In Focus: Episode 10: Style & Craft
Broadcast Premiere: May 6, 2021
In Focus: Episode 10

The Cleveland Orchestra
BROADCAST PRESENTATION
2020-21 Season
S1.E10 In Focus Season 1, Episode 10
_____________________
    

Style & Craft

Broadcast Premiere Date/Time:
Thursday, May 6, 2021, at 7 p.m.
      filmed March 9 and April 8-9
      at Severance Hall, Cleveland

MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937)
Sonatine
with
Franz Rosenwein, oboe
Carolyn Gadiel Warner, piano
      1.  Modéré
      2.  Mouvement de menuet
      3.  Animé

________________________________________

The Cleveland Orchestra
Vinay Parameswaran, conductor


BENJAMIN BRITTEN (1913-1976) 
Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge
(for string orchestra)
      Introduction and Theme (To F.B. — Himself)
      Variation 1:  Adagio (His Integrity)
      Variation 2:  March (His Energy)
      Variation 3:  Romance (His Charm)
      Variation 4:  Aria Italiana (His Wit)
      Variation 5:  Bourrée Classique (His Humor)
      Variation 6:  Viennese Waltz (His Tradition)
      Variation 7:  Moto perpetuo (His Enthusiasm)
      Variation 8:  Funeral March
            (His Sympathy and Understanding)
      Variation 9:  Chant (His Reverence)
      Variation 10:  Fugue and Finale
            (His Skill and Our Affection)


  

In addition to the concert performances, each episode of In Focus includes behind-the-scenes interviews and features about the music and musicmaking.

Each In Focus broadcast presentation is available for viewing for three months from its premiere.

_____________________

With thanks to these funding partners:

Presenting Sponsor: 
   The J.M. Smucker Company

Digital & Seasons Sponsors:
   Ohio CAT
   Jones Day Foundation
   Medical Mutual

In Focus Digital Partners: 
   Cleveland Clinic  
   The Dr. M.Lee Pearce Foundation, Inc.

_____________________

This episode of In Focus is dedicated
to the following donors in recognition for their
extraordinary support of The Cleveland Orchestra:
   Mr. Yuval Brisker
   Virginia M. and Jon A. Lindseth
   Mr. and Mrs. Alexander M. Cutler
   Haslam 3 Foundation
   The Milton and Tamar Maltz Family Foundation
   The Oatey Foundation
   James* and Donna Reid
   Ms. Beth E. Mooney
   Sally S.* and John C. Morley


    

T H I S   B R O A D C A S T   features two works by two talented young composers — one French, one English — and both with great gift for melody and form, style and craft.  

       Frenchman Maurice Ravel wrote a short sonata movement to enter into a magazine contest in 1903.  The piece was disqualified on a technicality, but soon enough expanded into a three-movement work that gained admirers everywhere — onstage and off.

       Three decades later, an acquaintance asked the young Benjamin Britten if he could complete a brand-new commission on very short deadline.  The resulting homage to Britten’s teacher Frank Bridge was given its premiere at the world-famous Salzburg Festival just three months later, adding to Britten’s newly surging reputation.  This set of variations aptly mirrors Bridge’s wide-ranging musical taste and dynamic personality — as well as Britten’s extraordinary abilities to create different moods and scenes in music — from Viennese waltz to a march, from funeral march to beguiling opera aria.
 

SONATINE
by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Composed:  1903-05, for solo piano

Premiered:  March 10, 1906, Lyon, France, by pianist Paule de Lestang

Scored for:  oboe and piano, arranged by David Walter

Duration:  about 10 minutes

________________________________

A S    A    S T U D E N T   of Gabriel Fauré at the Paris Conservatory, Maurice Ravel aspired to win the institution’s highest honor, the Prix de Rome and its funds for an extended period to work and study in the Italian capital. The prize had helped launch the careers of lauded French composers including Hector Berlioz, Charles Gounod, Georges Bizet, and Claude Debussy. Ravel, eager to join this pantheon, made five attempts to win the competition from 1900 to 1905, all unsuccessful.

