On a Personal Note

Change of Seasons, Part 1: The Scramble

Episode Summary

In January 2018, The Cleveland Orchestra planned to perform Haydn’s choral masterpiece The Seasons. One soloist fell ill. Then another. What resulted is one of the most unusual and memorable performances in Cleveland Orchestra history.

Episode Notes

In January 2018, The Cleveland Orchestra planned to perform Haydn’s choral masterpiece The Seasons. One soloist fell ill. Then another. What resulted is one of the most unusual and memorable performances in Cleveland Orchestra history.

Featured Music:

HAYDN – The Seasons

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Episode Transcription

Announcer:

Welcome to The Cleveland Orchestra’s On a Personal Note, where we explore the many ways music shapes our lives. In difficult situations or moments of sheer joy, music connects us with our humanity.

Mark Williams:

My name is Mark Williams. I’m the Chief Artistic Officer at The Cleveland Orchestra. I want to tell you about the craziest day of my career. In January 2018, Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra were scheduled to play Haydn’s cantata, The Seasons, and everything started going wrong on Thursday morning at 8:30 when I received a phone call from Ilya Gidalevich, our artistic administrator.

Ilya Gidalevich:

My name is Ilya Gidalevich and I’m the artistic administrator. I don’t remember it starting with me, but apparently it started with me.

Mark Williams:

Haydn’s Seasons has three soloists — a soprano, a tenor, and a baritone. And Ilya called me to tell me that the tenor was sick and he was taking him to the hospital.

Ilya Gidalevich:

One of the singers, the tenor, called me in the early morning, which is not my finest hour, and it’s him saying that he’s not feeling well and what to do. I mean, luckily, we are very fortunate to have relationships with the Cleveland Clinic. So we have many doctors that help us when we need help. And so I called the E.N.T.

Mark Williams:

I’ve dealt with some pretty crazy cancellations. And so I wasn’t that worried.

Ilya Gidalevich:

There was something about this that I think made me a little bit more worried than I otherwise would have been.

Mark Williams:

And I immediately began calling around to discover if there was another tenor who knew this role — in German, in the United States — because we had a performance in 12 hours. I start calling around and I discover that there are a few options and I’m feeling pretty good about all of this. And then my phone rings again and it’s 10:00 a.m. and it’s Ilya. And he says, “I’m on my way to the hospital.” And I thought, am I having déjà vu? Did I forget that we spoke earlier? And I said, “Ilya, you already told me this.” And he said, “No, I’m on my way to the hospital with the baritone. He’s sick too.”

Ilya Gidalevich:

I do remember him saying, “You’ve already called me about this” and having to explain that, no, no, no — this is take two. But I think the funniest thing about the start of this day is that Mark and I didn’t actually see each other until mid-afternoon; that all of this was happening by phone. So there was a lot of — I don't know what to call it — a lot of, kind of remote anxiety.

Mark Williams:

A sense of utter panic set in, and maybe a little bit of hopelessness.

Ilya Gidalevich:

It seemed like everything was on fire — just on fire.

Mark Williams:

I could no longer manage the situation myself. I had to call the music director. Franz Welser-Möst picked up the phone and I explained that both the tenor and the baritone were not feeling well, that both had been to the hospital and both had seen an E.N.T., and Franz, who has been working with singers for most of his life was very, very calm, which made me feel more hysterical. And I explained that I was working on finding a tenor who could sing the role in German and finding a baritone who could sing the role in German.

Ilya Gidalevich:

The Haydn’s Seasons isn’t done a lot, period. And then it’s done even less often in German. You need someone who’s done this piece before, who can jump in at a moment’s notice; who’s close enough and has some sort of authorization to work in the United States, whether they’re American or whether they have a visa — a valid visa. And you just have to kind of amplify all of that by the fact that this piece is so rare.

Mark Williams:

We’re now seven-and-a-half hours before the downbeat. It’s unclear if the tenor or the baritone will be able to sing tonight and I have not yet secured covers for either of them. This is a disaster.

Ilya Gidalevich:

In retrospect, it kind of seems like a French farce or the start of a bad joke your father tells you. How many singers does it take to put on a Haydn’s Seasons kind of thing?

Mark Williams:

Ilya’s operating a singer ambulance service, ferrying the singers from the hotel to the Cleveland Clinic and back; then to the pharmacy to get prescriptions and back. At this point, both of our originally booked singers are in their hotels with their medicines and we’re trying to figure out, will they be able to sing tonight? It’s 2:00 p.m. My office looks like a circus. I have two phones going, and my entire staff is calling around trying to find singers who could do these roles. And we get lucky. We found a tenor who’s in the United States, who’s done the piece in German, and he’s willing to get on a plane.

Ilya Gidalevich:

And the funny thing is that a Haydn’s Seasons is kind of this allegory for life, right? It’s taking a year, a calendar year, and going through the seasons and making analogies to sort of we’re born and in the spring, right? And then the full cycle that that leads to. And in many ways, I feel like that week was an entire cycle of my life.

Mark Williams:

It’s a beautiful metaphor for human life. The spring of youth through the winter of old age. It’s for orchestra and full chorus, soprano, tenor, and bass baritone soloists. And Golda Schultz, who was our soprano, was fortunately well but I didn’t dare call her this afternoon to tell her what we were going through.

Ilya Gidalevich:

No news is good news and we’ve had a lot of bad news by that point; that maybe tempting this was not in the cards. But the more realistic thing is that this was Golda’s debut with the Orchestra. She’s a fantastic singer, but she had not sung with us before. This was clearly going to be a — there’s some anxiety involved already. So we didn’t really check in with her until we knew exactly how things were going to happen.

