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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
One of the most sought-after artists of her generation, conductor Elim Chan embodies the spirit of contemporary orchestral leadership with her crystalline precision and expressive zeal. She served as principal conductor of the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra between 2019 and 2024 and principal guest conductor of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra between 2018 and 2023.
Having conducted the First Night of the Proms with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 2024, Chan returned to the series in 2025 to conduct the renowned Last Night of the Proms. The summer of 2025 also saw her reunite with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and The Cleveland Orchestra, as well as touring with the Concertgebouworkest Young and making her debut at the Musikfest Berlin with the Staatskapelle Berlin.
Highlights in the 2025–26 season include return engagements with The Cleveland Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, ORF Radio-Symphonie-Orchester, Staatskapelle Dresden, Luxembourg Philharmonic, and Orchestre de Paris, among others. She also makes her subscription debut with The Philadelphia Orchestra and debuts with the Münchner Philharmoniker, Orchester der Oper Zürich, Bamberger Symphoniker, and Orchestre symphonique de Montréal.
Chan’s previous debuts include performances with the San Francisco Symphony, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Wiener Symphoniker, and Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin.
Born in Hong Kong, Chan studied at Smith College in Massachusetts and at the University of Michigan. In 2014, she became the first female winner of the Donatella Flick Conducting Competition and went on to spend her 2015–16 season as assistant conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, where she worked closely with Valery Gergiev. In the following season, Chan joined the Dudamel Fellowship Program of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She also owes much to the support and encouragement of Bernard Haitink, whose masterclasses she attended in Lucerne in 2015.
violin
Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s focus is to get to the heart of the music, to its meaning for us — now and here. With a combination of depth, brilliance, and humor, Kopatchinskaja brings an inimitable sense of theatrics to her music. Her distinctive approach always conveys the essence of a work, whether in a fresh interpretation of a repertoire classic or through one of her original staged projects that cross musical, theatrical, and interdisciplinary boundaries.
A visionary who thrives on experimentation and collaboration, Kopatchinskaja describes contemporary music as her lifeblood. Her artistic partnerships with living composers such as Francisco Coll, Michael Hersch, György Kurtág, and Esa-Pekka Salonen have resulted in numerous world premieres. A virtuoso, storyteller, and all-around phenomenon, Kopatchinskaja continues to serve as artistic partner of the SWR Symphony Orchestra, designing her own programs in both established and innovative staged concert formats.
Kopatchinskaja kicked off the 2025–26 season with the Staatskapelle Berlin. Further engagements include appearances as the London Symphony Orchestra’s Artist Portrait, her debut with The Cleveland Orchestra, and performances with the Czech Philharmonic and Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, among others. In recent years, Kopatchinskaja has curated major residencies at the Southbank Centre, Wiener Konzerthaus, Berlin Philharmonie, and Elbphilharmonie Hamburg. Last season, Kopatchinskaja honored Schoenberg’s 150th anniversary by performing his monumental Violin Concerto with the BBC and Vienna symphony orchestras, Dresden Philharmonic, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, to name a few.
Kopatchinskaja’s discography includes over 30 recordings, among them the Grammy Award–winning Death and the Maiden with the Saint Paul Chamber Orche-stra, a project which was also recreated as a semi-staged filmed performance with Camerata Bern. Recent releases include Plaisirs illuminés with Sol Gabetta and Camerata Bern, Le monde selon George Antheil with Joonas Ahonen, and a new recording with Fazıl Say, which marked the comeback of their duo and received the Editor’s Choice Award from Gramophone.
Composer
The son of an Eritrean father and a Russian mother, British composer Daniel Kidane writes music inspired by an exciting variety of sonic sources and cultural questions. He has described the musical environment of his childhood as consisting of “Russian orthodox choral [music], Soviet war songs, Perestroika pop, classical orchestral, Eritrean folk, and UK Jungle” and his considerable oeuvre is similarly multifaceted, including works for orchestra, voice, chamber ensemble, string quartet, and even electric guitar.
Kidane’s pieces often develop a single theme — his string quartet Foreign Tongues imagines different languages spoken simultaneously, while Sirens, written in collaboration with Zimbabwean poet Zodwa Nyoni, offers a musical tableau of a night out in Manchester. A champion for diversity and equity in classical music, Kidane has written many works that critically engage with social and political events, such as Be Still, written during the COVID-19 lockdown, and Woke, which opened the BBC Proms in 2019.
