Meet TCO’s Concert Preview Speakers
Want to delve deeper into the music featured on The Cleveland Orchestra’s season? Check out our Music in Depth and Concert Preview series!
Hosted by a roster of music experts from the Cleveland area, Music in Depth and Concert Previews combine crucial historical context, fascinating musical details, and immersive audio examples to offer an exclusive window into each week’s Cleveland Orchestra performances.
Music in Depth is a one-hour Zoom webinar series that meets on Mondays at 4 PM during concert weeks. (Register on our website here.) Concert Previews take place in person at Severance Music Center one hour prior to each subscription concert. Both are free and open to the public.
Meet this season’s featured speakers:
Francesca Brittan
Francesca Brittan is associate professor of music at Case Western Reserve University. Her work focuses on music since around 1800, particularly histories of the orchestra and orchestration, intersections between music and medicine, and sonic histories of magic.
Brittan is the author and editor of several books, including Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz (2017), Berlioz and His World (2024), and The Attentive Ear: Sound, Cognition, and Subjectivity (2026). She serves as co-editor of the Journal of Musicology and general editor of the series “Recent Researches in Music of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” for AR Editions.
Eric Charnofsky
Eric Charnofsky enjoys a multifaceted career as a pianist, composer, lecturer, and narrator. He has performed with members of major orchestras and has recordings on the Capstone, Albany, Navona, and Crystal labels. Charnofsky taught music history, theory, and collaborative piano at the collegiate level, and has worked as a classical radio announcer, church choir director and organist, associate faculty member at Music Academy of the West, convention accompanist for the National Flute Association, and narrator with The Cleveland Orchestra and other ensembles.
In addition, Charnofsky serves on the boards for the Cleveland Chamber Music Society and Chamber Music Society of Ohio, and has received composition commissions from Pacific Serenades, Chamber Music Society of Ohio, Cleveland Chamber Collective, and Master Singers Chorale of Northeast Ohio. He holds a master’s degree in collaborative piano from The Juilliard School and also earned degrees in piano performance and composition.
Roger Klein
Rabbi Roger C. Klein received his BA from Dartmouth College and earned an MA and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Chicago, with a dissertation on Plato. He was ordained by the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, where he received a Master of Hebrew Letters degree. He also studied at the University of Tubingen in Germany as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow and at the Pardes Institute in Jerusalem.
Rabbi Klein has served Congregation Mishkan Or in Cleveland for more than 30 years. In addition, he has taught at several universities and lectures widely on Jewish thought, philosophy, history, and humor, as well as Christian-Jewish relations, the Bible, and music.
Klein grew up in Shaker Heights and graduated from Shaker Heights High School. He played varsity baseball in high school and college and is an avid lifelong tennis player.
Kevin McBrien
Kevin McBrien is the Editorial & Publications Manager for The Cleveland Orchestra, where he oversees the creation of the Orchestra’s program books for its Severance, Blossom, and Miami seasons.
An avid writer and speaker, he has written program notes and given pre-concert talks for arts organizations across the US, including The Cleveland Orchestra, Aspen Music Festival and School, St. Louis and Seattle symphonies, and Philharmonic Society of Orange County.
Born and raised in Orange County, California, McBrien holds a master’s and a PhD in musicology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a bachelor’s in music history & literature from California State University, Long Beach. He also has performing experience as a horn player, chorister, and conductor.
James O’Leary
Jamie O’Leary is the Frederick R. Selch Associate Professor of Musicology at Oberlin College and Conservatory. He specializes in the history of American modernism, the Broadway musical, and opera. His book, The Middlebrow Musical: Between Broadway and Opera, was published by Oxford University Press in 2025.
In addition to his academic work, O’Leary was a regular lecturer for The Metropolitan Opera and a pianist for the Yale School of Drama and Williamstown Theatre Festival.
Caroline Oltmanns
Caroline Oltmanns is a pianist, presenter, and pedagogue celebrated for imaginative interpretations, refined phrasing, and an engaging stage presence.
She has released seven solo CDs on the Filia Mundi label, including the 2022 concept album WIND, recorded at the Reitstadel in Germany. Recent seasons include performances in the US, Switzerland, and the UK, with concerto appearances alongside the Youngstown Symphony Orchestra and Cleveland Philharmonic Orchestra, and recital appearances in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
A dedicated advocate for new music, Oltmanns has commissioned and premiered numerous works and appears frequently on international radio and television. She is professor of piano at Youngstown State University, an International Steinway Artist, and a recipient of the 2022 and 2025 Steinway Top Teacher Awards.
David J. Rothenberg
David J. Rothenberg is professor of music at Case Western Reserve University. A musicologist specializing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance and a general audience lecturer with interests spanning from those eras to the present day, he is the author of The Flower of Paradise: Marian Devotion and Secular Song in Medieval and Renaissance Music (Oxford University Press, 2011), co-editor of Music and Culture in the Middle Ages and Beyond: Liturgy, Sources, Symbolism (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and co-editor of the Oxford Anthology of Western Music, Volume One: The Earliest Notations to the Early Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, third edition forthcoming). He holds a BA in music from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s and PhD in music history from Yale University.
Ellen Sauer Tanyeri
Ellen Sauer Tanyeri is a PhD candidate in musicology at Case Western Reserve University and Archives & Editorial Assistant at The Cleveland Orchestra.
A frequent performer with Apollo’s Fire and other world-class period ensembles, Sauer Tanyeri has degrees in flute performance from The Juilliard School and the University of Michigan. In addition to a passion for historically informed performance, her research interests include music of the French Revolution and 19th-century American sheet music.
Michael Strasser
Michael Strasser is professor emeritus of musicology at Baldwin Wallace University, whose research focuses primarily on music and musical life in fin-de-siècle France. As a doctoral student at the University of Illinois, he was the first musicologist to be awarded a prestigious Chateaubriand Fellowship by the French government for the study of French history and culture. He has published numerous articles and reviews and presented papers at international conferences about his research on French music, Arnold Schoenberg, and colonial music in British North America and Mexico.
In addition to his work with The Cleveland Orchestra, Strasser often presents talks at Cuyahoga County Public Library branches and local civic clubs on various topics, including music of the Civil Rights movement, popular music of World War II, and Nina Simone.
Before turning to musicology, Strasser was a band director at a high school in Florida and at the University of Louisville.
James Wilding
South African composer James Wilding’s mastery of structure and lyricism, use of ethnic instruments and folk tunes, and connections to art, photography, literature, and stories capture audiences in the US and abroad. Wilding’s work has been enthusiastically championed by such groups as the Akron Symphony Orchestra, Stow Symphony Orchestra, Middletown Wind Ensemble, Harburger Orchester Akademie, TEMPO Ensemble, and Chamber Music Society of Ohio.
Wilding has received commissions from the Bayerischer Rundfunk, South African Music Rights Organization, Tuesday Musical Association, Orange County School of the Arts, and Piano Spheres. His music is published by Hal Leonard, and his Etude for solo piano was prescribed for the UNISA Transnet International Piano Competition.
Wilding is professor of instruction in composition and theory at the University of Akron. He studied at the University of Cape Town with Peter Klatzow and at Kent State University with Thomas Janson.