In the News
Review: Beethoven’s Biggest Concert, Now With Heat
Joshua Barone, The New York Times
March 2, 2020
“Time travel may be impossible, but the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra offered the next best thing in a marvelous, if anachronistically lavish, re-creation at Music Hall here over the weekend.… in a year when celebrating the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth is all but inescapable, this was nonetheless a welcome, and informative, addition to the festivities.”
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What Does It Mean to “Reimagine” an Orchestra Season?
Alex Ross, The New Yorker
December 7, 2020
“I especially relished the work of the Cincinnati Symphony, which is thriving under the stylish, polyglot direction of Langrée. Cincinnati’s all-American season-opening concert included…Barber’s ‘Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” brimming with gauzy nostalgia. Angel Blue sang piercingly in the Barber and Christopher Pell, the Cincinnati’s principal clarinetist, anchored an urgently glowing ensemble in the Copland [Appalachian Spring].”
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Steve Smith, The New Yorker
Goings On About Town, October 2020
“In recent weeks, the music director Louis Langrée has rallied the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra for a virtual concert series infused with finesse and diversity. The newest program includes “You Have the Right to Remain Silent,” a bold, stinging, painfully timely clarinet concerto by the Pulitzer Prize- winning composer Anthony Davis, with Anthony McGill, the New York Philharmonic principal clarinetist, as the soloist.”
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Steve Smith, The New Yorker
Goings On About Town, April 2021
“The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and its music director, Louis Langrée, have provided online viewers with inventive programming and compelling performances throughout the long pandemic months, and the orchestra’s next two offerings continue this streak. The first is the world première of “A Body, Moving,” composed by Christopher Cerrone, presented alongside pieces by Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, and Gabriella Smith. Next, in “The Meta Simulacrum, Vol. 1,” the composer William Brittelle synthesizes material generated by a disparate array of pop musicians, jazz improvisers, and media artists into an evocation of an uncertain future.”
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10 Classical Concerts to Stream in November
Seth Colter Walls, The New York Times
October 28, 2020
“The conductor Louis Langrée has a strong track record in the music of Schubert, whose “Unfinished” Symphony anchors this program. But this conductor and his orchestra will also branch out, performing a piece by Julia Perry (“Homunculus C.F.”) as well as the Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Davis’s “You Have the Right to Remain Silent.” This work, with its sardonic invocation of the Miranda warning, has been memorably recorded by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Cincinnati’s performance boasts the acclaimed clarinetist Anthony McGill, of the New York Philharmonic, as one of the featured soloists.”
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FALL PREVIEW: Finally, a Lot of Classical Music and Opera to Hear This Season
Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times
Fall Preview, September 21, 2021
“Even with the resumption of live performances, the pandemic’s impact on culture is far from over: Ensemble Intercontemporain’s fall residency with this orchestra, led by the inspiring conductor Louis Langrée, has been scratched because of travel restrictions. But other highlights of the Cincinnati season remain, including performances of Andrew Norman’s 2014 piano fantasia “Suspend” (Oct. 29- 30) and William Dawson’s 1934 “Negro Folk Symphony” (Jan. 8-9)
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FALL PREVIEW: 10 Months of Classical Concerts You Won’t Want to Miss
Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times
Fall Preview, September 12, 2019
“Celebrations of Beethoven’s 250th are a dime a dozen, but this burnished ensemble is really going for it with a re-creation of the remarkable, epically long December 1808 concert that featured the premieres of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Fourth Piano Concerto and the “Choral Fantasy,” as well as other pieces. Louis Langrée conducts the two-part performance, four hours of music separated by a dinner break.”
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The Marine Band will play familiar standards, but also new fanfares, at today’s inauguration.
Joshua Barone, The New York Times
January 20, 2021
“Mr. Boyer’s premiere, “Fanfare for Tomorrow,” is an adaptation of short work of the same title he wrote for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’s Fanfare Project in the early months of the pandemic. He described the piece as optimistic, a response to one crisis but also befitting Wednesday’s ceremony.”
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