Word: clevelandism
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...past, as in a 1910 recording of the Fisk Jubilee Quartet or a 1935 recording of a South African choir that shows the influence of African-American music worldwide. More recent performers are featured as well, including the Soul Stirrers, the Staple Singers, Jessye Norman, Aretha Franklin and James Cleveland, all the way up to such contemporary neo-gospel acts as BeBe and CeCe Winans...
Music: Best American orchestra? It's the Cleveland...
Dohnanyi modestly ascribes the orchestra's excellence to the diligent work habits and pride instilled under Szell, the Hungarian-born terror who became music director in 1946 and transformed Cleveland from a cultural backwater into one of the orchestral world's powerhouses. Szell's ironfisted discipline brooked no contradiction, and the musicians played for him as if their livelihoods -- if not their lives -- depended on it. "Under Szell they had to be the best," notes Dohnanyi. "With me, they want to be the best...
...Cleveland would not have achieved its current prestige without Dohnanyi, who arrived in 1984 after having worked his way up the traditional German opera-house ladder. Beginning with the Frankfurt Opera, where he was Georg Solti's assistant, Dohnanyi spent time in Lubeck, Cologne and finally his adopted hometown of Hamburg before heading to the shores of Lake Erie. He has ended any doubts about his abilities as a symphonic conductor with performances that combine Szell's rigor, Boulez's unerring ear and a controlled interpretative fire...
What finally explains Cleveland's eminence is the happy intangibles that previously elevated Stokowski and Philadelphia, Karajan and Berlin, and Solti and Chicago to musical supremacy: leadership, talent, discipline and desire, perhaps especially the last. "For musicians there's not much else to do here," Dohnanyi points out. "There's no opera, there's no freelancing; you don't come to Cleveland to enjoy the weather. You come here to play in the Cleveland Orchestra." And play they do, better than anybody...