The Cleveland Orchestra’s Blossom Music Festival 2025
The Cleveland Orchestra is gearing up for a summer music festival that will feature favorite conductors leading a lineup of popular classics. Of particular interest is the return of Elim Chan, who made a strong impression in her previous appearances in Cleveland, conducting dramatic and insightful performances of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. This summer, she will take on Mahler’s Symphony No.1. It will be of great interest to see how she fares in these concerts and those next season, for she must be considered a leading candidate to succeed departing maestro Franz Welser-Möst who is leaving the post of music director in 2027.
A veteran conductor who has made an impressive impact during his guest conducting visits to Cleveland in recent years is Osmo Vänskä, who led a blazing Tchaikovsky ‘Pathétique’ Symphony last September when he stepped in for the indisposed Welser-Möst. Vänskä is back on 12 July to open the Blossom classical concerts with Sibelius’s En Saga and Orff’s Carmina Burana. Czech conductor Petr Popelka will return on 19 July with RobertSchumann’s ‘Spring’ Symphony and violinist Veronika Eberle, who is making her Cleveland Orchestra debut in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D.
The young British conductor Jonathon Heyward, currently the music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, will make his Cleveland Orchestra debut on 26 July with a program that matches established favorites – Dvorak’s Carnival Overture and Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony – with a contemporary piece, Glasslands by Anna Clyne. Daniele Rustioni, the Italian music director of Opéra Lyon and recently-named principal guest conductor of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, will conduct a program of favorites on 2 August, including Wagner’s overture to Tannhäuser and Brahms’s First Symphony, and featuring Alessio Bax in his Cleveland Orchestra debut with Liszt’s Piano Concerto No.1.
Chan’s Mahler No.1 on 9 August will be preceded by Ravel’s Sheherazade, sung by soprano Christiane Karg. Cleveland Orchestra associate conductor Daniel Reith will lead Elgar’s Enigma Variations on 16 August, along with Bruch’s Violin Concerto No.2 with associate concertmaster Stephen Tavani and the premiere of a new piece by Gabriella Smith, Rewilding, which pays tribute to the fiftieth anniversary of Cuyahoga National Park where Blossom is located. The final classical concert of the festival will take place on 23 August with the return of cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason to play the Saint-Saëns Cello Concerto No.1 in A minor with conductor Stephanie Childress, who will also direct Britten’s Simple Symphony and Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony.
The orchestra will offer popular fare for a number of concerts including film nights with live soundtracks on 5/6 July (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) and 29-31 August (The Lion King). On 27 July, Oscar-nominated and Grammy, Emmy and Tony Award–winning actress, singer and producer Cynthia Erivo joins the orchestra for a program of hits from some of the greatest vocalists of all time, along with Erivo’s own original songs. On 7 August, vocalist Laufey will join the orchestra for a program of hit songs and surprises, and on 10 August, singer and pianist Tony DeSare joins the orchestra for a program of the songs of Billy Joel. A further popular concert will follow with a Rodgers & Hammerstein Celebration on 17 August.
In addition to the concerts at Blossom, the orchestra has expanded its concurrent ‘Summers at Severance’ to four concerts in the orchestra’s main hall in the University Circle neighborhood of Cleveland. The busy French conductor Marie Jacquot – currently music director of the Royal Danish Orchestra, chief conductor-designate of the WDR Symphony Orchestra and principal guest conductor of the Vienna Symphony – will conduct Mozart’s Don Giovanni Overture, the same composer’s Violin Concerto No.3 with Randall Goosby and the Cleveland Orchestra premiere of Richard Strauss’s youthful Symphony in F minor. The next Severance concert, on 17 July, brings the return of Finnish conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali with Beethoven’s Symphony No.2, Stravinsky’s ballet score, Jeu de Cartes, and the Suite No.2 from Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé.
The remarkable Christoph Koncz, whose past includes a childhood appearance as youthful prodigy Kaspar Weiss in the film The Red Violin and a fifteen-year tenure as principal second violin in the Vienna Philharmonic, will conduct an all-Hungarian program with Liszt’s tone poem Les Préludes, Ernst von Dohnányi’s rarely heard Symphonic Minutes and Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. Dima Slobodeniouk, who led a mesmerizing Nielsen Fifth a few years back, returns to close the ‘Summers at Severance’ series with Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony at Severance on 21 August, along with Nobuyuki Tsujii as soloist in Chopin’s Piano Concerto No.2 in F minor.
Mark Sebastian Jordan
Featured Image: The Cleveland Orchestra returns to Blossom Music Center in 2025 for the Festival © Roger Mastroianni