       Despite this lack of success, Ravel had begun to establish himself as a composer of note. His virtuosic and shimmering solo piano work from 1901, “Jeux d’eau” [The Fountains], won praise from none other than Debussy. At the same time, he became associated with an influential group of artist-provocateurs who irreverently called themselves “Les Apaches” (a reference to a contemporaneous Parisian street gang, which had, without firsthand knowledge, adopted the name of a Native American tribe).

      When the French-English musical journal Weekly Critical Review launched a prize for a “Musical Competition” in 1903, Ravel entered at the urging of a fellow Apache, music critic and writer Michel-Dmitri Calvocoressi. The announcement called for a first movement of a piano sonata in F-sharp minor, “not to exceed 75 bars in length.” The winning piece would be published in a supplemental publication and its composer promised a 100-franc prize.

      It was not meant to be. Ravel was the only entrant and his lone submission exceeded the 75-bar limit. Furthermore, the journal was facing bankruptcy and abruptly cancelled the competition, along with its 100 francs. Yet the exercise wasn’t for naught as Ravel continued to develop the piece into what would become his petite Sonatine.

       The first movement exemplifies Ravel’s ability to synthesize the classical and contemporary. It unfolds in traditional sonata form shaded with his trademark impressionistic hues. In 1905, Ravel added the subsequent two movements: a halting and punctuated waltz-minuet and the lightning-quick (and treacherously difficult) toccata. The arrangement for oboe and piano performed for this In Focus boradcast emphasizes Ravel’s wistful melody floating above an undulating piano accompaniment, and finds particular resonance in the “horn calls” that open the third movement.

       By the time Paule de Lestang performed the 1906 premiere of Sonatine, Ravel’s unsuccessful fifth and final attempt to win the Prix de Rome had erupted into a scandal. Though a favorite for the prize, he had been eliminated in favor of five students of one of the members of the jury. “L’affaire Ravel,” as it was labeled in the press, forced the director of the Conservatory to resign, but it only grew Ravel’s renown.  

       And in another twist, though the composer never recouped any prize money for Sonatine, the popular work helped him secure a lucrative lifetime contract with the publisher Durand.

program note by Amanda Angel
       (The Cleveland Orchestra © 2021)
  

VARIATIONS ON A THEME OF FRANK BRIDGE, Opus 10
by Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)

Composed:  1937

Premiered:  August 27, 1937, at the Salzburg Festival

Scored for:  string orchestra

Duration:  about 25 minutes

________________________________

M U S I C A L   T R I B U T E S   take many forms.  This particular offering, from Benjamin Britten to his teacher Frank Bridge, fulfilled an ambitious set of intentions.  Here the young pupil affirms Bridge’s music and personality while also showcasing Britten’s own dazzling abilities to set a musical tale — in homage and thankfulness, in parody and all seriousness.  With the entire piece written in just twenty days.

       Britten, as a lad of ten, first heard Bridge’s music at a local festival.  The budding young composer was dazzled by the older man’s craft and style — and very shortly thereafter managed to impress Bridge, who didn’t really want students, into taking him on as a private pupil and apprentice. 

       They got on well, in part because they were both open to whatever the other said or wrote.  Bridge questioned everything Britten was doing as a composer.  And Britten, in tears after many lessons, accepted every criticism and challenge.  Not to write different music, but to write his own music differently — to dare to perfect every detail and not be satisfied with half measures and approximations of good ideas.  "Frank Bridge really taught me," Britten later wrote, "to take as much trouble as I possibly could over every passage, over every progression, over every line."

       Britten, by then a teenager, suddenly found himself writing fewer new works, instead of the furious output he’d managed since childhood.  But his skillset was growing, and discovering new quality and qualities within newly-disciplined work habits.

       By the time he’d finished at the Royal College of Music, he was already writing music for movies.  And it is this connection that brought him back to honoring his teacher.  In 1937, conductor Boyd Neel, who led the recording sessions for one of Britten’s film scores, was invited to present a program — with his own string orchestra — of British music at that summer’s Salzburg Festival. 

       In addition to requiring that the program showcase only British composers, the contract also stipulated that it include at least one brand-new work.  Boyd remembered how quickly Britten turned rewrites around in the studio, and inquired if he might be able to write something in three months or less.

