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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
Dalia Stasevska’s charismatic and dynamic musicianship has established her as a conductor of exceptional versatility. Chief conductor of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra and artistic director of the International Sibelius Festival, she also serves as principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and has made regular appearances at the BBC Proms.
In the 2024–25 season, Stasevska guest conducts the Orchestre de Paris, Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Dresdner Philharmonie, Helsinki Philharmonic, and Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, among others. In North America, she returns to The Cleveland Orchestra, The Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, and Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, and debuts with the New World Symphony.
A passionate opera conductor, 2023 saw Stasevska’s highly successful debut at the Glyndebourne Festival with Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Other productions include a double bill of Poulenc’s La voix humane and Weill’s Songs with the Finnish National Opera and Ballet, Madama Butterfly with Norske Opera, and Sebastian Fagerlund’s Höstsonaten at the Baltic Sea Festival.
Stasevska’s debut solo album, Dalia’s Mixtape with BBC Symphony Orchestra, released in August 2024 on Platoon and features some of the freshest sounds in contemporary music by Anna Meredith, Caroline Shaw, Andrea Tarrodi, Noriko Koide, and others. In a special collaboration with Joshua Bell and the INSO-Lviv Symphony Orchestra, she also recently released a recording of Thomas de Hartmann’s Violin Concerto on Pentatone Records.
Stasevska studied violin and composition at the Tampere Conservatoire and violin, viola, and conducting at the Sibelius Academy. In December 2018, she had the honor of conducting the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra at the Nobel Prize Ceremony. She was named one of The New York Times’s Breakout Stars and received the BBC Music Magazine’s Personality of the Year award in 2023.
In October 2021, Stasevska was bestowed the Order of Princess Olga of the III degree by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for her significant personal contribution to the development of international cooperation, strengthening the prestige of Ukraine internationally, and popularization of its historical and cultural heritage. Since February 2022, she has been actively supporting Ukraine by raising funds to buy supplies and, on several occasions, delivering them herself.
Composer
The first movement [Noche de los Mayas — Night of the Mayas] sets the atmosphere for the entire composition and can be understood as a broad prelude. The second movement, Noche de jaranas [Night of Merrymakers], depicts a village festival using the form of a scherzo. The third movement, Noche de Yucatán [Night of Yucátan], contains what in the film was the love music, describing the idyll of a Mayan girl and a Mexican engineer. This is followed without interruption by the fourth movement, Noche de encantamiento [Night of Enchantment]. This is in the form of a theme with four variations and concludes with a finale that captures, with extraordinary sensitivity, the atmosphere that still prevails today in the magical rites that continue to be practiced in what survives of the Mayan culture — a culture doomed to disappear under the pressure of modern civilization.
— José Yves Limantour, taken from the program note about his arrangement of Revueltas’s La Noche de los Mayas
* Revueltas’s La Noche de los Mayas is not performed on Friday’s matinee concert
Acclaimed conductor Dalia Stasevska returns to Severance for two evocative musical depictions of the American continent. Informed by African American spirituals, Indigenous melodies, and Czech folk songs, Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony proceeds from one memorable tune to another, including its exquisitely yearning slow movement and rollicking finale. Revueltas’s cinematic La Noche de los Mayas takes us farther south for a sonic feast of Yucatán rhythms.
Sunday's concert will be livestreamed on Adella, digital home of The Cleveland Orchestra, and medici.tv.
We offer a variety of concessions before and after the concert, as well as during intermission.
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