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Music Director
Now in his 24th season, Franz Welser-Möst continues to shape an unmistakable sound culture as Music Director of The Cleveland Orchestra. Under his leadership, the Orchestra has earned repeated international acclaim for its musical excellence, reaffirmed its strong commitment to new music, and brought opera back to the stage of Severance Music Center. In recent years, the Orchestra also launched its own streaming platform, Adella.live, and a recording label. Today, it boasts one of the youngest audiences in the United States.
In addition to residencies in the US and Europe, Welser-Möst and the Orchestra perform regularly at the world’s leading international festivals. Welser-Möst will remain Music Director until 2027, making him the longest-serving music director of The Cleveland Orchestra.
Welser-Möst enjoys a particularly close and productive artistic partnership with the Vienna Philharmonic. He regularly conducts the orchestra in subscription concerts at the Vienna Musikverein, at the Salzburg Festival, and on tour in Europe, Japan, China, and the US, and has appeared three times on the podium for their celebrated New Year’s Concert (2011, 2013, and 2023). At the Salzburg Festival, Welser- Möst has set new standards in interpretation as an opera conductor, with a special focus on the operas of Richard Strauss.
Among Welser-Möst’s many honors and awards, he was named an Honorary Member of the Vienna Philharmonic in 2024, one of the orchestra’s highest distinctions.
soprano
A native of Bolivar, New York, American soprano Joélle Harvey has built a reputation as one of the finest singers of her generation.
The 2025–26 season is anchored by the operas of Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro with the Bayerische Staatsoper and The Magic Flute with Santa Fe Opera and the Metropolitan Opera. She also performs Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with The Cleveland Orchestra, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony with The Philadelphia Orchestra, and J.S. Bach’s Easter Oratorio and Magnificat with the San Francisco Symphony.
An in-demand vocal soloist, Harvey regularly appears with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society, and The English Concert.
On the operatic stage, she has performed at the Glyndebourne Festival, Royal Opera House, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, and Houston Grand Opera, among others.
Harvey received Second Prize in Houston Grand Opera’s Eleanor McCollum Competition for Young Singers. She received degrees in vocal performance from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.
mezzo-soprano
Taylor Raven is a “vocal sensation” (Washington Classical Review) and is quickly establishing herself in opera, concert, and recital.
In the 2025–26 season, Raven makes her house debut with the English National Opera in Così fan tutte and returns to the Los Angeles Philharmonic for a staged production of Die Walküre. Highlights on the concert stage include Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with The Cleveland Orchestra, Mozart’s Requiem with the New Jersey Symphony, and her debut with the North Carolina Symphony for Handel’s Messiah.
In recent seasons, Raven debuted with the Metropolitan Opera in John Adams’s Antony and Cleopatra and performed Julia Perry’s Stabat Mater with the Duisburger Philharmoniker. Other recent engagements include performances with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Opera, and Houston Grand Opera.
Raven is a graduate of the Young Artist Program at Los Angeles Opera and holds degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Colorado Boulder.
tenor
The career of exuberant Finnish-American tenor Miles Mykkanen was launched with a national win of the Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition in 2019. He has since impressed with a series of important debuts on the world’s major stages, including the Metropolitan Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, Canadian Opera Company, and Royal Opera House.
In a pivotal 2025–26 season, Mykkanen opens the Metropolitan Opera’s season in Mason Bates’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. He returns to the Met later this season for Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence.
Elsewhere, Mykkanen appears in Richard Strauss’s Daphne at Seattle Opera and The Magic Flute at Los Angeles Opera. He also returns to The Cleveland Orchestra for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and sings Handel’s Messiah with Chicago’s Music of the Baroque. In addition, he will perform with piano duo Lucas and Arthur Jussen at the Maastricht Festival, and at The Juilliard School’s annual Alice Tully Vocal Recital at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall.
bass-baritone
Bass-baritone Dashon Burton’s 2025–26 season highlights include Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Fidelio with The Cleveland Orchestra, Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer with the New Jersey Symphony, Britten’s War Requiem with the Erie Philharmonic, and Handel’s Messiah at Augustana College. He also appears in recital at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC.
A three-time Grammy Award winner, Burton earned Best Classical Solo Vocal Album in 2021 for Ethyl Smyth’s The Prison with the Experiential Orchestra, and has twice won with the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, of which he is a founding member. His discography also includes Songs of Struggle & Redemption: We Shall Overcome, Paul Moravec’s Sanctuary Road, and Caroline Shaw’s The Listeners with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra.
