Become a Stand Partner monthly donor today – and your first year of donations will be MATCHED! Sign up today!
100 Points
Feb 12
Feb 14
The Cleveland Orchestra, under the leadership of 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. In recent years, 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 the ensemble into one of the most admired around the world.
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 streaming platform Adella.live and its own recording label. Together, they have captured the Orchestra’s unique artistry and the musical achievements of the Welser-Möst and Cleveland Orchestra partnership.
The 2025–26 season marks Franz Welser-Möst’s 24th year as Music Director, a period in which The Cleveland Orchestra has 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 celebrated 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.
conductor
Embodying music with an unparalleled dramatic sensibility, soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan is an artist at the forefront of creation. Over more than three decades, she has forged extraordinary artistic partnerships with the world’s foremost musicians, directors, and choreographers, including John Zorn, Simon Rattle, Sasha Waltz, Katie Mitchell, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Kirill Petrenko. The late conductor and pianist Reinbert de Leeuw has been an extraordinary influence and inspiration on her development as a musician.
In the 2025–26 season, Hannigan returns to The Cleveland Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, l’Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, Munich Philharmonic, and Iceland Symphony Orchestra (where her position as chief conductor and artistic director will begin in the 2026–27 season). She will make her New York Philharmonic conducting debut, performing her unique version of Poulenc’s La voix humaine, in which she both sings the role of Elle and conducts the orchestra. Her recital tour with Bertrand Chamayou also continues, with performances in Lausanne, Amsterdam, Gothenburg, Brussels, Madrid, Vienna, Prague, and London, and she embarks on another European tour alongside the Quatuor Belcea, singing the soprano part in Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet. In addition, Hannigan will give the world premiere of Laura Bowler’s The White Book for soprano and orchestra with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, and Copenhagen Philharmonic, conducted by Bar Avni.
Hannigan’s awards and honors include being named the 2025 Polar Music Prize Laureate, Musical America’s Artist of the Year in 2025, and an Accademico Onorario (Honorary Academician) at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia. Other honors include the Order of Canada, France’s Officier des Arts et des Lettres, Gramophone’s 2022 Artist of the Year, Germany’s Faust Award, Sweden’s Rolf Schock Prize for Musical Arts, the Stena Foundation’s 2021 Cultural Scholarship, the Dresdener Musikfestspiele Glashütte Award, Denmark’s Léonie Sonning Music Prize, and Canada’s De Hueck and Walford Career Achievement Award.
soprano
Soprano Johanna Wallroth has swiftly risen to international acclaim, with standout appearances at the Wiener Staatsoper, Berliner Philharmonie, Wiener Musikverein, and Philharmonie de Paris. Following her celebrated debut in Mozart’s Don Giovanni with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Daniel Harding, she was named Swedish Radio’s artist in residence for two consecutive seasons.
Wallroth’s 2025–26 season marks a series of important debuts, including as Pamina in Simon McBurney’s acclaimed production of The Magic Flute at Theater Basel, as the Governess in The Turn of the Screw with Den Norske Opera, and as Fiordiligi in a concert version of Così fan tutte with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra. On the concert platform, she joins The Cleveland Orchestra under Barbara Hannigan to perform Knoxville Summer of 1915 and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in a program of Mozart arias, conducted by Karina Canellakis.
Wallroth is also an accomplished recitalist and recently performed at Båstad’s historic Birgit Nilsson Hall with pianist Magnus Svensson,. In collaboration with pianist Malcolm Martineau, she has performed at the Schubertiades in both Vilabertran and Cantabria, the Tivoli Festival, as part of the Grandi voci series at Gothenburg Opera, and at Helsinki Seriös. She has also presented programs at London’s Wigmore Hall with Michael Pandya, at the Savonlinna Festival with Kristian Attila, and has recorded a number of lieder programs as a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist.
Wallroth’s artistic journey began at the Royal Swedish Ballet School, where she trained as a dancer before shifting her focus to voice, and she went on to graduate from Vienna’s Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst (MDW). She gained international attention when she secured first prize at the renowned Mirjam Helin International Singing Competition in 2019. Wallroth was also awarded the Birgit Nilsson Scholarship in 2021 and represented Sweden in the 2023 Cardiff Singer of the World Competition.
Composer
A Haunted Landscape is not programmatic in any sense. The title reflects my feeling that certain places on the planet Earth are imbued with an aura of mystery. ... Places can inspire feelings of reverence or brooding menace (like the deserted battlefields of ancient wars). Sometimes one feels an idyllic sense of time suspended. The contemplation of a landscape can induce complex psychological states and perhaps music is an ideal medium for delineating the tiny, subtle nuances of emotion and sensibility, which hover between the subliminal and the unconscious.
