March 16, 2004—The Oberlin Orchestra will present a free concert at Severance Hall Wednesday, April 14, at 8 p.m. Music Director of the Oberlin Conservatory Orchestras Steven Smith will lead the ensemble in Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 5 and György Ligeti's Atmosphères. Severance Hall is located at 11001 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio.

Seating is general admission. To reserve free tickets, or for more information, please contact the Severance Hall Box Office at 216-231-1111 or 1-800-686-1141, or visit www.clevelandorchestra.com.

This concert is produced with the generous support of the Clonick Family Foundation. Media sponsorship is provided by WCLV 104.9 FM, Cleveland's classical music radio station. WCLV will broadcast the concert live, with a simulcast on wclv.com, beginning at 8 p.m.

"The Oberlin Conservatory of Music is honored to provide this free concert for the people of Cleveland and Northern Ohio, and we are very pleased with our evolving relationship with The Cleveland Orchestra," says Acting Dean of the Conservatory David Stull.

"This is a marvelous opportunity for our students, and it would not be possible without the significant generosity of the Clonick Family Foundation."

The Conservatory Dean's Office is making available free bus transportation, on a first-come, first-serve basis, for members of the Oberlin community who wish to attend the concert. To reserve a bus seat, please call Nita Karpf at 440-775-8926 or e-mail her at nita.karpf@oberlin.edu. Those planning to ride the bus to Severance Hall must do the following:

• Call the Severance Hall Box Office to reserve a ticket for the concert and
• Call or e-mail Nita Karpf to reserve a seat on the bus and to obtain departure location and time.

According to Peter Laki, program annotator for The Cleveland Orchestra and visiting associate professor of music history at Oberlin, Ligeti's Atmosphères is "one of those epoch-making works by which classical music of the early '60s is remembered.

A central idea in the work, says Laki, is "the realization of complete stasis through extensive inner motion. Large portions of the piece consist of extremely dense counterpoint, with up to 56 voices (each string instrument has its own individual part to play). But the imitative entrances are so close to one another that it is impossible to perceive them separately, with apparent immobility as the result. . . . If we stand by an apparently motionless lake long enough, we become aware of those minute vibrations that we miss if we just walk by—and these vibrations are certainly part of what Atmosphères is all about."

The Oberlin Orchestra is performing the third critical edition of Mahler's Fifth Symphony, which was first performed in Cologne in1904 under the composer's baton.

The appearance in Cleveland by the Oberlin Orchestra is one of several projects to emerge from a new, developing collaboration between The Cleveland Orchestra and the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. This collaboration builds upon a core element of Oberlin's mission: professional training and contact with one of the world's great orchestras is seminal to a formal music education.

On the institutions' collaboration, Cleveland Orchestra Executive Director Gary Hanson says, "We are pleased to share our Severance Hall stage with the Oberlin Orchestra, and we welcome these talented young people to Cleveland. The Cleveland Orchestra has long enjoyed an association with Oberlin College and because of Franz Welser-Möst's commitment to education, our relationship with this fine conservatory has been invigorated." 

Music Director of The Cleveland Orchestra Franz Welser-Möst took the Oberlin Orchestra through a rehearsal of Beethoven's Leonore Overture last fall. Several students and recent graduates of the Conservatory's vocal studies program have performed with The Cleveland Orchestra the past two seasons, including the Women of the Oberlin College Choir and mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong '02 who made her Cleveland Orchestra debut in March by joining Dame Felicity Lott in Debussy's La Damoiselle élue.

The Oberlin Conservatory of Music, founded in 1865 and situated within the intellectual vitality of Oberlin College since 1867, is the oldest continuously operating conservatory in the United States. It is renowned internationally as a professional music school of the highest caliber.

BACKGROUNDERS
The Oberlin Conservatory of Music and The Cleveland Orchestra
Although The Cleveland Orchestra and Oberlin Conservatory collaboration seems like new growth, its roots actually run wide and deep:

• Founded in December 1918, The Cleveland Orchestra first performed at Oberlin's Finney Chapel in the spring of 1919. Since then it has appeared each season—203 times—under the auspices of the College's Artist Recital Series. The musicians' roster of The Cleveland Orchestra has consistently included faculty members and graduates of the Oberlin Conservatory. Current members of The Cleveland Orchestra are Associate Professor of Viola da Gamba and Cello Catharine Meints, Teachers of Double Bass Scott Haigh and Tom Sperl, and Teacher of Tuba Ron Bishop. Current members of The Cleveland Orchestra who have graduated from the Conservatory are John Rautenberg '58, associate principal flute; Mary Kay Fink '83, flute and piccolo; Paul Kushious '83, cello; Michael Mayhew '92, associate principal horn; Donald Miller '72, percussion and librarian; and Trina Struble '91, assistant principal harp.
• Oberlin has conferred honorary doctor of music degrees on three past Cleveland Orchestra music directors: Artur Rodzinski, George Szell, and Christoph von Dohnány.
• Former Oberlin College President Fred Starr served as a national trustee of The Cleveland Orchestra, from 1988 through 1992.
• John Long Severance graduated from Oberlin College in 1885. He was the lead donor for the construction of the Orchestra's opulent home, Severance Hall (the Oberlin campus also boasts a Severance Hall, originally built to house science classrooms). John Long Severance was also the second president of The Cleveland Orchestra's board of trustees.

