The Blossom Festival is a summer music festival of

orchestra An orchestra (; ) is a large instrumental ensemble typical of classical music, which combines instruments from different families. There are typically four main sections of instruments: * bowed string instruments, such as the violin, viola, c ...

l music located at the

Blossom Music Center Blossom Music Center, locally referred to simply as Blossom, is an outdoor amphitheatre in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, United States. The venue is the summer home of The Cleveland Orchestra and site of the ensemble’s annual Blossom Festival. Blossom M ...

Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio Cuyahoga Falls ( or ) is a city in Summit County, Ohio, United States. As of the 2020 census, the city population was 51,114. The second-largest city in Summit County, it is located directly north of Akron and is a suburb of the Akron metropol ...

. The festival was originally created to provide a summer concert vehicle for the

Cleveland Orchestra The Cleveland Orchestra, based in Cleveland, is one of the five American orchestras informally referred to as the " Big Five". Founded in 1918 by the pianist and impresario Adella Prentiss Hughes, the orchestra plays most of its concerts at Se ...

and the Blossom Music Center was specifically built to host the festival. The festival's first season was in 1968 and it consisted of six weeks of concerts given by the Cleveland Orchestra intermingled with eight individual

jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a m ...

folk music Folk music is a music genre that includes traditional folk music and the contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be called world music. Traditional folk music has b ...

concerts.

George Szell George Szell (; June 7, 1897 – July 30, 1970), originally György Széll, György Endre Szél, or Georg Szell, was a Hungarian-born American conductor and composer. He is widely considered one of the twentieth century's greatest condu ...

conducted the first concert on July 19, 1968. Since then the festival has been expanded to include ten weeks of orchestral music, most of which is still performed by the Cleveland Orchestra but also includes concerts by the festival's own Blossom Festival Orchestra. The Blossom Festival Orchestra is made up of free-lance musicians from the Cleveland area, mostly pulling from musicians of the Cleveland Pops Orchestra, Opera Cleveland Orchestra, or

Apollo's Fire Apollo's Fire, The Cleveland Baroque Orchestra is a popular and critically acclaimed period-instrument ensemble specializing in early music (Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, and early Romantic) based in Cleveland, Ohio. The GRAMMY-winning ense ...

. The orchestra performs annually for the Blossom Festival, often appearing when the Cleveland Orchestra has other summer performance engagements outside of the Cleveland area. On July 28, 2007 the Blossom Festival made history; premiering the first live concert performance of

Hoctor's Ballet ''Hoctor's Ballet'' is a composition by George Gershwin for full orchestra written in 1937, originally from the score for '' Shall We Dance''. Performance time runs about 10 minutes. Composed by Gershwin specifically for the ballerina Harriet Ho ...

which is one of the last orchestral works by Gershwin. Until 2005, the Blossom Festival had its own music director. The last person to serve in that capacity was

Jahja Ling Jahja Ling () is a conductor, music director and pianist. From 2004 to 2017, he was the music director and conductor at the San Diego Symphony. Following his retirement in 2017, he plans to do guest conducting, as well as teaching and voluntee ...

. After he stepped down from that position, the orchestra eliminated the post, and now the orchestra's full-time music director

Franz Welser-Möst Franz Leopold Maria Möst (born 16 August 1960), known professionally as Franz Welser-Möst, is an Austrian conductor. He is currently music director of the Cleveland Orchestra. Biography Franz Leopold Maria Möst was born in Linz, Austria, ...

is in charge of the classical music concerts both during the regular concert season in Cleveland and the summer concerts at the Blossom Festival.

Leonard Slatkin Leonard Edward Slatkin (born September 1, 1944) is an American conductor, author and composer. Early life and education Slatkin was born in Los Angeles to a Jewish musical family that came from areas of the Russian Empire now in Ukraine. His fat ...

was the Festival Director from 1992 through 1999. 2020 saw no festival happening.

References

{{coord, 41.191298, -81.560678, region:US_type:event, display=title, format=dms Classical music festivals in the United States Music festivals in Ohio Music of Cleveland Festivals in Cleveland Music festivals established in 1968