The Cleveland Orchestra Does Haydn's 'The Seasons' and the Rest of the Classical Music to Catch This Week

Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus will perform Joseph Haydn’s charming and inventive oratorio, The Seasons, in Severance Hall on Thursday, January 18 at 7:30 pm and Saturday, January 20 at 8:00 pm. Soloists Golda Schultz, soprano, Maximilian Schmidt, tenor, and Christian van Horn, baritone (stepping in for the ailing Thomas Hampson) take the colorful roles of Hanne, Lucas, and Simon, country folk who personalize the changing seasons. Haydn has fun with the idea, conjuring up a hunting song, an inebriated wine festival, a sunrise, and a thunderstorm, here and there planting his own little jokes — what does the ploughman whistle as he goes off to work but the theme from the composer’s “Surprise” Symphony?

Between the Seasons performances the Orchestra will bring a bouquet of Beethoven to its next Fridays@7 concert on January 19. Welser-Möst will give the audience a whiff of the end-of-season Beethoven Festival with the Egmont Overture and the First and Third Symphonies. Tickets for all three performances can be ordered online.

ChamberFest Cleveland’s founding co-artistic director and clarinetist Franklin Cohen will join pianist Zsolt Bognár for the next performance on the free Arts Renaissance Tremont series at Pilgrim Church on Sunday, January 21 at 3:00 pm. The program includes a clarinet version of Beethoven’s song cycle Adelaide, and works by Weinberg, Fauré, Poulenc, and Brahms. Donations will be appreciated.

Same day, same hour, across town at Valley Lutheran Church in Chagrin Falls, pianist Per Enflo will be featured in Mozart’s 17th and 21st Piano Concertos in cahoots with the Cleveland Virtuosi, led by violinist and Chagrin Concerts artistic director Hristo Popov. Enflo has combined careers as a theoretical mathematician — he taught at Kent State for a number of years before moving back to his native Sweden — with that of a concert pianist. A freewill offering will be received.

Also combining two careers is The Cleveland Orchestra’s English hornist, Robert Walters. The next Heights Arts Close Encounters event, also on Sunday, January 21 at 3:00 pm, will feature Walters both as musician and poet as he joins bassoonist Drew Pattison and pianist Edward “Teddy” Niedermaier in “Rhythms, Rhymes, and the Kitchen Sink” at the Bop Stop. On the playlist: music by Sibelius, Debussy, Hendrik Andriessen, Dutilleux, Elgar, and a new work written last year by Niedermaier. Reserve your tickets online.

Haydn ends his Seasons oratorio with Winter, a subject that tenor Corey Shotwell and pianist Gerardo Teissonnière will also explore in their faculty recital at CIM on Sunday, January 21 at 4:00 pm. The main event is Franz Schubert’s haunting song cycle, Winterreise (“Winter Journey”), preceded on this occasion by the premiere of Evan Fein’s song Letzte Brief, a setting of Schubert’s final letter, written only days before his death at age 31. The concert in Mixon Hall is free, but seating passes are required. Call 216.795.3211.

For details of these and other events, visit the ClevelandClassical.com Concert Listings page.