Mark Williams:

It’s three o’clock. More good news. We have found a bass baritone in America who knows the piece in German who’s willing to get on a plane. Same process. My team is booking flights; we’re booking hotels, we’re getting cars set. At four o’clock, the tenor officially cancels. He’s too sick to do it. I think, no problem. We’ve got a tenor in the air. We’re tracking the flight. He’ll be here in time to work with Franz a bit beforehand to understand how Franz is interpreting the piece. We’re in good shape. Four-thirty, we get an update on the bass baritone. He wants to sing, but he’s really, really sick. And, of course, we have to think about the long view. We’ve got performances in Cleveland. And then this project ends with a performance at Carnegie Hall.

Franz has been at this for a long time and he knows voices better than anyone I know. And when I told him that the baritone was sick but wanted to sing, tenor was already out, his response was not what I was expecting, which is, well, we have a cover tenor and a cover base — we're all set. His response was: You can carry one, but you can’t carry two. He knew that if the bass baritone were to sing that evening, that the remaining performances in Cleveland and at Carnegie would be at risk. And he was right. And so he said, tell him to take the night off.

It’s five o’clock. The tenor has canceled. Franz has told the bass baritone to take the night off because he really is too sick to sing. I have two soloists in the air and we don’t know what we’re going to do. Franz says, “I think we can get about an hour’s worth of music out of this. I’m going to grab my score and I’ll call you back in 20 minutes.” Franz calls me back in exactly 20 minutes and says, “So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to do the parts that we can do.” And he’d already laid out a plan for which solos, which movements could work without the soloists — including some that, well, we’d just play half and stop. This was pretty risky. Remember, there’s no time to rehearse any of this.

So we got the librarian involved and we started printing out sheets for the orchestra and for the chorus that said, “Play movement one, don’t play movements two and three. Play movement four, up through measure 50, then stop.” And normally this process takes weeks and months. So to simply print up a change sheet that the orchestra and chorus could glance at before the performance was highly irregular. And, of course, this is the moment that we have to call Golda.

Golda Schultz:

So if Mark says he called me, he probably did. I don’t remember this call at all. The only thing I remember was Franz going, “So?” Standing in my dressing room, me just looking at him like, what’s going on? And he was saying, “So, the guys aren’t coming. So it’s just you and me, kid.”

Just having that experience of that was just crazy to me. And then I think Mark came to the dressing room after that and just said, “I'm so sorry that this is happening. But I’m so grateful that you’re able to do this and whatever you need.” I think if I had told them, I’m going to need an entire magnum of champagne to get through this experience right now, I think that they would not have disagreed with me that evening. The idea was whatever anybody needs to get through this moment, we’re going to give them. If I had said, I need a thousand puppies to be in the dressing room with me while I just prepare myself mentally, they might’ve even agreed to that.

Mark Williams:

Franz had gotten there early and he went into her dressing room and walked her through the plan for the evening. He also spoke to the director of choruses and to the librarian to make sure that the sheets we had printed were in everyone’s hands and that they were all correct, and that any questions could be answered. And what I saw backstage — where inside, I felt as if I would literally die — what I saw all around me was extraordinary professionalism and deep, deep focus.

Ilya Gidalevich:

I mean, the brilliance of Franz, given all of his wealth of experience and his wealth of experience with singers, is the calmness with which he approaches things like that, right? This kind of way out that he devised, I think was absolutely brilliant. I think it simultaneously fixed a problem that we just logistically could not fix and also provided an experience for an audience that they otherwise would never have had.

Mark Williams:

The audience arrives. And they have no idea what’s about to happen. You see, we didn’t even have time to print a sheet in the program to say that there was a change. So the lights go down and André Gremillet comes on stage and announces that not one but two soloists have canceled, but the show will go on and we will do our very best to give them Haydn’s The Seasons.

André Gremillet:

Good evening and welcome to Severance Hall, I’m André Gremillet. It is not often the Executive Director comes out before a concert at The Cleveland Orchestra, fortunately. But when it does happen, it’s usually not great news, which is the case this evening, as I’m here to announce that we will be unable to perform The Seasons in its entirety. Literally, a few hours ago, not one but two of our soloists for this evening fell ill. They will be unable to perform this evening. Therefore, the Orchestra and Music Director Franz Welser-Möst will perform for you this evening an abbreviated version of The Seasons with soprano Golda Schultz and the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus. In addition, Franz will be providing us with some insights, some comments to guide us through the performance between each movements. Clearly, this is not what any of us had in mind for this evening, but I can assure you that you will be subject to a truly unique concert experience. Now, thank you for your understanding and please enjoy this very special performance.

Mark Williams:

We have this incredibly generous audience, and there were literally gasps and a few snickers, but everyone was game. And suddenly there was a feeling that this was a night at Severance Hall that you’d always remember. And really, if you think of it, every performance of The Cleveland Orchestra is this way. We’re creating something for you in the moment that will never be the same ever again. Franz and Golda walked on stage and he began the overture and the Orchestra sounded absolutely incredible. And they played this dramatic overture that represents the end of winter and suddenly he stops. And he turns around almost mid-sentence and says, “Well, here, you would hear the baritone and the tenor singing about X or Y or Z.” And everyone just burst out in laughter.

Franz Welser-Möst:

Now, the two guys. I also have a great sense of humor.

Announcer:

Mark Williams, Ilya Gidalevich, and Golda Schultz will never forget that remarkable performance of Haydn’s The Seasons. But it seems likely that the very lucky audience members who packed the hall that cold January night won’t either. For those who were there, it was pure live performance magic. For the rest of us, you can get a sense of it right now with the overture coming up next. It was recorded in Severance Hall in 2018. And don’t miss part two of this story in our very next episode. More at clevelandorchestra.com/podcast.