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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
An Italian with a strong affinity for the German repertoire, Antonello Manacorda is a true orchestral practitioner whose artistic creativity is combined with a collaborative approach to music-making. Born in Turin to an Italian French family, educated in Amsterdam, and now living in Berlin, Manacorda was a founding member and long-time concertmaster of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra before studying conducting with the legendary Finnish teacher Jorma Panula.
At the end of the 2024–25 season, Manacorda stepped down as artistic director and principal conductor of the Kammerakademie Potsdam. With this ensemble, he produced a series of award-winning recordings and will remain associated with the orchestra as honorary conductor.
In the 2025–26 season, opera productions take Manacorda to the Opéra National de Paris (The Marriage of Figaro), Deutsche Oper Berlin (Zar und Zimmermann), and The Metropolitan Opera (La traviata). He also undertakes an international concert tour with Les Siècles and Isabelle Faust and conducts subscription weeks with The Cleveland Orchestra, Oslo Philharmonic, Munich Philharmonic, and Danish National Symphony Orchestra, among others.
In recent seasons, Manacorda has worked with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Berlin Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, among others. He enjoyed great success with a new production of Weber’s Der Freischütz by Dmitri Tcherniakov at the Bavarian State Opera, his debut at the Semperoper Dresden, and a new production of Debussy’s Pelléas et Melisande at the Opéra National de Paris.
With the Kammerakademie Potsdam, Manacorda has recorded Mendelssohn and Schubert cycles for Sony Classical, the latter of which received the Orchestra of the Year prize at the 2015 ECHO Klassik Awards. In October 2022, Manacorda and Potsdam received the OPUS Klassik Award in the same category for their recording of Mozart’s final symphonies. A recording of Beethoven’s complete symphonies was released in May 2024; the recording of his Fifth and Sixth symphonies, previously released in October 2023, was awarded the OPUS Klassik in the Best Symphonic Recording category.
violin
Augustin Hadelich is one of the great violinists of our time. Known for his phenomenal technique, insightful and persuasive interpretations, and ravishing tone, he appears extensively on the world’s foremost concert stages. Hadelich has performed with all the major American orchestras as well as the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and many other eminent ensembles.
In the 2025–26 season, Hadelich serves as artist in residence with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where he is featured in concerto, chamber music, and recital formats. He also appears with The Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra, and San Diego Symphony. Further invitations bring him to the Leipizig Gewandhaus Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic, Czech Philharmonic, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, NCPA Orchestra Beijing, and São Paulo Symphony, among others. In April 2026, he will be in residence at the Tongyeong International Music Festival in South Korea. Recitals take him to New York, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Warsaw, Copenhagen, Graz, Heidelberg, Cremona, and Taipei.
Hadelich’s discography reflects his stylistic versatility and encompasses much of the violin repertoire. In 2016, he received a Grammy Award for his recording of Dutilleux’s L’Arbre des songes with the Seattle Symphony and Ludovic Morlot. A Warner Classics Artist, his most recent album, American Road Trip with pianist Orion Weiss, was awarded an Opus Klassik in 2025 for Chamber Music Recording of the Year.
Hadelich, a dual American-German citizen born in Italy to German parents, rose to fame after winning the Gold Medal at the 2006 International Violin Competition of Indianapolis. Further distinctions followed, including an Avery Fisher Career Grant, the UK’s Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Exeter. In 2018, he was named Instrumentalist of the Year by Musical America. Hadelich holds an Artist Diploma from The Juilliard School, where he studied with Joel Smirnoff, and in 2021, was appointed to the violin faculty at the Yale School of Music. He plays a 1744 violin by Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù, known as “Leduc, ex Szeryng,” on loan from the Tarisio Trust.
Composer
At age 35, Felix Mendelssohn could already look back on an international career of a decade and a half. He was happily married and, by 1844, the father of four. His first name, Felix (Latin for “happy”), appeared to be a good omen for his life. No one could then have predicted Mendelssohn’s tragic death only three years later.
His Violin Concerto in E minor was a gift of friendship to a musician particularly close to his heart. Mendelssohn had known Ferdinand David (1810–73) since boyhood, and shortly after the composer took over the directorship of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, he invited the violinist to be his concertmaster. David held this position for 37 years, serving long after Mendelssohn’s untimely death. The composer’s fondness for David can be seen in this passage from an 1838 letter to the violinist: “I realize that there are not many musicians who pursue such a straight road in art undeviatingly as you do, or in whose active course I could feel the same intense delight that I do in yours.”
