New York), Arizona Opera, and Des Moines Metro Opera.

Career highlights include performances at Cincinnati Opera as Count Almaviva in Le Nozze di Figaro, Silvio in Pagliacci with Atlanta Opera, Dandini in La Cenerentola with Virginia Opera, and the title role in

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Don Giovanni with the Jacksonville Symphony. A regular at the Metropolitan Opera since 2018–19, Mr. Lattanzi has been on its roster for productions of Der Rosenkavalier, Kat’a Kabanvova, Marnie, Madama Butterfly, and Il Barbiere di Siviglia.

Benjamin Taylor

barito n e Bello

Baritone Benjamin Taylor began the 2022-23 season with his debut at Boston Lyric Opera in La Bohème (Schaunard) followed by debuts with Bayerische Staatsoper for La Fanciulla del West (Bello), OperaDelaware/Opera Baltimore for La Traviata (Germont), and Opera Philadelphia for La Bohème (Schaunard). He returns to the Metropolitan Opera for The Magic Flute (Papageno) and Dialogues des Carmélites and Berkshire Opera Festival for La Bohème (Marcello).

He makes his debut with The Cleveland Orchestra in La Fanciulla del West. Upcoming engagements include returns to Opera Philadelphia and the Met. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in last season’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones (Chester), followed by debuts with Detroit Opera, and Spoleto Festival USA, and Cincinnati Opera for the world premiere of Castor and Patience (West). He returned to Pittsburgh Opera for The Magic Flute (Papageno).

since 2019. He received recent acclaim for his last-minute appearance in Opera Philadelphia’s production of Carmina Burana, stepping in for a sick vocalist. This season he also stars as Nemorino in Curtis Opera Theatre’s production of L’Elisir d’Amore. A graduate of Manhattan School of Music, Mr. Tancredi was an apprentice at Santa Fe Opera and a winner of a 2019 George London Foundation Award.

Alex McKissick

ten o r Joe

A highly sought-after recitalist in the Washington, DC metro area, Alex McKissick started off the 2022-23 season with an acclaimed role debut as Don Ottavio in North Carolina Opera’s production of Don Giovanni. He appears on tour with trumpeter Chris Botti throughout the US, performing selections by Sartori and Puccini. Highlights of his 2021-22 season included the world premiere of two Georgia Shreve oratorios, Lavinia and Anne Komnene, at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center; a performance with Camerata Notturna of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 alongside soloists Siphokazi Molteni and Matthew Rose; as well as galas with Berkshire Opera Festival and Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle.

Joseph Barron

bass-barito n e

Joseph Tancredi

ten o r Harry

Joseph Tancredi is currently the Alfred Greenberg Memorial Fellow at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he has been enrolled in its opera program

Happy Hailed by The New York Times as “vocally robust” and “lyrically malevolent,” Joseph Barron recently covered the role of Leporello (Don Giovanni) at San Francisco Opera.

He also was a cover for the title role in Le Nozze di Figaro and appeared

as the Police Officer (Boris Godunov) at the Metropolitan Opera. He made his role and company debut as Don Pizarro (Fidelio) with Opera North Carolina, reprised Bartolo in Il Barbiere di Siviglia at Finger Lakes Opera, and made his role debut as Colline in La Bohème with Charlottesville Opera. Upcoming engagements include debuts with the Dallas Opera and the Atlanta Opera as Donner (Das Rheingold), Monterone (Rigoletto) at the Met, and returning to Charlottesville Opera as Baron Zeta in The Merry Widow.

Kyle Miller

barito n e Jim Larkens

Originally from San Francisco, lyric baritone Kyle Miller is currently based in Berlin, where he is a member of the ensemble at the Deutsche Oper and holds the Curt Engelhorn Scholarship through the Opera Foundation. During the 2022–23 season, he appears as Marullo (Rigoletto), Moralès (Carmen), First Priest (The Magic Flute), Ostasio (Francesca da Rimini), Second Nazarener (Salome), Graf Dominik (Arabella), Zöllner (La Bohème), and the Third Brabantischer Edler (Lohengrin). He has performed with the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Opera San Jose, Washington National Opera, and Santa Fe Opera.