       Understanding the rare opportunity to be featured at the prestigious Salzburg Festival, Britten said yes.  He completed the score in just three weeks, putting his training and mastery to full task. 

       The form and idea, Britten freely admitted, owes much to Elgar’s famous Enigma Variations, to develop one musical phrase in many disguises.  But rather than writing about different friends and individuals, here Britten fashioned a succession of movements to portray varying aspects of his teacher’s personality and music.  While doing so, the completed work also deftly displays Britten’s extraordinary understanding of instrumental color and string technique (both Britten and Bridge were accomplished violists), along with his uncanny ability to instantly set and shape a scene or mood — traits that he would master even further in his opera scores.

       Musically, Britten chose a theme from Bridge’s Idyll No. 2 for string quartet.  From this somewhat old-fashioned and pastoral theme, his homage goes, in many senses, all over the map.  Some variations bear only a slight connection to the original theme.  While others clearly display the aspect of Bridge that Britten penciled into the score, or, more obviously, to quote several of Bridge’s musical works directly, especially in the final movement.  At least one variation comments on the occasion of the premiere in Salzburg (Viennese Waltz).  Others demonstrate Britten’s remarkable sense of musical styling (Funeral March or Moto Perpetuo) or his own lifestory (tenor Peter Pears, who Britten had met two years earlier and was to become his partner in music and life, attended the premiere and reported back his understanding that the Romance movement was a personal love note between the two men.) 

        One masterful aspect to note (and watch and listen to) is how Britten separates a string quartet from the rest of the orchestra at several different moments, setting up an aural and visual dynamic of two forces interplaying in harmony and friendship, mirroring on one level how Britten felt in working with Bridge — not just in working with a teacher, but in a friendship centered around the joy of building music together, phrase by phrase, note by note, but each with a separate role to play.

       This piece and its Salzburg premiere helped launch Britten’s name internationally, giving him new opportunities toward the art, fame, and acclaim that was to become his as one of Britain’s greatest composers of the 20th century.

program note by Eric Sellen © 2021
   

Frank Rosenwein

Principal Oboe
Edith S. Taplin Endowed Chair
The Cleveland Orchestra

Frank Rosenwein joined The Cleveland Orchestra as principal oboe at the beginning of the 2005-06 season.  He made his solo debut with the Orchestra in February 2007, in Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2.  Since that time he has performed as soloist on many occasions, including playing the Richard Strauss Oboe Concerto in 2012 and the first Cleveland Orchestra performances of Vaughan Williams's Oboe Concerto in 2017.

       Since 2006, Mr. Rosenwein has served as head of the oboe department at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where in 2015 he was given the Alumni Achievement award.  He also teaches each summer as part of the Kent Blossom Music Festival, and appears as a guest artist and masterclass clinician in schools around the world.  As a chamber musician, he has spent many summers at the Marlboro Festival and has performed with the Mainly Mozart Festival in San Diego, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and the Seattle Chamber Music Society.

       Born in Evanston, Illinois, Frank Rosenwein earned a bachelor of music degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he studied with John Mack (Cleveland Orchestra principal oboe, 1965-2001), and a master of music degree from the Juilliard School.  Prior to coming to Cleveland, he served as principal oboe (2002-05) of the San Diego Symphony and San Diego Opera.

       Mr. Rosenwein is married to Cleveland Orchestra associate concertmaster Jung-Min Amy Lee.  They live in Cleveland Heights with their children and dog.
     

Carolyn Gadiel Warner

Violin
The Cleveland Orchestra

Keyboard
Marjory and Marc L. Swartzbaugh Endowed Chair
The Cleveland Orchestra

Pianist and violinist Carolyn Gadiel Warner is a native of Canada who began her musical education with the piano at age three.  Later taking up the violin, she earned degrees in both instruments from the University of Toronto and the Paris Conservatory of Music, from which she graduated with a First Prize.

       Since 1979, Ms. Warner has been a member of both the violin and keyboard sections of The Cleveland Orchestra. 