Mendelssohn penned this tender tribute the same year he created his first sketches of the E-minor Violin Concerto. Other commitments, however, prevented him from completing the work until 1844. The concerto would be one of his last symphonic compositions, followed only by the oratorio Elijah.
The concerto seems to perfectly reflect the composer’s sunny disposition. In this work, as elsewhere in Mendelssohn’s music, Romantic passion is always tempered by Classical restraint, tender and lyrical feelings are balanced by light, even humorous moments, and depth of expression goes hand in hand with virtuosity.
One of Mendelssohn’s most innovative touches happens at the very beginning of the concerto, where he dispenses with the usual orchestral exposition and introduces the solo instrument right away with a soaring melody. The violin remains the center of attention throughout the entire work, with only a few tutti sections for the entire orchestra where the soloist doesn’t play.
In another striking departure from convention, the three movements of the concerto are played without pause. It wasn’t the only time Mendelssohn eliminated movement breaks in his larger works — he had done the same in his “Scottish” Symphony — but in this concerto, he takes it a step further by inserting short connecting passages between the movements. After the first movement, a single note held by a solo bassoon provides a link to the beautiful Andante, and a brief melodic passage serves as a bridge between the second and third movements. The speed of this latter passage, scored for solo violin and string orchestra, is halfway between the preceding slow and subsequent fast tempos. The various moods and sentiments — those of the passionate first movement, the lyrical second, and the graceful third — all flow directly from one another, instead of existing as separate entities.
The written-out cadenza of the first movement (which may be in part by David) is also more strongly integrated into the movement than was the case in earlier concertos. Mendelssohn moved it from its traditional place at the end of the movement to the middle, allowing it to grow organically out of the development section and naturally resolve in the recapitulation. But the cadenza does not end when the orchestra reenters; it continues while the flute, oboe, and first violins play the main theme — another example of the seamless transitions that were so important to Mendelssohn.
The triumph of this work may have been best expressed by the great violinist Joseph Joachim in 1906: “The Germans have four violin concertos. The greatest — and the one that makes the fewest concessions — is Beethoven’s. Brahms’s is the closest to Beethoven’s in seriousness. Bruch’s [First] is the richest and the most enchanting. But the dearest of all — the heart’s jewel — is Mendelssohn’s.”
— 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.
Arnold Schoenberg's transition from a tonal composer in his twenties to inventing Serialism in his forties was a long, difficult, and painful process. He always insisted that he was driven by some invisible force, that something urged him to forge a new musical language — even though he had clearly mastered the late Romantic style of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. This style was, in fact, one to which he often longed to return.
Gradually, he moved into more chromatic territory, abandoning tonality bit by bit and then fully “emancipating” dissonance by allowing chords to be made up of any of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale. His ears — and eventually ours — got used to more harmonic chaos, to a more colorful world, filled with a brand-new notion of what music could be. (Schoenberg was by no means the only force pushing to upend tradition, but he is the one who pushed fastest in full public view and with the clearest sense of creating a new “system.”) The final step Schoenberg took was to systematize this new language, in which all 12 tones were set in equal balance.
Evidence that the process was painful is provided by the Second Chamber Symphony, which he began to compose in 1906, immediately after finishing the First Chamber Symphony. In the earlier work, Schoenberg held on to tonality but no longer relied on it to guide the musical structure, as it had for generations. But immediately upon starting the Second Chamber Symphony, Schoenberg felt that he could no longer continue in the same furrow. His next step would have to be the complete abandonment of tonality — but this new work, he realized, was not going to be the one to move him that far forward, to carry the burden of voicing that new future.
So, he left the work as a series of sketches, its two movements far from complete. He came back to it in 1911 and again in 1916, but without success. In 1938, he was asked by conductor Fritz Stiedry, a fellow German émigré who had known Schoenberg in Vienna, for a work for his group, the New York–based New Friends of Music Orchestra.
This prompted Schoenberg to once again revisit the incomplete Chamber Symphony. Having at last a more detached view of style — in the intervening years, he had worked out his own 12-tone system and also ably orchestrated a number of other, tonal works — Schoenberg was able to complete the work in the style always intended for it. The final work is set in two movements — one slow, one fast. (At one point, Schoenberg planned a third movement but later abandoned the idea, although he incorporated some of its ideas into the completed second movement.) Stiedry ultimately led the work’s world premiere in December 1940.