Mr. Miller is a recent graduate of The Juilliard School and earned his bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College Conservatory of Music.

Zachary Altman

bass-barito n e Billy Jackrabbit

Bass-baritone Zachary Altman is gaining notice for wide-ranging repertoire across Europe and the United States. In 2022-23, he makes his role debut as Trinity Moses in

Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny with Opera Vlaanderen, Komische Oper Berlin, and Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg. In addition, he makes a role debut as Vodnik (Rusalka), and debuts with The Cleveland Orchestra. His 2021-22 engagements included Bottom (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle with Opera Malmö, Leporello (Don Giovanni) with Scottish Opera, and debuts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra as the First Apprentice in Wozzeck and as all four villains in Opera Tampa’s Tales of Hoffmann.

Taylor Raven m ezzo-so pran o

Wowkle A “vocal sensation” (Washington Classical Review), Taylor Raven is quickly establishing herself in opera, concert, and recital.

She began the 2022–23 season with her debut at San Francisco Opera, appearing in the world premiere of John Adams’s Antony and Cleopatra (Charmian), Dialogues des Carmélites (Sister Mathilde), and La Traviata (Flora).

Other highlights this season include debuts with Kentucky Opera in La Cenerentola (Angelina) and Chicago Opera Theater in The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing (Joan Clarke).

She returns to Des Moines Metro Opera for her role debut as Carmen.

Upcoming engagements in 2023-24 include returns to San Francisco Opera as Fatima/Omar’s Mother in Rhiannon Giddens’s and Michael Abels’s Omar and Seattle Opera as Rosina (Il Barbiere di Siviglia).

the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival

John Brancy

barito n e

Jake Wallace Grammy Award–winning baritone John Brancy is known for his intense musicality and communicative power. Hailed

by The New York Times as “a vibrant, resonant presence,” Mr. Brancy is equally at home in staged opera, concert performance, and recital. Recent highlights include Guglielmo (Così fan tutte) at San Francisco Opera and San Diego Opera; Franz WolffMetternich in the world premiere of La Beauté du monde at Opéra de Montréal; the world premiere of Michael Gandolfi’s Cantata with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, soprano Sophia Burgos, and pianist Alessio Bax; and a staged version of Brahms’s German Requiem with Rundfunkchor Berlin.

Michael Adams

barito n e Jose Castro

Praised by Opera News for “brandishing a beautiful, evenly produced, nicely ripe sound,” Michael Adams sings the Count in Le Nozze di Figaro with both Opera Omaha and Madison Opera in the 2022–23 season. He also returns to the role of Figaro in Il Barbiere di Siviglia with Opera Idaho. Last season, he made two company and role debuts in his home state of Texas: Sharpless in Madama Butterfly with Dallas Opera and the Count in Le Nozze di Figaro with Austin Opera before joining the Metropolitan Opera roster for its production of the latter. He also returned to the Deutsche Oper Berlin as the Count and the Herald in a new production of Schrecker’s Der Schatzgräber.

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the cleveland orchestra Now in its second century, The Cleveland Orchestra, under the leadership of music director Franz Welser-Möst since 2002, is one of the most sought-after performing ensembles in the world. Year after year, the ensemble exemplifies extraordinary artistic excellence, creative programming, and community engagement. The New York Times has called Cleveland “the best in America” for its virtuosity, elegance of sound, variety of color, and chamber-like musical cohesion.

Founded by Adella Prentiss Hughes, the Orchestra performed its inaugural concert in December 1918.

By the middle of the century, decades of growth and sustained support had turned it into one of the most admired globally.