Steven Smith Biography
Associate Professor of Conducting and Music Director of the Oberlin Conservatory Orchestras Steven Smith, who joined Oberlin's faculty in 2002, was formerly the assistant conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra. He continues to be the music director of the Santa Fe Symphony.

Smith is in frequent demand as a guest conductor; last summer he conducted the Aspen Concert Orchestra at the Aspen Music Festival. He also has held previous conducting positions with the Kansas City Symphony (KSO), the San Juan Symphony, the Colorado Springs Symphony, and "Epicycle: an ensemble for new music." During his tenure with the KSO, he was the sole recipient of the Conductor Career Development Grant and was named Foundation Artist by the Geraldine C. and Emory M. Ford Foundation. Smith earned master's degrees from the Eastman School of Music and the Cleveland Institute of Music.

About the Oberlin Orchestra
The Oberlin Orchestra is the largest of the more than 25 student ensembles at the Conservatory; more than 120 members of the orchestra will appear on stage for the performance at Severance Hall, for which Caroline Slack, of Vashon Island, Washington, will be concertmaster. She is a student of Professor of Violin Gregory Fulkerson and will graduate in May 2004.

Like the Oberlin Chamber Orchestra, its smaller counterpart, the Oberlin Orchestra follows a demanding schedule of six hours of rehearsal each week as well as concerts every three to four weeks. Students in both orchestras are exposed to a cross section of orchestral literature, and both perform well-known works from the standard orchestral repertoire as well as less familiar works ranging from the baroque to the contemporary. Both orchestras also collaborate with the Oberlin Opera Theater and the Conservatory's larger choral ensembles.

Robert Spano, music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, is professor of conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory. Guest conductors of the Oberlin Orchestra have included Robert Shaw, Michael Morgan, Hugh Wolff, Catherine Comet, Oscar Shumsky, and composerJohn Williams--most recently at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. In addition to Franz Welser-Möst, Sir Simon Rattle of the Berlin Philharmonic rehearsed the orchestra in fall 2003.

A Brief History of the Oberlin Orchestra
Very few people were violin or cello majors in 1896, and no one majored in any of the wind instruments. Professors Fred and Charles Doolittle taught violin and cello; Professor J. Arthur Demuth taught violin, cornet, horn, trombone, oboe, and clarinet; and Charles Doolittle, flute. Their valiant efforts made possible the formation that year of a Conservatory Orchestra with Professor George W. Andrews as conductor.

In 1916 the string and wind instrument students at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music were a small group. The addition of Maurice Kessler, violinist from the Boston Symphony, and Friedrich Goerner, former first cellist with the Pittsburgh Symphony, had strengthened the department, but of the 13 students studying with Mr. Goerner, only one was a cello major.

At this time the Conservatory Orchestra under Dr. Andrews numbered 40 and consisted of one flute, one clarinet, two trumpets, three horns, trombone, timpani, and strings. Until the 1930s the missing parts would be supplied by organist Bruce Davis, who through long experience and great ability, had acquired an enormous deftness in this task.  Willard Warch was a member of the Orchestra's cello section of 1927-31, and recalls in his book Our First 100 Years, from which this account is taken, Professor Kessler looking out over the orchestra at a typical rehearsal and saying, "Bruce! Today we need second flute, second oboe, both bassoons, and third and fourth horns." And that, writes Warch, is what he gave them, or at least the essentials.

The orchestra in the years before the 1950s also had the assistance of other faculty members. Arthur Heacox had studied string bass in Munich and Paris and served the orchestra faithfully as bassist--sometimes the only one--for years. When he retired he persuaded Don Morrison, of violin and music education, to be his successor. Victor Lytle of the theory department was the orchestra timpanist for several years. (Dr. Andrews himself, while a student in the 1870s, had learned trombone in order to help out the orchestra of that time.)

Demuth, in 1916, played some of the winds or strings, as did his successor of the 1920s, R. Walter Frederick. The violin and cello teachers, of course, filled the first chairs of their instruments, and even the College faculty helped out. Mr. Jameson played horn. Professor and Mrs. Wolfgang Stechow played viola, and Dean Carl F. Wittke of the College of Arts and Sciences first played viola and then string bass. When Mr. Arthur Williams came in 1928, he played horn on occasion as well as trumpet; but the outstanding record of assistance to the Oberlin Orchestra and Bands belongs to George Waln, who at one time or another played B-flat clarinet, E-flat soprano clarinet, alto clarinet, bass clarinet, flute, English horn, bassoon, and contrabassoon.

A notable professor of orchestral conducting from 1966 to 1983 was Robert Baustian. The pantheon of conductors on the classical music scene who trained at Oberlin includes David Zinman, Robert Spano, Raymond Harvey, Michael Morgan, Jeannette Sorrell, Edwin London, John Kennedy,David Hoose, Stephen Gunzenhauser, and the up-and-coming Michael Christie.

Selected source material from Our First 100 Years  by Willard Warch.