       Ms. Warner serves on the chamber music faculty at the Cleveland Institute of Music.  She is a founding member — with her husband, Stephen Warner, a longtime violinist with The Cleveland Orchestra, now retired — of the Cleveland Duo and the Cleveland Duo & James Umble, who have been profiled in The Strad magazine and can be heard on the Cappella, Dana, and Klavier record labels.  Both ensembles tour throughout North America and abroad, performing dozens of concerts each year for students of all ages and levels of musical background.

Vinay Parameswaran

Associate Conductor
Elizabeth Ring and William Gwinn Mather Endowed Chair
The Cleveland Orchestra

Music Director
Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra
    

THE 2020-21 SEASON marks Vinay Parameswaran’s fourth year as a member of The Cleveland Orchestra’s conducting staff. In this role, he leads the Orchestra in several dozen concerts each season at Severance Hall, Blossom Music Festival, and on tour. He also serves as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra.

       Mr. Parameswaran came to Cleveland following three seasons as associate conductor of the Nashville Symphony (2014-2017), where he led over 150 performances. In the summer of 2017, he was a Conducting Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center. Recent seasons have included Mr. Parameswaran making his guest conducting debuts with the Rochester Philharmonic and the Tucson Symphony, and also made his subscription debut with the Nashville Symphony conducting works by Gabriella Smith, Grieg, and Piev. Other recent engagements have included debuts with the National Symphony Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony, Jacksonville Symphony, Eugene Symphony, and the Vermont Symphony Orchestra.

       In addition to his concert work, Mr. Parameswaran has led performances of Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love with Curtis Opera Theater. He also assisted with Opera Philadelphia’s presentation of Verdi’s Nabucco.

       Mr. Parameswaran has participated in conducting masterclasses with David Zinman at the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, as well as with Marin Alsop and Gustav Meier at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. He is the conductor on the album Two x Four with the Curtis 20/21 ensemble alongside violinists Jaime Laredo and Jennifer Koh, featuring works by Bach, David Ludwig, Philip Glass, and Anna Clyne.

       A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Mr. Parameswaran played percussion for six years in the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra. He holds a bachelor of arts degree in music and political science from Brown University, where he began his conducting studies with Paul Phillips. He received a diploma from the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Otto-Werner Mueller as the Albert M. Greenfield Fellow.

In Focus: Episode 10: Style & Craft
Broadcast Premiere: May 6, 2021
In Focus: Episode 10

The Cleveland Orchestra
BROADCAST PRESENTATION
2020-21 Season
S1.E10 In Focus Season 1, Episode 10
_____________________
    

Style & Craft

Broadcast Premiere Date/Time:
Thursday, May 6, 2021, at 7 p.m.
      filmed March 9 and April 8-9
      at Severance Hall, Cleveland

MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937)
Sonatine
with
Franz Rosenwein, oboe
Carolyn Gadiel Warner, piano
      1.  Modéré
      2.  Mouvement de menuet
      3.  Animé

________________________________________

The Cleveland Orchestra
Vinay Parameswaran, conductor


BENJAMIN BRITTEN (1913-1976) 
Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge
(for string orchestra)
      Introduction and Theme (To F.B. — Himself)
      Variation 1:  Adagio (His Integrity)
      Variation 2:  March (His Energy)
      Variation 3:  Romance (His Charm)
      Variation 4:  Aria Italiana (His Wit)
      Variation 5:  Bourrée Classique (His Humor)
      Variation 6:  Viennese Waltz (His Tradition)
      Variation 7:  Moto perpetuo (His Enthusiasm)
      Variation 8:  Funeral March
            (His Sympathy and Understanding)
      Variation 9:  Chant (His Reverence)
      Variation 10:  Fugue and Finale
            (His Skill and Our Affection)


  

In addition to the concert performances, each episode of In Focus includes behind-the-scenes interviews and features about the music and musicmaking.

Each In Focus broadcast presentation is available for viewing for three months from its premiere.

_____________________

With thanks to these funding partners:

Presenting Sponsor: 
   The J.M. Smucker Company

Digital & Seasons Sponsors:
   Ohio CAT
   Jones Day Foundation
   Medical Mutual

In Focus Digital Partners: 
   Cleveland Clinic  
   The Dr. M.Lee Pearce Foundation, Inc.