The second movement is longer than the first, but both movements provide excellent opportunities to hear Schoenberg’s gift for discovering new instrumental combinations. The size of the orchestra (a small wind section plus strings) also plays a crucial role, preventing the texture from ever becoming too thick.
When listening to Schoenberg’s 12-tone works, one often has the impression of two pieces of music being played simultaneously in different rooms. Though that sense of simultaneous “conversations” is present on occasion, in this work, the various musics blend together in happy unity.
— 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.
Behind the first puzzle posed by the “Unfinished” Symphony — why didn’t Franz Schubert finish it? — there is a second and even greater enigma. Schubert’s first six symphonies, written between 1813 and 1818, showed him completely at ease with all aspects of the form. But a few years later, he was leaving fragment after fragment, as if he no longer felt up to the challenge. The B-minor Symphony is not Schubert’s only “Unfinished.” Other projected symphonies were abandoned even earlier in the compositional process, and several have since been completed and performed in “realizations.” (One of these — a fairly complete sketch of a symphony in E major — was even played by The Cleveland Orchestra in 1928.)
All these “failed” projects point to Schubert’s growing dissatisfaction with the symphonic form as he had been practicing it and suggest that he was striving for something on a far larger scale than his previous efforts. Both stimulated and discouraged by Beethoven’s formidable examples, he once exclaimed: “Who can do anything after him?!” Thus, it seems clear, Schubert was searching for his own artistic response to Beethoven’s symphonies — a response that would match Beethoven in scope and dramatic energy yet be free from any direct stylistic influence. Schubert eventually rose to the challenge in his “Great” C-major Symphony, completed in 1825, but it was a daunting task, accomplished only after several attempts.
With the “Unfinished” Symphony, Schubert came very close to a solution. As Brian Newbould, a specialist on Schubert’s symphonies, has put it, this work is not so much an unfinished symphony as a “finished half-symphony.” It is the only one of the uncompleted “fragments” with two movements that are fully written out and orchestrated, requiring no editing in order to be performed.
While Beethoven tended to construct his symphonic movements from extremely short melodic or rhythmic gestures, Schubert often started with full-fledged melodic statements that unfold like songs. In this first movement, song quickly turns into drama when the second theme is interrupted by a measure of silence, followed by a few moments of orchestral turbulence, after which the previous idyll is restored. One particular harmonic turn in the development section even uncannily anticipates the music of Wagner’s groundbreaking opera Tristan und Isolde (1857–59).
The second movement combines a peaceful, ethereal melody with a more majestic theme featuring trumpets, trombones, and timpani. A new melody is introduced in a different key (C-sharp minor), again with a dramatic extension. These contrasts in mood persist until the end of the movement, where E major is finally reestablished after an exacting tonal journey through several different keys.
The manuscript score of the “Unfinished” Symphony was long in the possession of the composer Anselm Hüttenbrenner, a friend of Schubert. For decades, though, Hüttenbrenner denied anyone access to the work, for reasons that remain unclear. Finally, as the story goes, conductor Johann von Herbeck, who directed the concerts of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Society of the Friends of Music), bribed the stingy composer by offering to perform the “Unfinished” alongside one of Hüttenbrenner’s own works. Now finally released, the “Unfinished” Symphony was premiered in 1865 — 37 years after the composer’s death — and was quickly recognized as one of Schubert’s masterworks.
The staggeringly talented Augustin Hadelich sets his sights on Mendelssohn’s treasured Violin Concerto, seizing our attention from the iconic introduction all the way through its breathless finale. Conductor Antonello Manacorda also leads Schoenberg’s hyper-romantic Second Chamber Symphony, which took 33 years to be completed, and Schubert’s Eighth Symphony, which famously never was ... though that hasn’t kept the beloved “Unfinished” from its celebrated place in the repertoire.
There will be a Concert Preview presentation one hour prior to the performance in Reinberger Chamber Hall with Jamie O’Leary, Frederick R. Selch Associate Professor of Musicology, Oberlin Conservatory.
Pre-concert Wine Tasting available in Lounge at Severance ($20.00 per ticket)
Augustin Hadelich’s performance is generously sponsored by Robin Dunn Blossom and Barbara Blossom in memory of Jaymi Blossom Feeney
We offer a variety of concessions before and after the concert, as well as during intermission.
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