“Look for the doors at Severance Hall to be open even more widely than usual the next two weeks,” writes Zachary Lewis in Sunday’s (10/12) Plain Dealer (Cleveland). During its “Bach in Focus” mini-festival, “The Cleveland Orchestra and music director Franz Welser-Möst are presenting everything from Bach’s grandest liturgical masterpiece to any number of his smallest gems…. The festival launches with the epic Mass in B Minor.… In keeping with its mission to attract new listeners, the orchestra and Welser-Möst will then take part of their Bach show on the road. In between performances at Severance Hall, the group will also present Bach’s Missa Brevis—a subset of the Mass in B Minor—at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Cleveland…. Another unusual move then awaits back home. Picking up where it left off last spring during its ‘At Home in Lakewood’ residency, the orchestra will reanimate its ‘Make Music!’ program by hosting a free, four-hour Bach marathon featuring a large cast of student and professional artists from all over Northeast Ohio.… Bach’s secular persona is the theme of the festival finale … led by former assistant conductor James Gaffigan” and featuring Bach’s Violin Concertos No. 1 and 2, with soloist Hilary Hahn, plus Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 5 (“Reformation”) and Brahms’s Schicksalslied.
Posted October 14, 2014