_____________________

This episode of In Focus is dedicated
to the following donors in recognition for their
extraordinary support of The Cleveland Orchestra:
   Mr. Yuval Brisker
   Virginia M. and Jon A. Lindseth
   Mr. and Mrs. Alexander M. Cutler
   Haslam 3 Foundation
   The Milton and Tamar Maltz Family Foundation
   The Oatey Foundation
   James* and Donna Reid
   Ms. Beth E. Mooney
   Sally S.* and John C. Morley


    

T H I S   B R O A D C A S T   features two works by two talented young composers — one French, one English — and both with great gift for melody and form, style and craft.  

       Frenchman Maurice Ravel wrote a short sonata movement to enter into a magazine contest in 1903.  The piece was disqualified on a technicality, but soon enough expanded into a three-movement work that gained admirers everywhere — onstage and off.

       Three decades later, an acquaintance asked the young Benjamin Britten if he could complete a brand-new commission on very short deadline.  The resulting homage to Britten’s teacher Frank Bridge was given its premiere at the world-famous Salzburg Festival just three months later, adding to Britten’s newly surging reputation.  This set of variations aptly mirrors Bridge’s wide-ranging musical taste and dynamic personality — as well as Britten’s extraordinary abilities to create different moods and scenes in music — from Viennese waltz to a march, from funeral march to beguiling opera aria.
 

SONATINE
by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Composed:  1903-05, for solo piano

Premiered:  March 10, 1906, Lyon, France, by pianist Paule de Lestang

Scored for:  oboe and piano, arranged by David Walter

Duration:  about 10 minutes

________________________________

A S    A    S T U D E N T   of Gabriel Fauré at the Paris Conservatory, Maurice Ravel aspired to win the institution’s highest honor, the Prix de Rome and its funds for an extended period to work and study in the Italian capital. The prize had helped launch the careers of lauded French composers including Hector Berlioz, Charles Gounod, Georges Bizet, and Claude Debussy. Ravel, eager to join this pantheon, made five attempts to win the competition from 1900 to 1905, all unsuccessful.

       Despite this lack of success, Ravel had begun to establish himself as a composer of note. His virtuosic and shimmering solo piano work from 1901, “Jeux d’eau” [The Fountains], won praise from none other than Debussy. At the same time, he became associated with an influential group of artist-provocateurs who irreverently called themselves “Les Apaches” (a reference to a contemporaneous Parisian street gang, which had, without firsthand knowledge, adopted the name of a Native American tribe).

      When the French-English musical journal Weekly Critical Review launched a prize for a “Musical Competition” in 1903, Ravel entered at the urging of a fellow Apache, music critic and writer Michel-Dmitri Calvocoressi. The announcement called for a first movement of a piano sonata in F-sharp minor, “not to exceed 75 bars in length.” The winning piece would be published in a supplemental publication and its composer promised a 100-franc prize.

      It was not meant to be. Ravel was the only entrant and his lone submission exceeded the 75-bar limit. Furthermore, the journal was facing bankruptcy and abruptly cancelled the competition, along with its 100 francs. Yet the exercise wasn’t for naught as Ravel continued to develop the piece into what would become his petite Sonatine.

       The first movement exemplifies Ravel’s ability to synthesize the classical and contemporary. It unfolds in traditional sonata form shaded with his trademark impressionistic hues. In 1905, Ravel added the subsequent two movements: a halting and punctuated waltz-minuet and the lightning-quick (and treacherously difficult) toccata. The arrangement for oboe and piano performed for this In Focus boradcast emphasizes Ravel’s wistful melody floating above an undulating piano accompaniment, and finds particular resonance in the “horn calls” that open the third movement.

       By the time Paule de Lestang performed the 1906 premiere of Sonatine, Ravel’s unsuccessful fifth and final attempt to win the Prix de Rome had erupted into a scandal. Though a favorite for the prize, he had been eliminated in favor of five students of one of the members of the jury. “L’affaire Ravel,” as it was labeled in the press, forced the director of the Conservatory to resign, but it only grew Ravel’s renown.  

