Northeast Ohio will be in the national spotlight at 9 p.m. Friday, Jan. 11 PBS (check local listings) in Great Performances: The Cleveland Orchestra Centennial Celebration.
The program will be available to stream the following day on pbs.org/gper and PBS apps. This 90-minute co-production of THIRTEEN Productions LLC for WNET, WVIZ/PBS ideastream, The Cleveland Orchestra, and Clasart Classic celebrates The Cleveland Orchestra’s historic centennial. The co-production is in association with international broadcasters NHK (Japan), BR/3Sat (Germany, Austria and Switzerland), and YLE (Finland).
On September 29, 2018 at Severance Hall, WVIZ/PBS ideastream, Northeast Ohio’s public multimedia source, and Great Performances, America’s preeminent performing arts television series, worked together to capture The Cleveland Orchestra’s 100th-anniversary gala concert for television. The Cleveland Orchestra’s featured performance was led by Music Director Franz Welser-Möst and offered works touching on more than a century of Viennese musical traditions with Lang Lang performing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24. The remainder of the concert featured Die Frau Ohne Schatten Symphonic Fantasy by Richard Strauss and Maurice Ravel’s viscerally cataclysmic La Valse (The Waltz), which dramatically evokes the changing artistic worlds between the 19th and 20th centuries.
This Great Performances episode also includes three special segments produced by WVIZ/PBS ideastream. Each includes a historical look at The Cleveland Orchestra. The first segment features “The Mother of The Cleveland Orchestra,” Adella Prentiss Hughes, who was the first female founder of a successful orchestra. The second highlights the Orchestra’s seven music directors, including Kiev-born Nikolai Sokoloff; the tireless, forward-thinking George Szell who is famous for forging what became known as “The Cleveland Sound”; and Franz Welser-Möst, whose collaborative relationship with the Orchestra is widely-acknowledged among the best orchestra-conductor partnerships of today. The final segment showcases the Orchestra’s long legacy of community engagement in Northeast Ohio neighborhoods and schools.
This production marks the fourth time that The Cleveland Orchestra has been featured on Great Performances, most recently in 2006 when Franz Welser-Möst conducted the Orchestra in a Carnegie Hall Opening Night Concert. Additional appearances on the long-running series include a concert from the 1975–76 season with Lorin Maazel and a performance from 2000 conducted by Christoph von Dohnányi.
