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100 Points
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
Composer, conductor, and creative thinker — John Adams occupies a unique position in the world of music. His works stand out for their depth of expression, brilliance of sound, and profoundly humanist themes. His operas and oratorios, such as Nixon in China, Doctor Atomic, and El Niño, have transformed contemporary music theater, and works such as Harmonielehre, Shaker Loops, and his Violin Concerto are among the most performed in all contemporary classical music.
As a conductor, Adams has led the world’s major orchestras, programming his own works alongside a wide variety of repertoire ranging from Beethoven and Debussy to Sibelius and Philip Glass. Conducting engagements in 2025–26 include return visits to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Houston Symphony (both with frequent collaborator Víkingur Ólafsson), The Cleveland Orchestra, and New World Symphony. Further afield, he returns to the Gothenburg Symphony, Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony, and leads multiple concerts with The Hallé in a three-day festival of his music.
Among Adams’s honorary doctorates are those from Yale, Harvard, Northwestern, and Cambridge universities, as well as The Juilliard School. Other honors include Spain’s BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award, Holland’s Erasmus Prize, the Ditson Conductor’s Award from Columbia University, and an “Honorary Academician” appointment by the General Assembly of the Academicians of Santa Cecilia.
In celebration of Adams’s 75th birthday in 2022, Nonesuch Records released the 40-disc John Adams Collected Works, a box set spanning the composer’s over four-decade career with the label. Also available as a box set is the Berlin Philharmonic’s John Adams Edition, a CD and DVD collection comprising seven of his works, conducted by Simon Rattle, Gustavo Dudamel, Kirill Petrenko, Alan Gilbert, and Adams himself.
A five-time Grammy winner, Adams’s Nonesuch recording of his opera Girls of the Golden West with the Los Angeles Philharmonic received a 2024 Grammy nomination for Best Opera Recording.
Adams is the author of the highly acclaimed autobiography Hallelujah Junction and is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review. Since 2009, he has been the creative chair of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
piano
Pianist Aaron Diehl has quietly redefined the boundary between jazz and classical music, building an international career distinguished by stylistic fluency, intellectual rigor, and a deep sense of musical lineage. He has worked extensively with figures such as Tyshawn Sorey, Timo Andres, Philip Glass, and Cécile McLorin Salvant, forging projects that span concertos, chamber music, orchestral works, and jazz performance. In 2023, Diehl was named artistic director of 92NY’s Jazz in July Festival, succeeding the legendary Bill Charlap.
A leader in contemporary jazz, Diehl has headlined the Monterey, Detroit, and Newport jazz festivals, and held residencies at Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Village Vanguard, and SF Jazz, among others. In the classical realm, Diehl has appeared as a soloist with major orchestras including The Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, working with conductors such as Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Marin Alsop, Alan Gilbert, Teddy Abrams, and John Adams.
In recent seasons, Diehl has appeared in a wide range of boundary-crossing projects, including a performance of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians with the Bang on a Can All Stars, premiering and touring Darcy James Argue’s A Banquet for the Birds with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, and collaborating with The Knights on an arrangement of Keith Jarrett’s Book of Ways.
Diehl was born in Columbus, Ohio, where he grew up listening to his grandfather, pianist and trombonist Arthur Baskerville. His family nurtured Diehl’s musical talents from a young age, and in 2002, he competed in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington Competition, placing as a finalist. It was there that he attracted the attention of Wynton Marsalis, who invited Diehl to join his septet for a European tour. After studying at Juilliard, Diehl was awarded the 2011 American Pianists Association’s Cole Porter Fellowship.
Diehl also inherited a lifelong love of flying from his father, who was an avid pilot, and holds commercial single and multi-engine pilot certifications. He has been a Steinway Artist since 2016.
Composer
Of the third movement Fugue, Ives’s program says only that it is “an expression of the reaction of life into formalism and ritualism.” … [It is] the kind of piece Ives used to play Sunday after Sunday at the organ. This particular one, transferred from the First String Quartet to the Fourth Symphony, is in a way the most revolutionary movement of all. …
The Fugue precedes in much the same gentle, beautiful way it did in the Quartet, now fleshed out in color with basses, flute, and clarinet, and with horns entering periodically in the manner of a [J.S.] Bach chorale prelude. … It ends nearly as did the original, but with the addition of a delicate shadow line in clarinet, and a trombone playing a fragment of “Joy to the World”: And heav’n and nature sing … repeat the sounding joy. … Ives found that joy in a New England church, in the revealed religion he called in the Essays “the path between God and man’s spiritual part — a kind of formal causeway.” Here that causeway is symbolized by the formal tradition of the fugue. The country church is not the end of the Pilgrim’s journey, but for Ives it is a critical stopping place.
— Jan Swafford, writing on Ives’s Fourth Symphony in Charles Ives: A Life with Music (1996)
pianist/composer
You’ll often hear composers speak of the “materials” of a piece. The word is useful in that it encompasses everything from notes and harmonies to timbres and techniques. It’s also a dodge; we use it to cast our music in a more objective light, as if it were simply something to be assembled like flat-packed furniture. So the “tunes” in this piece are a corrective — a challenge to myself to come clean about my intentions and influences, rather than approach them sideways, as pure abstractions.