       And in another twist, though the composer never recouped any prize money for Sonatine, the popular work helped him secure a lucrative lifetime contract with the publisher Durand.

program note by Amanda Angel
       (The Cleveland Orchestra © 2021)
  

VARIATIONS ON A THEME OF FRANK BRIDGE, Opus 10
by Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)

Composed:  1937

Premiered:  August 27, 1937, at the Salzburg Festival

Scored for:  string orchestra

Duration:  about 25 minutes

________________________________

M U S I C A L   T R I B U T E S   take many forms.  This particular offering, from Benjamin Britten to his teacher Frank Bridge, fulfilled an ambitious set of intentions.  Here the young pupil affirms Bridge’s music and personality while also showcasing Britten’s own dazzling abilities to set a musical tale — in homage and thankfulness, in parody and all seriousness.  With the entire piece written in just twenty days.

       Britten, as a lad of ten, first heard Bridge’s music at a local festival.  The budding young composer was dazzled by the older man’s craft and style — and very shortly thereafter managed to impress Bridge, who didn’t really want students, into taking him on as a private pupil and apprentice. 

       They got on well, in part because they were both open to whatever the other said or wrote.  Bridge questioned everything Britten was doing as a composer.  And Britten, in tears after many lessons, accepted every criticism and challenge.  Not to write different music, but to write his own music differently — to dare to perfect every detail and not be satisfied with half measures and approximations of good ideas.  "Frank Bridge really taught me," Britten later wrote, "to take as much trouble as I possibly could over every passage, over every progression, over every line."

       Britten, by then a teenager, suddenly found himself writing fewer new works, instead of the furious output he’d managed since childhood.  But his skillset was growing, and discovering new quality and qualities within newly-disciplined work habits.

       By the time he’d finished at the Royal College of Music, he was already writing music for movies.  And it is this connection that brought him back to honoring his teacher.  In 1937, conductor Boyd Neel, who led the recording sessions for one of Britten’s film scores, was invited to present a program — with his own string orchestra — of British music at that summer’s Salzburg Festival. 

       In addition to requiring that the program showcase only British composers, the contract also stipulated that it include at least one brand-new work.  Boyd remembered how quickly Britten turned rewrites around in the studio, and inquired if he might be able to write something in three months or less.

       Understanding the rare opportunity to be featured at the prestigious Salzburg Festival, Britten said yes.  He completed the score in just three weeks, putting his training and mastery to full task. 

       The form and idea, Britten freely admitted, owes much to Elgar’s famous Enigma Variations, to develop one musical phrase in many disguises.  But rather than writing about different friends and individuals, here Britten fashioned a succession of movements to portray varying aspects of his teacher’s personality and music.  While doing so, the completed work also deftly displays Britten’s extraordinary understanding of instrumental color and string technique (both Britten and Bridge were accomplished violists), along with his uncanny ability to instantly set and shape a scene or mood — traits that he would master even further in his opera scores.

       Musically, Britten chose a theme from Bridge’s Idyll No. 2 for string quartet.  From this somewhat old-fashioned and pastoral theme, his homage goes, in many senses, all over the map.  Some variations bear only a slight connection to the original theme.  While others clearly display the aspect of Bridge that Britten penciled into the score, or, more obviously, to quote several of Bridge’s musical works directly, especially in the final movement.  At least one variation comments on the occasion of the premiere in Salzburg (Viennese Waltz).  Others demonstrate Britten’s remarkable sense of musical styling (Funeral March or Moto Perpetuo) or his own lifestory (tenor Peter Pears, who Britten had met two years earlier and was to become his partner in music and life, attended the premiere and reported back his understanding that the Romance movement was a personal love note between the two men.) 

        One masterful aspect to note (and watch and listen to) is how Britten separates a string quartet from the rest of the orchestra at several different moments, setting up an aural and visual dynamic of two forces interplaying in harmony and friendship, mirroring on one level how Britten felt in working with Bridge — not just in working with a teacher, but in a friendship centered around the joy of building music together, phrase by phrase, note by note, but each with a separate role to play.