Burton holds degrees from Oberlin College and Conservatory and Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music. He is assistant professor of voice at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.
Now firmly in its second century, 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.
Now in its 74th season, The Cleveland Orchestra Chorus is celebrated for its versatility and refined musicianship, appearing regularly with The Cleveland Orchestra at Severance and Blossom Music Center. As one of the few all-volunteer, professionally trained choruses affiliated with a major American orchestra, it received the 2019–20 Distinguished Service Award, recognizing extraordinary service to the Orchestra.
Visit cochorus.com for more information on the Chorus and auditions.
Composer
Deep in the woods of Finland, among the trees and fauna, an ancient presence presides. Tapio, the forest spirit, is the embodiment of the woodland, its essence personified. The Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, even refers to the forest itself as “Tapiola” — the realm of Tapio.
Composer Jean Sibelius was deeply inspired by the mythologies and characters of the Kalevala, incorporating them into several of his works. In 1926, he composed the symphonic tone poem Tapiola, a musical portrayal of Tapio and the spirit of Finland’s wilds. It was Sibelius’s last major orchestral work, even though he would live for another three decades.
Sibelius prefaced the score with the following epigraph:
Widespread they stand, the Northland’s dusky forests,Ancient, mysterious, brooding savage dreams;Within them dwells the Forest’s mighty god,And wood-sprites in the gloom weave magic secrets.
This atmospheric stanza sets the poetic tone for the work, a single continuous movement of organic development not unlike the forests of Finland. Although Sibelius composed Tapiola with his trademark fluidity, there is a structural arc to the work: a quiet, mysterious opening section that introduces the initial motives; a “development” section that evokes restless wildlife and storm-like surges; and a coda whose climax eerily dissolves into stillness, like a shadow retreating into the trees. Part of Sibelius’s ingenuity is the way in which a few musical “cells” create something akin to a force of nature — a whisper that swells into a ravaging storm before impassively returning to silence.
In the spirit of the score’s epigraph, Tapiola opens with a mysterious and brooding atmosphere, rooted in the minor mode. As a motivic fragment materializes, it is passed around the orchestra, played alternately by strings and winds, with sporadic hints of a storm brewing in the distance. Monolithic background chords provide both stability and stillness underneath the restless and repetitive motion of the thematic material. The background sonorities soon rise to the foreground as the initial motive fades away. Other wisps of melody are soon introduced, which organically flow in and out of the piece, and cover wide-ranging moods: bittersweet, unnerving, longing, sprightly.
The all-encompassing nature of the forest seems encapsulated by this interplay of background and foreground, the balance of organic transformation and grounded support, and the flow of transient ideas across broad timescales. By the time Tapiola concludes, there is a lingering sense that the woodlands of Finland are both ancient and widespread, encompassing an endless variety of terrain and atmosphere — from wet peatlands to dry pine heaths; vast silver birch suffused with light, their slender trunks casting long shadows over the moss and soil; and rocky ridges punctuated by glacial erratics and jack pine roots.
After Tapiola was published in 1926, Sibelius effectively ended his career as a composer. He began writing an eighth symphony, but only fragments exist — the rest were lost or destroyed. While it is unknown why Sibelius stopped writing music for the last 30 years of his life, it is difficult to imagine a more appropriate end to his catalog than Tapiola. Throughout his life, Finland embraced Sibelius for crafting a distinctive musical “voice” for the country founded on Finnish folklore, landscape, and language. At a time when modernism was in fashion across Europe — and Finland was establishing its cultural and political autonomy separate from long-held Russian influence — Sibelius’s nurturing of Finland’s musical identity was invaluable.
Although Sibelius’s career ended with Tapiola, the work stands as both a fitting conclusion to a singular musical voice and a testament to the living, breathing forests that make up the soul of Finland.
— Kevin Whitman
Kevin Whitman is The Cleveland Orchestra’s marketing operations manager.
“Joy, beautiful spark of divinity.” Beethoven turned these immortal words from Friedrich Schiller into his epoch-making Ninth Symphony, a work that seems to point to infinity at every turn. The combined powers of The Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus prove once again that every encounter with Beethoven’s Ninth brings radiant new discoveries and emotions. Rounding out the program is Sibelius’s tone poem Tapiola, a sumptuous sketch of a Finnish forest spirit.
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