The past decade has seen an increasing number of young people attending concerts, bringing fresh attention to The Cleveland Orchestra’s legendary sound and committed programming. More recently, the Orchestra launched several bold digital projects, including the

Franz Welser-Möst Music Director

Kelvin Smith Family Chair FIRST VIOLINS David Radzynski CONCERTMASTER

Blossom-Lee Chair Peter Otto FIRST ASSOCIATE CONCERTMASTER

Virginia M. Lindseth, PhD, Chair Jung-Min Amy Lee ASSOCIATE CONCERTMASTER

Gretchen D. and Ward Smith Chair Jessica Lee ASSISTANT CONCERTMASTER

Clara G. and George P. Bickford Chair Stephen Tavani ASSISTANT CONCERTMASTER

Miho Hashizume Theodore Rautenberg Chair Jeanne Preucil Rose 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 Katherine Bormann Analisé Denise Kukelhan Gladys B. Goetz Chair Zhan Shu SECOND VIOLINS

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

Stephen Rose* Alfred M. and Clara T. Rankin Chair

Kim Gomez Elizabeth and Leslie Kondorossy Chair

Eli Matthews1 Patricia M. Kozerefski and Richard J. Bogomolny Chair

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

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streaming broadcast series In Focus, the podcast On a Personal Note, and its own recording label, a new chapter in the Orchestra’s long and distinguished recording and broadcast history. Together, they have captured the Orchestra’s unique artistry and the musical achievements of the Welser-Möst and Cleveland Orchestra partnership.

The 2022-23 season marks Franz Welser-Möst’s 21st year as music director, a period in which The Cleveland Orchestra earned unprecedented acclaim around the world, including a series of residencies at the Musikverein in Vienna, the first of its kind by an American orchestra, and a number of acclaimed opera presentations.

Since 1918, seven music directors — Nikolai Sokoloff, Artur Rodziński, Erich Leinsdorf, George Szell, Lorin Maazel, Christoph von Dohnányi, and Franz Welser-Möst — have guided and shaped the ensemble’s growth and sound.

Through concerts at home and on tour, broadcasts, and a catalog of acclaimed recordings, The Cleveland Orchestra is heard today by a growing group of fans around the world.

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

CELLOS

HARP

Mark Kosower* Louis D. Beaumont Chair

Trina Struble* Alice Chalifoux Chair

Richard Weiss1 The GAR Foundation Chair

FLUTES

Charles Bernard2 Helen Weil Ross Chair Bryan Dumm Muriel and Noah Butkin Chair

Yun-Ting Lee Jiah Chung Chapdelaine

Tanya Ell Thomas J. and Judith Fay Gruber Chair

VIOLAS

Ralph Curry Brian Thornton William P. Blair III Chair

Wesley Collins* Chaillé H. and Richard B. Tullis Chair Lynne Ramsey1 Charles M. and Janet G. Kimball Chair Stanley Konopka2 Mark Jackobs Jean Wall Bennett Chair Lisa Boyko Richard and Nancy Sneed Chair Richard Waugh Lembi Veskimets The Morgan Sisters Chair Eliesha Nelson Joanna Patterson Zakany William Bender Gareth Zehngut

David Alan Harrell Martha Baldwin Dane Johansen Paul Kushious BASSES Maximilian Dimoff* Clarence T. Reinberger Chair Derek Zadinsky2 Charles Paul1 Mary E. and F. Joseph Callahan Chair Mark Atherton Thomas Sperl Henry Peyrebrune Charles Barr Memorial Chair Charles Carleton Scott Dixon

Joshua Smith* Elizabeth M. and William C. Treuhaft Chair Saeran St. Christopher Jessica Sindell2 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 Sharon and Yoash Wiener Chair Jeffrey Rathbun2 Everett D. and Eugenia S. McCurdy Chair Robert Walters ENGLISH HORN Robert Walters Samuel C. and Bernette K. Jaffe Chair