A Haunted Landscape is cast in a single, continuous movement. A unifying factor is provided by a very low B-flat, sustained throughout by two solo contrabassists. I had imagined that this low B-flat (60 cycles — the frequency of alternating current) was an immutable law of nature and represented a kind of “cosmic drone.” But, alas, science defeats art — a chemist friend informed me that alternating current is arbitrarily determined by man, and that B-flat is not even international, much less intergalactic!
— From a program note by George Crumb
Syrl Silberman of WGBH-TV in Boston had worked on a film about [Carl Ruggles] and had become friendly with the [94-year-old] man. We drove up to the rest home where Mr. Ruggles, an old — and, some said, senile — man was living. … Syrl and I just walked into his room and said “Hello,” set up a tape recorder, put some light earphones on his old and shriveled head, cranked the volume up as high as possible, and started to play an air-check of the [Boston Symphony Orchestra's recent] performance of Sun-Treader.
The first timpani stroke of the work hit the old man like a hammer. Suddenly, he was sitting bolt upright, his eyes wild and open, like an eagle, his breath coming in fast, hoarse grunts and growls and guttered noise. “Fine. Great. Damn, damn fine work!” He kept it up right through the whole piece. Sometimes singing or moaning along with the music until the end. He turned toward me, sitting at his bedside, and grabbed my hand in his, holding it in a viselike grip and just stared at me, saying nothing. We remained so awhile, then he settled back and began to talk, mostly about his friend Ives (“Charlie”), about Varèse, [artist] Thomas Hart Benton. And music, music, music:
“I don’t think much about that fellow Brahms. … Debussy — a genius — nothing wrong with him that a few weeks in the open air wouldn’t cure. … Oh, there are some fine works all right: the St. Matthew Passion, Missa solemnis, The Ring, Tristan, and Sun-Treader. When I wrote Sun-Treader, I knew it was great. I knew it!”
— Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas on his meeting with Carl Ruggles in 1970
I had always admired Mr. [James] Agee’s writing, and this prose-poem particularly struck me because the summer evening he describes in his native southern town reminded me so much of similar evenings when I was a child at home. I found out, after setting this, that Mr. Agee and I are the same age, and the year he described was 1915, when we were both 5. You see, it expresses a child’s feeling of loneliness, wonder, and lack of identity in that marginal world between twilight and sleep.
— Samuel Barber, interviewed by James Fasset on June 19, 1949
by James Agee
© 1949 by G. Schirmer, Inc.
[We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.]
. . . It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds’ hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt: a loud auto: a quiet auto: people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually, the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard, and starched milk, the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squared with clowns in hueless amber. A streetcar raising its iron moan; stopping; belling and starting, stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks; the iron whine rises on rising speed; still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell; rises again, still fainter; fainting, lifting, lifts, faints foregone: forgotten. Now is the night one blue dew.
Now is the night one blue dew, my father has drained, he has coiled the hose.
Low on the length of lawns, a frailing of fire who breathes ...
Parents on porches: rock and rock. From damp strings morning glories hang their ancient
faces.
The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums.
On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there. ... They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine, ... with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.
After a little l am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.
Dr. [Fritz] Reiner selected the portions of the opera that he wanted to play and also set the sequence of the excerpts. He expressed his ideas as to instrumentation, wishing to make generous use of saxophones and banjo and to dispense with Gershwin’s pet instrument, the piano.
I proceeded not only to follow Dr. Reiner’s ideas faithfully, but also to remain completely loyal to George’s harmonic and orchestral intentions. In other words, although carrying out Dr. Reiner’s approach, I have been careful to do what I knew — after many years of association with Gershwin — Gershwin would like as a symphonic version of his music.
— Robert Russell Bennett, in the liner notes for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s 1945 recording of the work
The ingenious Barbara Hannigan conducts an all-American evening that’s capped by an orchestral suite of timeless tunes from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Rounding out this cross-country road trip are bold, evocative works by American mavericks Carl Ruggles and George Crumb, and Barber’s nostalgic Knoxville: Summer of 1915, based on a poem by James Agee and featuring award-winning Swedish soprano Johanna Wallroth.
There will be a concert preview presentation one hour prior to the performance in Reinberger Chamber Hall with James Wilding, Professor of Theory & Composition, The University of Akron.
Circle Night: Feb. 12
Barbara Hannigan's performance is generously sponsored by Tony and Diane Wynshaw-Boris.
We offer a variety of concessions before and after the concert, as well as during intermission.
*Donor exclusive lounge areas. Learn more about becoming a donor
Below is a list of the features and services available in at Severance for this concert. You may also request assistance in advance of a concert by calling the Severance Ticket Office at 216-231-1111 or 800-686-1141 or create a request using the button below.
Jump to: