NEWS
Brett Mitchell to lead multiple subscription weeks with The Cleveland Orchestra in 2016-17 season
The Plain Dealer has published a preview of The Cleveland Orchestra's 2016-17 subscription season, which includes multiple weeks led by Associate Conductor Brett Mitchell.
Mitchell will preside over two subscription programs: an evening of works by Copland, Bernstein and Augusta Read Thomas, and the season finale, a live performance of Bernstein's score to "West Side Story" alongside the film, in honor of the composer's upcoming centennial.
To read the complete article, please click here. To read the news release from The Cleveland Orchestra, please click here.
Preview: "Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra to join Youth Chorus for March 4 concert"
Cleveland Classical has published a preview of Brett Mitchell's upcoming subscription performance with the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra:
On Friday, March 4 at 8:00 pm at Severance Hall, the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra will perform what director Brett Mitchell says is the most challenging piece the orchestra has played during his tenure. “Stravinsky’s Pétrouchka is certainly a challenging undertaking even for the best of professional orchestras,” Mitchell pointed out during a telephone interview. “But I’ve been with COYO long enough to know that whatever challenge is put in front of the musicians they will, without fail, rise to the challenge. In fact, they always end up exceeding my expectations.”
In order to give his players a head start with learning Stravinsky’s seminal work, Mitchell enlisted the assistance of The Cleveland Orchestra itself. “The first rehearsal back in December was a side-by-side with TCO. The opportunity to sit next to professionals, who have played the piece many times, really helped the young musicians up the confidence factor. As a result they came into the second rehearsal far more assured because of that experience.”
Three days prior to our conversation, Mitchell arranged for a second side-by-side rehearsal. “This is the first time we have ever approached a project like this with side-by-sides at the front and the back ends of the rehearsal process. To watch the professionals and the young musicians come together — and watch the one-on-one mentoring relationships that develop — was heartwarming and speaks miles about our organization and how truly interwoven COYO is into the fabric of TCO. We’re all part of the Musical Arts Association, we’re all in this together with the same mission: to present the best music we possibly can for our audiences.”
The concert’s second half will be dedicated to works for chorus and orchestra. The Cleveland Orchestra Youth Chorus, prepared by their director Lisa Wong, will be featured in Aaron Copland’s Canticle of Freedom and Johannes Brahms’s Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny).
To read the complete article, please click here.
Preview: "10 Classical Music Events You Shouldn't Miss This Week"
Brett Mitchell's performance with the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra and Youth Chorus this Friday evening at 8 p.m. has been listed in Cleveland Scene's "10 Classical Music Events You Shouldn't Miss This Week." To read this article, please click here.
Previews and Audio: Upcoming concerts with The Cleveland Orchestra and Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra
Several media outlets have previewed the upcoming collaboration between The Cleveland Orchestra, Cleveland Ballet, and Csárdas Dance Company, which will be led by the Orchestra's associate conductor Brett Mitchell on Friday, February 26. To read an article in Cool Cleveland, "Cleveland Orchestra celebrates ballet and folk dance at Severance Hall," please click here. To read a brief piece from 106.5 The Lake, please click here.
Mr. Mitchell also recently discussed this performance and the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra's upcoming subscription concert with host Mark Satola on WCLV Classical 104.9. COYO's performance—presented on Friday, March 4 at Severance Hall—will feature Stravinsky's Petrushka, as well as Brahms's Schicksalslied and Copland's Canticle of Freedom in their annual collaboration with the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Chorus. To hear this complete interview, please click here.
Brett Mitchell leads the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra in performance at Severance Hall. (Photo by Roger Mastroianni.)
Preview: Cleveland Cello Society
Cleveland Scene has published a preview of Brett Mitchell's upcoming appearance with the Cleveland Cello Society on Sunday, February 28. At this event, Mr. Mitchell will conduct a career retrospective interview Stephen Geber, former principal cellist of The Cleveland Orchestra, and will lead performances of Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus and Randall Thompson's Alleluia. To read this preview, please click here.
Previews: "Cleveland Orchestra will perform Balanchine's 'The Nutcracker' as part of 2016 Holiday Festival"
(Photo by Alexander Iziliaev of Pennsylvania Ballet)
The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) has published a preview of The Cleveland Orchestra's 2016-17 production of The Nutcracker, which will be led by Associate Conductor Brett Mitchell. Presented in collaboration with Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Ballet, the production will be staged at the State Theatre at Playhouse Square, and will run for seven performances between November 30 and December 4, 2016.
The new production will differ markedly from those of recent years, principally through the involvement of Pennsylvania Ballet, led by Angel Corella and last seen here in partnership with the Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom Music Center in 1984. Notably, Pennsylvania Ballet performs the Balanchine version of "Nutcracker," which includes several unique scenes and de-emphasizes romantic elements through the casting of children in certain lead roles.
To read the complete article, please click here. To read an additional preview in AXS, please click here. To read Pennsylvania Ballet's 2016-17 season announcement with additional information, please click here.
Debut with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra
Brett Mitchell will make his debut with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra later this season, leading works of Strauss and Prokofiev on Sunday, April 24, 2016. To learn more or purchase tickets, please click here.
Previews: "Cleveland Orchestra announces programs and prices of 2016 Blossom Music Festival"
The Plain Dealer and Akron Beacon Journal have published articles previewing The Cleveland Orchestra's 2016 Blossom Music Festival season, during which Associate Conductor Brett Mitchell will conduct three performances. Mr. Mitchell will first appear with the Kent/Blossom Chamber Orchestra on Saturday, July 30, leading a performance of Andrew Norman's The Great Swiftness and Beethoven's Symphony No. 8. He will then close the 2016 Festival with two performances of John Williams's Oscar-nominated score for 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark on Saturday, September 3 and Sunday, September 4.
Please click here to read the article in The Plain Dealer, here to read the article in the Akron Beacon Journal, and here to view the press release from The Cleveland Orchestra.
Brett Mitchell to lead three performances at 2016 Blossom Music Festival
The Cleveland Orchestra has announced its 2016 Blossom Music Festival season, during which Associate Conductor Brett Mitchell will conduct three performances. Mr. Mitchell will first appear with the Kent/Blossom Chamber Orchestra on Saturday, July 30 in a program to be announced. He will then close the 2016 Festival with two performances of John Williams's Oscar-nominated score for 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark on Saturday, September 3 and Sunday, September 4.
To learn more about the 2016 Blossom season, please click here to view the press release from The Cleveland Orchestra, here to read an article in The Plain Dealer, and here to read an article in the Akron Beacon Journal.
Video: Cleveland Orchestra Miami 10th Anniversary Season
The Cleveland Orchestra has produced a video about the history and impact of Cleveland Orchestra Miami on the occasion of its 10th anniversary season. The video features Associate Conductor Brett Mitchell in conversation, and contains video of his performances with the Orchestra at both the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts and the South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center. To view this video, please click here.
Audio: "Star Wars: The Score Awakens"
Brett Mitchell discusses John Williams's Oscar-nominated score for Star Wars: The Force Awakens with host Bill O'Connell on an upcoming hourlong special set air on WCLV Classical 104.9 on Saturday, January 23 at 5 p.m. Eastern. A synopsis from WCLV:
Star Wars: The Force Awakens is already the biggest movie of all time in the United States. The soundtrack is an original score by John Williams, who has written the music for all seven Star Wars movies, plus other classics like Indiana Jones, E.T., Home Alone, and many, many more. Brett Mitchell, Associate Conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra, is a die-hard fan of John Williams and Star Wars, so WCLV invited him to the KeyBank Studio to take us through the score.
To listen to "Star Wars: The Score Awakens," please click here.
Audio: "Awakening John Williams's 'Force' with Brett Mitchell"
Photo by Gregg Barckholtz, edited by Dacia Clay
Brett Mitchell discusses John Williams's Oscar-nominated score for Star Wars: The Force Awakens with host Dacia Clay on the most recent episode of Houston Public Media's Classical Classroom. A synopsis from HPM:
This episode is full of spoilers – not just spoilers about The Force Awakens, but about future Star Wars episodes. Okay – they could be future spoilers. Right now, they’re just our attempts at trying to find the Easter eggs hidden in John Williams’s new score. This may be the nerdiest and most epic episode ofClassical Classroom to date. Brett Mitchell, Associate Conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra and Music Director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra, is your guide through the music of the latest Star Wars episode. He teaches about John Williams as a composer and about important tools of the compositional trade, and reveals how this new music is tied to Williams’s scores for the original films. Mitchell takes no prisoners, and does not care for Ewoks. Prepare for hyperdrive.
To listen to "Awakening John Williams's 'Force' with Brett Mitchell," please click here.
Photo by Gregg Barckholtz, edited by Dacia Clay
Debut with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra
Brett Mitchell will make his debut with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra later this season, leading a pair of concerts on the orchestra's ReMix series on March 11 and 12, 2016. On the program are Wojciech Kilar's Orawa, Adam Schoenberg's Finding Rothko, and Bryce Dessner's Lachrimae and St. Carolyn by the Sea. Brothers Bryce and Aaron Dessner, founding members of GRAMMY®-nominated indie rock band The National, will be the featured soloists on electric guitars on St. Carolyn by the Sea. To read the press release from the Dallas Symphony Orchestra about these performances, please click here. To purchase tickets, please click here.
Brett Mitchell to lead world-premiere collaboration between The Cleveland Orchestra and Cleveland Play House
CLEVELAND, OH – Cleveland Play House (CPH) and The Cleveland Orchestra announce details of their latest collaboration, The Good Peaches, a play commissioned by CPH and written by Pulitzer Prize and Roe Green Award-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes. The play will make its world premiere April 14–16 on the Allen Theatre stage. The Good Peaches features three actors and a 55-piece orchestra, and will be directed by CPH Artistic Director Laura Kepley and conducted by the Orchestra’s Associate Conductor Brett Mitchell. This presentation marks the third collaboration between CPH and the Orchestra, and will feature music excerpted from Benjamin Britten’s Sea Interludes and John Adams’s Shaker Loops.
Aurora’s task is simple: Deliver a wedding dress to the queen. But when an unexpected storm hits, the young girl finds herself on an adventure beyond her wildest imagination. Music and theater will collide through the bursting swells of a massive storm and in an extraordinary teaming of actors and chamber orchestra. Set amongst the stirring melodies of Benjamin Britten and John Adams, The Good Peaches combines a compelling drama of survival with live music performed by a world-class orchestra.
CPH Artistic Director Laura Kepley states, “Only two other major plays for actors and orchestra exist, so we are very proud to be working with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Hudes, and collaborating with the world-class Cleveland Orchestra to add another play to the canon. Cleveland audiences will experience it first but I am certain that orchestras around the country will be lining up to add this beautiful, evocative, girl versus nature musical odyssey to their seasons.”
Brett Mitchell, Associate Conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra, adds, “All of us at The Cleveland Orchestra are enormously excited to collaborate with Cleveland Play House on this groundbreaking project. Working with the entire CPH team throughout this process has been an absolute dream, and we're delighted that these great orchestral works of John Adams and Benjamin Britten are such an integral part of telling this magnificent new tale, written in such beautiful poetry by Quiara Hudes and brought to life with such spirit by this extraordinary company.”
To learn more, please view these articles in The Plain Dealer and Broadway World.
Previews: "Cleveland Play House, Cleveland Orchestra collaboration with Pulitzer-winning playwright set for April"
The Plain Dealer and Broadway World have published articles announcing an upcoming, world-premiere collaboration between Cleveland Play House and The Cleveland Orchestra, which will be led by associate conductor Brett Mitchell. From The Plain Dealer:
"The Good Peaches," the hotly anticipated play for actors and orchestra written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes, will make its world premiere at the Allen Theatre April 14-16 as part of the New Ground Theatre Festival, the Cleveland Play House's annual showcase of new theatrical works.
Hudes's new tale follows the heroic journey of a young girl named Aurora, tasked with delivering a wedding dress to a queen. But a violent storm knocks her off-course and into an adventure beyond her wildest imaginings.
Conducted by the Cleveland Orchestra's associate conductor, Brett Mitchell, the play will feature three actors and a 55-piece chamber orchestra performing selections from Benjamin Britten's "Sea Interludes" and "Shaker Loops" by John Adams.
To read The Plain Dealer's complete article, "Cleveland Play House, Cleveland Orchestra collaboration with Pulitzer-winning playwright set for April," please click here. To read Broadway World's article, "Cleveland Play House & The Cleveland Orchestra to Present THE GOOD PEACHES," please click here. To read Crain's Cleveland Business's article, "Cleveland Play House, Cleveland Orchestra to partner for play's world premiere," please click here.
Essay: 'The Masur I Knew'
Kurt Masur and Brett Mitchell after performing together at the Manhattan School of Music on March 12, 2004.
I first met Kurt Masur as a graduate student in March 2004, when I was one of a handful of young conductors he selected to attend his first weeklong conducting seminar at the Manhattan School of Music. During our first encounters, I was enormously intimidated by the recently named Music Director Emeritus of the New York Philharmonic, but by the end of the week, we were sharing the second half of the seminar’s culminating concert (which was also my New York debut). I began with the Haydn Variations (while Maestro peered on from just offstage – no pressure!), and he concluded with Till Eulenspiegel.
