Last night the Cleveland Orchestra performed the Beethoven Piano Concerto #4 with Mitsuko Uchida as soloist and after intermission a searing rendition of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony. Prelude to Act I Wagner's Lohengrin was the encore. The audience loved it and demanded numerous curtain calls. For those of you who know a little about music history, you might be interested to know that Gustav Mahler's grand-daughter was in the audience during our Thursday night concert and loved it! Only in Vienna...
This morning at the Wiener Musikvereinsaal the orchestra rehearsed a little bit of a new piece that we have played several times call "Chor" by Jorge Widmann and then spent the rest of the rehearsal on the Brahms Requiem with the Wiener Singverein (Viennese Singing Society) and soloists. The Singverein sang really beautifully and it is not surprising, considering they are the chorus for the Vienna Philharmonic and they were singing in their native language of German. The soloists were Simon Keenlyside, a wonderful singer, and the fabulous Malin Hartelius, who sang so stunningly beautifully in the Cleveland Orchestra's production of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro last spring. The concert for this program is tonight and tomorrow night. On Tuesday the orchestra will take a train to Linz to perform our last concert of the tour. Linz is the hometown of our music director Franz Welser-Most, so it will be a homecoming for him.
Today I'm taking a day off the day from sight-seeing to nap, stay away pastries, and write this blog!
To follow the orchestra's tour online, go to www.clevelandorchestrablog.com Hope your open houses went well today!
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