CLARINETS

CONTRABASSOON

TROMBONES

Afendi Yusuf* Robert Marcellus Chair

Jonathan Sherwin HORNS

Brian Wendel* Gilbert W. and Louise I. Humphrey Chair

Daniel McKelway2 Robert R. and Vilma L. Kohn Chair

Nathaniel Silberschlag* George Szell Memorial Chair

Richard Stout Alexander and Marianna C. McAfee Chair

Michael Mayhew§ Knight Foundation Chair

Shachar Israel2

Amy Zoloto

Jesse McCormick Robert B. Benyo Chair

EUPHONIUM & BASS TRUMPET

Hans Clebsch Richard King

Richard Stout

TRUMPETS

Yasuhito Sugiyama* Nathalie C. Spence and Nathalie S. Boswell Chair

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

E-FLAT CLARINET Daniel McKelway Stanley L. and Eloise M. Morgan Chair BASS CLARINET Amy Zoloto Myrna and James Spira Chair

photo by Roger Mastroianni

BASSOONS

Michael Sachs* Robert and Eunice Podis Weiskopf Chair Jack Sutte Lyle Steelman2 James P. and Dolores D. Storer Chair

John Clouser* Louise Harkness Ingalls Chair

Michael Miller

Gareth Thomas Barrick Stees2 Sandra L. Haslinger Chair

Michael Sachs* Mary Elizabeth and G. Robert Klein Chair

CORNETS

Michael Miller

TUBA

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

KEYBOARD INSTRUMENTS

CONDUCTORS

Carolyn Gadiel Warner Marjory and Marc L. Swartzbaugh Chair

MUSIC DIRECTOR LAUREATE

Christoph von Dohnányi

Assistant CONDUCTOR

LIBRARIANS Michael Ferraguto Joe and Marlene Toot Chair Donald Miller ENDOWED CHAIRS CURRENTLY UNOCCUPIED Elizabeth Ring and William Gwinn Mather Chair

James and Donna Reid Chair Sunshine Chair

Marc Damoulakis* Margaret Allen Ireland Chair

Mr. and Mrs. Richard K. Smucker Chair

Jonathan Sherwin

the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival

Sidney and Doris Dworkin Chair Lisa Wong DIRECTOR OF CHORUSES

Frances P. and Chester C. Bolton Chair

* Principal § Associate Principal 1 First Assistant Principal 2 Assistant Principal

Paul and Lucille Jones Chair

PERCUSSION

Donald Miller Thomas Sherwood

Daniel Reith

Rudolf Serkin Chair

This roster lists full-time members of The Cleveland Orchestra. The number and seating of musicians onstage varies depending on the piece being performed.

Seating within the string sections rotates on a periodic basis.

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the cleveland orchestra chorus Now in its 71st season, the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus is one of the few all-volunteer, professionally led choruses affiliated with a major American orchestra.

Founded in 1952 at the request of George Szell, it received the 2019-20 Distinguished Service Award, recognizing extraordinary service to the Orchestra.

Lisa Wong

Director of Choruses

Director

Frances P. and Chester C. Bolton Chair

Assistant Director

Lisa Wong was appointed director of choruses for The Cleveland Orchestra in May 2018 after serving as acting director throughout the 2017-18 season.

She joined the choral staff of The Cleveland Orchestra as assistant director of choruses at the start of the 2010-11 season. In 2012, she took on added responsibilities as director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Chorus.

In addition to her duties at Severance, she is a faculty member at the College of Wooster. Choirs under her direction have performed at the Central Division conference of the American Choral Directors Association and the state conference of the Ohio Music Education Association. An advocate for the music of under-represented composers, Ms. Wong serves as the Repertoire and Resource Chair for World Music and Cultures for the Ohio Choral Directors Association.

Active as a clinician, guest conductor, and adjudicator, she serves as a music panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts.

Ms. Wong holds a Bachelor of Science degree in music education from West Chester University, as well as Master of Music and Doctor of Music degrees in choral conducting from Indiana University.

