A scene from the Cleveland Orchestra’s recent production of The Magic Flute, led by Music Director Franz Welzer-Möst. Photo by Roger Mastroianni.
In Monday’s (5/27) New York Times, Zachary Woolfe writes, “It was that rarest of sights when I walked into the Cleveland Orchestra’s hall on Sunday afternoon: a dark curtain drawn across the stage. Rare, that is, in a concert hall. Orchestras don’t tend to have dramatic unveilings before they start to play. And while Cleveland has done near-annual opera presentations over the past two decades, the ensemble has almost always been onstage alongside the singers, as the stagings have worked around (and sometimes incorporated) the presence of dozens of players. But for Mozart’s The Magic Flute, which ended a sold-out four-performance run at Severance Music Center on Sunday, the orchestra was lowered into an honest-to-goodness pit, and the curtain was closed at the start, just as it would have been in an opera house. It was a reminder that … orchestras can—and should!—summon the resources to fill even a bit of that gap…. Seating-in-the-round halls like Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and David Geffen Hall in New York lend themselves to experimental stagings … There’s something about presenting opera that signals, to me, a complete orchestra.”