Kidane’s Sun Poem is a journey of fatherhood. Composed in the wake of two momentous paternal events — losing his father to cancer and becoming a first-time father himself — Kidane took the title from the second part of Barbadian author Kamau Brathwaite’s epic trilogy. Sun Poem is a complement to the work’s female-dominated first part, called Mother Poem, and explores the history of Barbados from a male perspective as it is passed down from grandfather to father to son. Inspired by Brathwaite, Kidane’s Sun Poem engages with ideas of maturation and manhood, familial bonds, and cultural inheritance. “There is no way I couldn’t have written it,” Kidane stated in an interview. “Sun Poem is a memento for my son.”
Like a timeless family heirloom, Sun Poem takes one musical idea on a transcendent journey. Beginning in fits and starts, the work opens with the call of muted trumpets. The instruments’ layered entries sound a frustrated emergence around a solitary, repeated pitch. Winds and other brass, alongside plucked strings and piano, enter as if the senses are awakening throughout the ensemble. A four-note motive, consisting of two consecutive upward leaps, appears for the first time in the trumpet. As the orchestra becomes more animated, a variety of taut rhythmic gestures typical of Kidane’s music are repeated, suggesting a child’s uncertain but excited first steps. The wide and colorful range of percussion exudes possibility as well as risk.
Following a grand pause, the woodwinds and trumpet offer a fully matured theme, supported by sustained harmonies in the strings. As it accumulates momentum, the theme encounters various obstacles — harmonic, timbral, and metric. Heralded by the opening’s aspiring leaps in the flute, the work’s apex features a triumphant brass melody scored over pulsating strings that evoke the minimalism of John Adams’s Short Ride in a Fast Machine — an apt metaphor for life. Yet the entrance of a reflective wandering melody in the clarinet curbs this unbounded striving and the music begins to retreat from the heights it has just attained. The periodic intrusion of low brass hints at something ominous, though it is tempered by the brightness of the percussion and piano.
A final, deliberate iteration of the four-note motive appears softly in the high strings, and the opening flutter of the trumpet sounds once again — one life cycle completing as another begins.
— Leah Batstone
Leah Batstone is a musicologist and visiting scholar at the Jordan Center at New York University. She is also the founder and creative director of the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival, which takes place each spring in New York City.
It is rare for a piece of instrumental music to be as clearly a declaration of love as Béla Bartók’s First Violin Concerto. In a way, the work was too intensely personal for its own good: its dedicatee never performed it, and the composer himself, after a few attempts, shelved the work. The concerto was not heard in its original form until 1958, after both composer and dedicatee had passed away. As a result, a major milestone in Bartók’s development as a composer was revealed to the world only belatedly.
Bartók was 26 years old when he fell passionately in love with Stefi Geyer, a charming and highly gifted violin student at the Budapest Conservatory. Though Geyer was friendly toward the composer, she did not return his feelings and became particularly upset over his criticism of her Catholic faith. She eventually broke off relations with Bartók, who suffered what was probably the deepest emotional crisis of his entire life. Upon receiving Geyer’s break-up letter on February 13, 1908, Bartók wrote a piano piece that became No. 13 of his 14 Bagatelles for piano. This funeral dirge bears the French subtitle “Elle est morte” — She is dead.
Bartók’s infatuation with Geyer, which lasted about a year, came at a time when the composer had just begun to find his individual voice as a composer, which synthesized Modernism with elements of folk music. The Violin Concerto, therefore, shows him at a crossroads. In addition to being a declaration of love, the concerto is a document of his artistic quest.
The concerto opens with the solo violin by itself, playing what Bartók explicitly described as “your leitmotive” in one of his letters to Geyer. This four-note motive dominates the entire concerto. Bartók referred to the two movements of the concerto as musical portraits: the first movement represents the “idealized Stefi Geyer, celestial and inward,” and the second the “cheerful, witty, amusing” side of her personality. Bartók had at one point planned a third movement, portraying the “indifferent, cool, and silent Stefi Geyer” through music that would have been “hateful” — but he quickly abandoned the idea.
The orchestra joins the soloist only gradually; at first, we hear a few stands of orchestral violins, with additional players entering until the entire orchestra is involved. In true post-Romantic fashion, the music winds its way to a fortissimo climax and back to the initial pianissimo. The poignant coda is announced by the entrance of the triangle and the two harps, accompanying a solo violin that climbs into the highest register of the instrument to close the movement on Geyer’s motive.