       This piece and its Salzburg premiere helped launch Britten’s name internationally, giving him new opportunities toward the art, fame, and acclaim that was to become his as one of Britain’s greatest composers of the 20th century.

program note by Eric Sellen © 2021
   

Frank Rosenwein

Principal Oboe
Edith S. Taplin Endowed Chair
The Cleveland Orchestra

Frank Rosenwein joined The Cleveland Orchestra as principal oboe at the beginning of the 2005-06 season.  He made his solo debut with the Orchestra in February 2007, in Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2.  Since that time he has performed as soloist on many occasions, including playing the Richard Strauss Oboe Concerto in 2012 and the first Cleveland Orchestra performances of Vaughan Williams's Oboe Concerto in 2017.

       Since 2006, Mr. Rosenwein has served as head of the oboe department at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where in 2015 he was given the Alumni Achievement award.  He also teaches each summer as part of the Kent Blossom Music Festival, and appears as a guest artist and masterclass clinician in schools around the world.  As a chamber musician, he has spent many summers at the Marlboro Festival and has performed with the Mainly Mozart Festival in San Diego, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and the Seattle Chamber Music Society.

       Born in Evanston, Illinois, Frank Rosenwein earned a bachelor of music degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he studied with John Mack (Cleveland Orchestra principal oboe, 1965-2001), and a master of music degree from the Juilliard School.  Prior to coming to Cleveland, he served as principal oboe (2002-05) of the San Diego Symphony and San Diego Opera.

       Mr. Rosenwein is married to Cleveland Orchestra associate concertmaster Jung-Min Amy Lee.  They live in Cleveland Heights with their children and dog.
     

Carolyn Gadiel Warner

Violin
The Cleveland Orchestra

Keyboard
Marjory and Marc L. Swartzbaugh Endowed Chair
The Cleveland Orchestra

Pianist and violinist Carolyn Gadiel Warner is a native of Canada who began her musical education with the piano at age three.  Later taking up the violin, she earned degrees in both instruments from the University of Toronto and the Paris Conservatory of Music, from which she graduated with a First Prize.

       Since 1979, Ms. Warner has been a member of both the violin and keyboard sections of The Cleveland Orchestra. 

       Ms. Warner serves on the chamber music faculty at the Cleveland Institute of Music.  She is a founding member — with her husband, Stephen Warner, a longtime violinist with The Cleveland Orchestra, now retired — of the Cleveland Duo and the Cleveland Duo & James Umble, who have been profiled in The Strad magazine and can be heard on the Cappella, Dana, and Klavier record labels.  Both ensembles tour throughout North America and abroad, performing dozens of concerts each year for students of all ages and levels of musical background.

Vinay Parameswaran

Associate Conductor
Elizabeth Ring and William Gwinn Mather Endowed Chair
The Cleveland Orchestra

Music Director
Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra
    

THE 2020-21 SEASON marks Vinay Parameswaran’s fourth year as a member of The Cleveland Orchestra’s conducting staff. In this role, he leads the Orchestra in several dozen concerts each season at Severance Hall, Blossom Music Festival, and on tour. He also serves as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra.

       Mr. Parameswaran came to Cleveland following three seasons as associate conductor of the Nashville Symphony (2014-2017), where he led over 150 performances. In the summer of 2017, he was a Conducting Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center. Recent seasons have included Mr. Parameswaran making his guest conducting debuts with the Rochester Philharmonic and the Tucson Symphony, and also made his subscription debut with the Nashville Symphony conducting works by Gabriella Smith, Grieg, and Piev. Other recent engagements have included debuts with the National Symphony Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony, Jacksonville Symphony, Eugene Symphony, and the Vermont Symphony Orchestra.

       In addition to his concert work, Mr. Parameswaran has led performances of Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love with Curtis Opera Theater. He also assisted with Opera Philadelphia’s presentation of Verdi’s Nabucco.

       Mr. Parameswaran has participated in conducting masterclasses with David Zinman at the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, as well as with Marin Alsop and Gustav Meier at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. He is the conductor on the album Two x Four with the Curtis 20/21 ensemble alongside violinists Jaime Laredo and Jennifer Koh, featuring works by Bach, David Ludwig, Philip Glass, and Anna Clyne.

       A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Mr. Parameswaran played percussion for six years in the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra. He holds a bachelor of arts degree in music and political science from Brown University, where he began his conducting studies with Paul Phillips. He received a diploma from the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Otto-Werner Mueller as the Albert M. Greenfield Fellow.