Collaborative Pianist

Daniel J. Singer Daniel Overly

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TENORS Rong Chen Richard Hall John-Joseph Haney* Peter Kvidera Adam Landry Tod Lawrence David McCallum James C. Pintner Matthew Rizer Nathan A. Russell John Sabol Andrew Stamp William Venable Allen White Peter Wright

Brian Fancher Andrew Fowler Jeffrey D. Gershman Mark Hermann Seth Hobi* Kurtis B. Hoffman Robert L. Jenkins III James Johnston Kevin Kutz Jason Levy Jacob J. Liptow Tyler Mason Robert Mitchell Tremaine Oatman Francisco Prado Brandon Randall Robert G. Seaman Charlie Smrekar Devon Steve Charles Tobias Matt Turell *Shari Bierman Singer Fellow

BASSES Craig Astler Jack Blazey Ronnie Boscarello Nick Connavino Kyle Crowley Tom Cucuzza Christopher Dewald Jeffrey Duber

Jill Harbaugh Manager of Choruses

Lisa Fedorovich Chair, Cleveland Orchestra Chorus Operating Committee

photos by Roger Mastroianni

Lisa Wong

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Your Visit HEALTH & SAFETY The Cleveland Orchestra is committed to creating a comfortable, enjoyable, and safe environment for all guests at Severance Music Center. While mask and COVID-19 vaccination are recommended they are not required.

Protocols are reviewed regularly with the assistance of our Cleveland Clinic partners; for up-to-date information, visit: clevelandorchestra.com/ attend/health-safety

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. These seating breaks are at the discretion of the House Manager in consultation with the performing artists.

PAGERS, CELL PHONES & WRISTWATCH ALARMS

IN THE EVENT OF AN EMERGENCY

As a courtesy to others, please silence all devices prior to the start of the concert.

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.

PHOTOGRAPHY, VIDEOGRAPHY & RECORDING Audio recording, photography, and videography are prohibited during performances at Severance.

Photographs can only be taken when the performance is not in progress.

HEARING AIDS & OTHER HEALTH-ASSISTIVE DEVICES For the comfort of those around you, please reduce the volume on hearing aids and other devices that may produce a noise that would detract from the program. For Infrared Assistive-Listening Devices, please see the House Manager or Head Usher for more details.

AGE RESTRICTIONS Regardless of age, each person must have a ticket and be able to sit quietly in a seat throughout the performance. Classical 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 Music Explorers (for 3 to 6 years old) and Family Concerts (for ages 7 and older).

our Partner Institutions The Cleveland Orchestra and the Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival: The American Dream is proud to partner with the following organizations: Case Western Reserve University

Cleveland Museum of Art

Ideastream Public Media

case.edu

clevelandart.org

ideastream.org

Chautauqua Institution

Cleveland Public Library

Karamu House

chq.org

cpl.org

karamuhouse.org

Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque

The City Club of Cleveland

Western Reserve Historical Society

cityclub.org

wrhs.org

cia.edu/cinematheque

For more information about The Cleveland Orchestra’s ongoing programs & upcoming season:

clevelandorchestra.com @Cleveorch

© 2023 The Cleveland Orchestra and the Musical Arts Association This book was produced by The Cleveland Orchestra and distributed free to attending audience members.

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your visit & partners

@clevelandorchestra

@CleveOrchestra

EDITORIAL

DESIGN

Amanda Angel, Managing Editor of Content aangel@clevelandorchestra.com

Elizabeth Eddins, eddinsdesign.com

Kevin McBrien, Editorial Assistant

Meridian Printing, meridianprinting.com

ADMINISTRATION

ADVERTISING

Justin Holden, VP of Communications Ross Binnie, Chief Brand Officer

Live Publishing Company, 216-721-1800

PRINTING

@ClevelandOrchestra

This book was printed in a facility powered by wind power energy and uses organic inks.

Rainey Institute El Sistema Orchestra

A SYMPHONY OF

success

We believe that all Cleveland youth should have access to high-quality arts education. Through the generosity of our donors, we have invested more than $12 million since 2016 to scale up neighborhoodbased programs that now serve 5,000 youth year round in music, dance, theater, photography, literary arts and curatorial mastery. That’s a symphony of success. Find your passion, and partner with the Cleveland Foundation to make your greatest charitable impact.

(877) 554-5054 www.ClevelandFoundation.org