The second-movement Allegro giocoso is playful and brilliant overall, but also includes a lengthy middle section that reverts to the dreamy Romanticism of the first movement. Shortly before the end, the flutes play a quirky little tune that is evidently a personal message from Bartók to Geyer. In the score, the tune is placed in quotation marks and bears the note: “Jászberény, June 28th, 1907.” Bartok had spent a few days in this Hungarian city with Geyer and her brother; it was there that he made the first sketches for the concerto on July 1, three days after the above date. The tune itself is a German children’s song known as “Der Esel ist ein dummes Tier” (The donkey is a foolish beast). The last thing played by the soloist is, not surprisingly, the four-note Geyer motive, cut off by a short and almost brutal orchestral closure.
Some 30 years later, Bartók resumed contact with Geyer. Both had by then married, and the two enjoyed a friendly rapport. Geyer championed Bartók’s violin works and even helped the composer and his wife emigrate to the United States in 1940 to escape the threat of fascism in Europe.
But back in 1908, the young composer’s feelings were still raw. Following his “funeral” bagatelle written the day of the breakup, Bartók turned Geyer’s motive into a biting caricature, twisting it into a furious waltz in his Bagatelle No. 14. In 1911, Bartók orchestrated this bagatelle as the second of his Two Portraits. And what was the first portrait? None other than a reworked version of the first movement of the then-hidden concerto. Thus, even decades before the rediscovery and premiere of Bartók’s First Violin Concerto, listeners could get to know, through music, the young woman who first broke Bartók’s heart and would later save his life.
— adapted from a note by Peter Laki
Peter Laki is a musicologist and frequent lecturer on classical music. He is a visiting associate professor of music, emeritus, at Bard College and was The Cleveland Orchestra’s program annotator from 1990 to 2007.
In the 1920s, Béla Bartók’s music reached a peak of modernity and dissonance, which bestowed on him a reputation for aggressive ugliness that neither Schoenberg nor Stravinsky ever matched. With hindsight, we can understand that the horrified critics of the time were faced with sounds they had never expected to hear in their lives, but also that this music is far from ugly or formless. It may not display the soaring lines that many love in Mozart and Schubert, but it is full of lyrical feeling, youthful energy, and highly inventive rhythms and harmonies, and displays a shapeliness that can quite reasonably be seen as a legacy of these Classical masters.
The two violin sonatas, which most clearly exhibit this extreme style, were followed in 1923 by a work that reached in a different direction and won the hearts of the public. This was the Dance Suite, composed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the formal linking of the two capitals of Hungary, Buda and Pest, into a single city. Kodály’s Psalmus Hungaricus was commissioned for the same occasion, and the senior Hungarian composer, Ernő Dohnányi (grandfather of The Cleveland Orchestra’s late Music Director Laureate Christoph von Dohnányi) conducted both works in a festival in November 1923.
Bartók’s name was rapidly gaining recognition outside of Hungary in those years, partly through the efforts of his publisher, Universal Edition, and partly because of a much-publicized performance at the 1925 International Society for Contemporary Music festival in Prague, which catapulted Bartók’s music onto the international stage. Over the following two years, the Dance Suite received over 60 performances in major European and American centers.
Bartók regarded himself equally as a composer and an ethnographer, for he had devoted much of his life up to that point to the study of folk music from many regions of Eastern Europe and beyond. He collected thousands of tunes and devoted long hours to cataloging and analyzing them. Most of his works display the influence of folk song in some shape or form. The Dance Suite was a deliberate announcement of the composer’s dedication to the study of folk music and his creative approach to incorporating this resource into modern orchestral music.
This is not music to dance to, however, even if dance movements lie at its origin. The melodies are recognizably folklike, but Bartók treats them freely in his orchestration and varies the tempo with accelerations and interruptions, all of which proclaim a highly sophisticated musician handling raw materials in a way that never deprives them of their distinctive character.
The six movements run continuously, the last being a Finale that recalls snatches from the earlier dances. The fifth dance is the only one to maintain a regular 4/4 beat (almost) throughout. The rest play with alternating time signatures that break up the rhythms, create hiccups, and insert a certain drama into the action. The fourth dance is the only one to sustain a gentle pace, with dense string chords as background to wandering melodic phrases in the woodwinds.
