Severance Music Center is Cleveland’s home for symphonic music and other presentations, including Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Concert Hall and Reinberger Chamber Hall. We are strongly committed to making everyone feel welcome. The doors to Severance open three hours prior to most performances.

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Janáček’s Jenůfa

Severance Music Center

Bach’s Easter Oratorio

Mahler's Song of the Earth

Mahler’s Third Symphony

Mahler called his Eighth Symphony, “the biggest thing that I have ever done…in which the most beautiful instrument in the world is given its true place.” Music Director Laureate James Conlon concludes the 150th May Festival with a work of gigantic proportions—music of triumph and transcendence that celebrates the power of the human voice, featuring the sounds of the Chorus and the CSO in the breathtaking space of Music Hall.

Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand

Cincinnati Music Hall

Legends swirl around the creation of Mozart’s Requiem, written on his deathbed and left unfinished: Who was the mysterious figure who commissioned the composer? What parts of the work were truly his own? And was Mozart composing his own funeral mass with this final artistic statement? Many of these questions were explored hauntingly (abeit suspiciously) in the movie Amadeus. We are nevertheless left with a work of overwhelming power — at once intensely dramatic and deeply personal — that touches the core of our humanity.

Mozart's Requiem

Written in the final year of his life, Schubert’s Mass in E Flat is a work of uncommon power and poignant reflection from a composer facing his own mortality. It is preceded by his “Unfinished” Symphony, presented in between movements of Berg’s Lyric Suite. Through this fascinating juxtaposition, spanning more than a century, Schubert’s pioneering artistry and Berg’s latent romanticism are brought into illuminating relief.

Welser-Möst Conducts Schubert

Holiday Concerts with The Cleveland Orchestra and Cleveland Orchestra Chorus returns in 2022! Join us for an unforgettable experience that will fill Mandel Concert Hall with the sounds of the holiday season.

Cleveland Orchestra Holiday Concerts

Composer, conductor, and creative thinker John Adams occupies a unique position in the world of music. His works stand out among contemporary classical compositions for their depth of expression, brilliance of sound, and the profoundly humanist nature of their themes. For his oratorio El Niño, Adams imagines a modern-day miracle, retelling the story of the Messiah through a constellation of references from medieval chant to contemporary Latin American poetry. “John Adams's nativity oratorio is a winner, a very palpable hit — an intelligent, emotional and sometimes magical re-telling of the old, old story from a new perspective” (BBC).

El Niño

Some pieces of music are so stirring, so electrifying that audiences are transfixed by their inherent emotional power. Mahler’s passionate and tempestuous Second Symphony – about humanity’s search for meaning in life and death — is such a work. Composed for a massive orchestra, choir, and soloists, it is riveting from its darkly ferocious opening to its exhilarating, ecstatic finale.

Mahler's Resurrection

Otello in Concert

The Cleveland Orchestra Chorus reunites after an unprecedented year apart for a special performance of Brahms’s A German Requiem, accompanied by two pianos. While the piece is technically not a requiem, Brahms called it a “human requiem”, as he wrote it to comfort the living in the face of mortality.

Cleveland Orchestra Chorus

May 17, 2025

Janáček’s Jenůfa

17 - 19 Apr, 2025

Bach’s Easter Oratorio

Cleveland Orchestra Chorus