Concert to take place on Sunday, June 26 at 5:30 p.m. on the south terrace of the Cleveland Museum of Art as the finale of its Centennial Festival Weekend
CLEVELAND – The Cleveland Orchestra has announced the program for a free concert as part of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Centennial Celebration season. The concert takes place on Sunday, June 26, 2016 at 5:30 p.m. during the Centennial Festival Weekend, which includes the museum’s annual Solstice celebration on the night of June 25. The concert is the festival’s grand finale and marks the conclusion of two days of experiences with the museum’s world-renowned collection, as well as a wide-ranging roster of local artists and their work that will take place inside the museum and outside around Wade Lagoon. Tickets are not required for the June 26 concert, which will take place on the museum’s south terrace in front of its iconic 1916 building.
For the first time, The Cleveland Orchestra will perform a concert on the south terrace of the Cleveland Museum of Art. The concert will feature works by Bartók, Hindemith, Mussorgsky, Respighi, and Adam Schoenberg under the direction of Cleveland Orchestra Associate Conductor Brett Mitchell. The program was created to provide connections to the visual arts and the summer solstice. Béla Bartók and Paul Hindemith, two in a long line of artists who performed in the museum’s longstanding concert series, both visited the Cleveland Museum of Art, either performing or giving lectures. The Hindemith, Respighi, and Adam Schoenberg works were inspired by the visual arts and the Mussorgsky work has a connection to the summer solstice. The complete program is listed below.
“It's a great pleasure for us to help our friends at the Cleveland Museum of Art celebrate their centennial,” said Brett Mitchell, associate conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra. "The five pieces on our program all feature intimate connections between the worlds of visual art and classical music, with two of the composers having visited and performed at the CMA during its first hundred years.”
“Having The Cleveland Orchestra perform the finale of our Centennial Festival Weekend is about the greatest birthday gift I think we could ever imagine,” said Tom Welsh, director of performing arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art.
About the Program
Paul Hindemith visited the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1939, giving lectures and performing a number of his works for viola. In addition to Hindemith's in-person visit to the museum, his opera from the previous year, 1938's Mathis der Maler, is about German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald and his Isenheim Altarpiece. The Hindemith selection titled “Angelic Concert,” being performed at this concert, is from the opera and is based on a scene in the altarpiece.
Béla Bartók visited the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1928. Bartók’s Hungarian Sketches, being performed on this program, are orchestrations he made in 1931 of five piano pieces he had composed between 1908 and 1911. When he visited the museum in 1928, three years before he made the orchestrations, he played the original piano versions of three of the five movements, "Evening in the Country," "Bear Dance," and "Slightly Tipsy."
Ottorino Respighi’s Three Botticelli Pictures was inspired by Botticelli paintings, while Adam Schoenberg’s Finding Rothko is a reaction to four works by Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko.
Modest Mussorgsky’s A Night on Bald Mountain is a tone poem depicting St. John’s Eve, a feast day that coincides with the summer solstice.
The Cleveland Orchestra and Cleveland Museum of Art
Previously, The Cleveland Orchestra collaborated in performances at the Cleveland Museum of Art as part of the museum’s Italian Masterworks and California Masterworks exhibitions. On May 1, 2016 The Cleveland Orchestra and Cleveland Museum of Art announced that, for the first time, the Orchestra’s annual “At Home” neighborhood residency is in partnership with the Cleveland Museum of Art and will take place from June to August in Hough to celebrate music and art in this historic neighborhood east of downtown Cleveland.