Most remarkable is Bartók’s gift for apt and pointed orchestration, whether in the tinkling of piano or celesta, the extreme range of the bassoon, or the intrusion of the trombones. And although the tunes are strictly his invention, he composes as if they came straight from the little villages and hamlets where he collected folk songs. In so many ways, the Dance Suite was the perfect answer to all those who despaired of modern music and lamented that it could never be tuneful.
— Hugh Macdonald
Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.
The Poem of Ecstasy by Alexander Scriabin is a superb example of the huge, self-obsessed orchestral repertoire from the period before World War I, which we generally associate with Mahler and Richard Strauss. Scriabin was a strongly progressive and individualistic composer who saw himself as the prophet of a new cosmos, and his works as the voice of a divine being.
Like many Russian artists who, once they are attached to an idea, pursue it relentlessly to its ultimate point — Mussorgsky and Tolstoy also come to mind — Scriabin was driven by a powerful inner force to capture his mystical vision in music. He is easily dismissed as a crazy egomaniac, but his music is superbly crafted and excitingly modern, even today.
Most of Scriabin’s music is for the piano, with some important orchestral works composed at regular intervals throughout his short career. His previous orchestral piece, The Divine Poem, was a three-movement symphonic work completed in 1904, when he was 32. It ventured into the territory of philosophical abstraction, which had begun to fascinate him shortly before. (A later work, Prometheus, explored synthetic imagery in its scoring for piano, orchestra, and “color organ.”)
His next orchestral work was to be titled Orgiastic Poem, but it eventually became The Poem of Ecstasy, giving an even greater prominence to the composer’s obsession with the spirit’s search for joy and his intense belief in his own creativity. Alongside this orchestral work, Scriabin wrote a 300-line-long poem of the same name, full of mystical fantasizing, which also inspired his Fifth Piano Sonata.
While the poem text can be safely ignored as self-absorbed rambling, the musical work is a masterpiece that stands fittingly beside other great orchestral creations of the early 20th century. The Poem of Ecstasy was completed early in 1908 and premiered later that year in New York City, led by the composer’s friend Modest Altschuler. Two months later, it was performed in Moscow and was soon adopted by orchestras worldwide that were keen to present the latest in “advanced” music.
The orchestra is large, and the contrasts of mood are extreme, yet the piece has a concentration that would become even more pronounced in Scriabin’s final works. While Mahler’s symphonies were reaching further out into all realms of human thought, Scriabin’s were concentrating into a densely packed kernel of feeling and belief.
The themes heard in The Poem of Ecstasy have specific functions, according to the composer. For instance, the opening line in the flute is the theme of longing, the clarinet’s melody over hazy strings is a dream theme, and the trumpet’s succession of rising phrases represents victory. Such labels are easily understood in the context of 19th-century program music, although a crystal-clear interpretation of their relationship to the music is hardly possible. We have simply an alternation of moods in the composer’s mind, with a recapitulation of the opening material leading to an ecstatic climax.
The emotional intensity is extreme, whether languid and erotic, playful, volatile, or blazingly triumphant. The textures are intricate and complex, yet the harmonic progress is plodding. The key of C major, in which the work closes, had come to represent Scriabin’s central focus after years of exploring remote tonal regions. The next step, which he took shortly after, was to cut loose from tonality altogether. Scriabin was thus, with Schoenberg and Debussy, one of the most progressive and visionary spirits of his time.
*Daniel Kidane’s Sun Poem and Bartók’s Dance Suite are not performed on Friday’s matinee concert
Patricia Kopatchinskaja makes her much-anticipated Cleveland Orchestra debut with Bartóks fiery Violin Concerto No. 1, which remained unperformed for 50 years after its dedicatee rejected both the concerto and the composer’s affections. Returning conductor Elim Chan pairs one Bartók favorite with another — the folk-inflected Dance Suite — and rounds out the program with two marvelous works: Daniel Kidane’s fatherhood-inspired Sun Poem and the rapturous mysticism of Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy.
There will be a Concert Preview presentation one hour prior to the performance in Reinberger Chamber Hall with Kevin McBrien, Editorial & Publications Manager, The Cleveland Orchestra.
Elim Chan’s performance is generously sponsored by Herb and Jody Wainer.
Circle Night: Mar. 19
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