Primary among those intentions was to write a concerto that would speak to the style and expertise of its soloist, the pianist Aaron Diehl. Aaron is a musician who takes a wide view of American musical history, a tradition that is, in a sense, made of tunes: early hymnody, folk songs, parlor songs, work songs, the blues, and ragtime are the roots of its family tree. I’ve always been fascinated by this protean admixture, in which sacred and secular, art and kitsch, mainstream and recondite bump up against each other. (The title Made of Tunes is drawn from the song “The Things Our Fathers Loved” by Charles Ives, a composer who shared this fascination.)
Aaron’s part includes opportunities for improvisation, sections in which I pass him a tune, or a rhythm, or a harmony, and he responds with something I wouldn’t have thought of. The boundary between the piece’s improvised and notated music is often intentionally blurry, the soloist’s excursions catching the tail of an idea and elaborating further, before handing it back.
The first movement, Come, Labor On, counterposes hymnody and motor. Taking its main tune and title from Thomas Tertius Noble’s hymn (which I remember singing as a child — one of my first experiences of four-part harmony), the form is a slow-fast-slow palindrome. After a stately orchestral introduction, the soloist instigates rhythmic drama, introducing an ostinato pattern perforated by emphatic cross-rhythms. After a huge orchestral pileup, under which organ and brass play an entire hymn verse in elaborate harmony, the movement ends with a piano-led recapitulation of the introduction.
The second movement, American Nocturnal, is a series of six variations on an original theme, derived from smashing the melody notes of the hokey patriotic tune “America the Beautiful” into a series of expanding and contracting intervals. (The original tune is never heard.) The movement is dominated by expressive exchanges between piano and wind soloists. Each variation ends with a low orchestral rumble, longer and more threatening with each iteration, until, in the sixth variation, it overwhelms the soloist, who finishes the piece in a ruminative daze, accompanied by distant saxophone echoes of the first movement.
— Timo Andres
Frenzy is a one-movement symphony that, in the course of its 20 minutes, encompasses a variegated yet unified symphonic structure. Its title notwithstanding, the piece is generally buoyant and extroverted and postpones its real frenetic energy to the concluding moments. What makes Frenzy unique in comparison to my other works is its focus, almost to the point of obsession, on the development and transformation of small, vivid motives that continue to resurface in various guises throughout the piece. This kind of classic development treatment of motivic ideas — the German term Durchführung is familiar to most musicians — differs from the gradual “change-via-repetition” technique in my earlier, minimalist-influenced works. In fact, once completed, Frenzy revealed itself, much to the surprise of its composer, as a melding of the two approaches toward musical form. On the one hand, its rhythmic event horizon is still essentially pulse-driven while on the other its melodic world is about shapeshifting and the “spinning out” of ideas.
The opening bars present two contrasting gestures: a punctuated tattoo in the winds and brass and an urgent, muscular theme in the upper strings. Both these ideas reappear throughout the piece, always transformed in one way or another and yet always identifiable.
In place of a “slow movement” the music’s surface simply quiets down; density and forcefulness yield to feelings of lightness and transparency. The pulse is still there, now carried along by a congenial interplay among the two harps and celesta while the strings limn a lyrical melody that floats above them.
The final section is indeed frenetic, with hard-driven, choppy string figures, tsunami-like waves of brass, and madly scurrying woodwinds, all of which come together to earn the piece’s title.
Frenzy is dedicated to my longtime friend Simon Rattle, who conducted the first performance with the London Symphony Orchestra in March of 2024.
— John Adams
I arrived at Nadia [Boulanger]’s house with a suitcase full of scores, the complete classical oeuvre I had written to that point. Nadia spent the first two weeks analyzing the work. “To teach you,” she said. “I first must know where your music is going.”
One day, finally, she told me that everything I had brought with me was well written but that she could not find the spirit in it. She asked me what music I played in my country, what I wanted to do. I had not told her about my past as a tango musician, much less that my instrument, the bandoneon, was in the closet in my room in Paris.
I thought to myself: if I tell her the truth she will throw me out the window. … But after two days I had to tell her the truth. I told her I made my living arranging for tango orchestras. …
Nadia looked into my eyes and asked me to play one of my tangos at the piano. So I confessed to her that I played bandoneon; I told her she shouldn’t expect a good piano player because I wasn’t. She insisted, "It doesn’t matter, Astor, play your tango." And I started out with Triunfal. When I finished, Nadia took my hands in hers and with that English of hers, so sweet, she said, "Astor, this is beautiful. I like it a lot. Here is the true Piazzolla — do not ever leave him." It was the greatest revelation of my musical life.
— Astor Piazzolla recalls his studies with the French composer and pedagogue Nadia Boulanger in Astor Piazzolla: A Memoir (1990)
* The Ives work and two of the Piazzola tangos (La Mufa and Oblivion) are not performed on Friday’s matinee concert
Pioneering composer John Adams conducts a marquee lineup of Cleveland Orchestra premieres, including his Frenzy, an audacious work that reflects our dizzying modernity, and his own arrangements of Astor Piazzolla’s irresistible Argentine tangos. Following a contemplative fugue by Ives, pianist Aaron Diehl takes center stage in a concerto composed for him, Timo Andres’s delightful American pastiche Made of Tunes.
John Adams' performance is generously sponsored by Tony and Diane Wynshaw-Boris
Pre-concert Wine Tasting available in Lounge at Severance 19th and 21st ($15.00 per ticket)
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.
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