Oberlin student singers and the Oberlin College Choir have a long history of performing with the Cleveland Orchestra, but ever since Franz Welser-Möst became Music Director of the orchestra in 2003, he has regularly presented Conservatory voice students with exceptional opportunities to perform on a world-class stage. Education is vitally important to Welser-Möst, who received an honorary degree at Oberlin in 2006, and he has made a commitment to participating in the coaching and conducting of Oberlin students and ensembles.

In September, six vocal performance majors from the Conservatory, along with the Oberlin College Choir, will continue the tradition when conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy leads the orchestra in a rare performance, with theatrical staging, of Edvard Grieg’s incidental music for Henrik Ibsen’s fantastical play Peer Gynt. The complete Grieg score, with narration, will be presented at Severance Hall at 8 p.m. on Thursday, September 27; Friday, September 28; and Saturday, September 29.

“The students gain the opportunity to work with one of the greatest orchestras in the world,” says Professor of Singing Gerald Crawford of these performances with the Cleveland Orchestra. “To venture forth in such a fashion, while still an undergraduate, has enormously powerful implications.”

Soprano Elizabeth Ford-Zaroff ‘09, who studies with Professor of Singing Daune Mahy, will perform the role of Anitra, the daughter of a Bedouin chief. She is also a member of the choir. The three Cowherd Girls are sopranos Alexandra Becerra ’08, a student of Associate Professor of Singing Salvatore Champagne; and Tiffany Marx ’08 and Alyssa Cox ’08, who study with Associate Professor of Singing Lorraine Manz. Baritone Joseph Lattanzi ‘10, a student of Champagne’s, will perform the role of Hehler; and bass-baritone John Harper ‘08, who studies with Manz, appears as Dieb.

Associate Professor of Choral Conducting Hugh Floyd prepared the Oberlin College Choir, and—to round out Oberlin’s involvement—Professor of Russian Tim Scholl will be delivering the preconcert lectures.

This is the first time that the Cleveland Orchestra is performing Grieg’s complete score for Peer Gynt, although it has performed suites and excerpts — most notably, the popular In the Hall of the Mountain King — on numerous occasions, mostly in the 1920s and 1930s.
Written in verse and not originally intended as a stage performance, Henrik Ibsen’s 1876 dramatic work about identity, self-discovery, and free will is filled with trolls and shady business dealings in Morocco, a madhouse, a child born out of wedlock (possibly mirroring Ibsen’s situation at the time) and Norwegian superstitions. When Ibsen asked Grieg to create incidental music for his work, little did he know that the composition would one day stand on its own as a musical masterpiece.