Two years later, after another seminar together at the Manhattan School, Maestro invited me to Paris to audition to become one of his assistant conductors at the Orchestre National de France. Not speaking a word of French, I took him up on his offer, and ended up working with him in Paris and on tour for the next three seasons. Among the many extraordinary musical memories from those years, two in particular stand out: a desperately moving War Requiem at the Basilica of St Denis, and his unforgettable 80th-birthday concert at the BBC Proms, played by the combined forces of his two orchestras at that time: the ONF and the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
In 2008, Maestro selected me as one of his first two Mendelssohn Scholarship recipients, which allowed me to spend a month learning from him as we traveled from Vienna to Leipzig, from Berlin to New York. (It was during this trip that Maestro posed for the photograph below, which captures perfectly the lighthearted, humorous, even silly man that rarely made a public appearance.) Over the course of that trip, Maestro asked me to lead a rehearsal of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with Anne-Sophie Mutter and the Gewandhausorchester, and to accompany an impromptu vocal rehearsal for St. Matthew Passion at the New York Philharmonic. Throughout all these experiences, Maestro helped me grow with both a watchful eye and an open heart. The countless meals and conversations we shared during that month—especially those at his home in Leipzig—will remain dear to me for the rest of my life.
Kurt Masur at Vienna International Airport in February 2008. (Photo by Brett Mitchell)
Kurt Masur and Brett Mitchell at the Musikverein in February 2008.
Over the many years we worked together, Maestro became for me the greatest mentor a young conductor could hope for, offering far more than technical advice and “tricks of the trade.” Nothing illustrates better the musician and human being I came to know than the time I asked him about a certain crescendo he requested of an orchestra: “Maestro, if Mozart wanted a crescendo there, why didn’t he just write one?” Masur replied, “Because if he wrote it down, you’d do it with your head instead of with your heart.” For Maestro, music was never about sharps and flats, dots and dashes; at its core, music was about communicating thoughts, ideas, and feelings. Technique was important, yes, but only insofar as it served the music; everything else was superficial.
When I learned of Maestro’s passing this past Saturday morning, I was stunned. Yes, he was 88 years old, and yes, had struggled with health issues for some time, but I don’t think any of us ever imagined a world without him in it until he left. As we all mourn his loss, my great hope is that the artistry and humanity he shared for almost nine decades will light the way for those of us who strive to continue in his footsteps.
Farewell, dear Maestro, and Godspeed.
Watch Mr. Mitchell’s culminating performances from Maestro Masur’s 2004 and 2006 masterclasses at the Manhattan School of Music.
BRAHMS — Variations on a Theme by Haydn
(March 2004)
MOZART — Finale from Symphony No. 40
(January 2006)
Review: "Cleveland Orchestra sets holiday bar higher with live 'Back to the Future' performance"
The Plain Dealer has published a review of The Cleveland Orchestra's live performance of Back to the Future, presented last Thursday under the baton of Associate Conductor Brett Mitchell.
Every performance is demanding in its way, but the expertise and attention required in "Back to the Future" were exceptional. Likely the intermission that broke up the show wasn't for the audience so much as the orchestra and associate conductor Brett Mitchell, who faced and rose to a marathon task of concentration and precision...
The presentation as a whole was powerfully immersive, boasting a visceral, immediate quality no sound system on Earth could replicate. Dolby stereo was still cutting-edge 30 years ago, when the film premiered. On Thursday, however, old-fashioned orchestra instruments handily trumped technology.
To read the complete review, please click here.
Video: Brett Mitchell discusses upcoming Cleveland Orchestra performances on Cleveland 19 News
Brett Mitchell appeared on this morning's Cleveland 19 News (CBS) to discuss The Cleveland Orchestra's upcoming performances of Back to the Future and Home Alone. To watch this interview, please click here.
Previews: Cleveland Orchestra "At the Movies"
Cleveland Scene and Cool Cleveland have listed two of Brett Mitchell's upcoming performances with The Cleveland Orchestra as must-see events this holiday season. To read the article in Cleveland Scene about Back to the Future, please click here. To read the article in Cool Cleveland about Home Alone, please click here.
Audio: Brett Mitchell discusses upcoming Cleveland Orchestra concerts on Majic 105.7
Brett Mitchell appeared this morning on Majic 105.7 to discuss The Cleveland Orchestra's upcoming performances of Back to the Future and Home Alone. To hear this interview, please click here, then advance the player to 58:22. (Please note that an iHeartRadio account is required.)