Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
By JOHN FLEMING
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 1, 2001
Jahja Ling's other orchestra
Jahja Ling leads the Cleveland Orchestra in an all-Russian program Friday night in Sarasota, part of the orchestra's five-cities-in-six-days Florida tour. Gil Shaham is the soloist in Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 2. Also on the agenda is Stravinsky's Petrouchka and Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet.
Ling, music director of the Florida Orchestra, is in his 16th season as resident conductor in Cleveland, as well as his second season as director of the summertime Blossom Festival south of Cleveland. Another Tampa Bay area tie comes in the person of Cleveland's associate concertmaster, Ellen dePasquale, former Florida concertmaster.
The Cleveland Orchestra is routinely ranked among America's "big five" symphony orchestras -- along with New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago -- and now there's a book that tells its 82-year history. The Cleveland Orchestra Story (Gray & Company) by Donald Rosenberg, music critic with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, is a probing, authoritative account of how a midsized city in the industrial heartland has managed to sustain one of the world's great orchestras.
The Cleveland Orchestra plays at 8 p.m. Friday in a sold-out concert at Van Wezel Hall.
The golden age of television ran from the late 1940s through the '70s, according to Claude McNeal, artistic director of the Center Theater Company, which puts on cabaret shows at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center.
"These were some of the best times of our lives and we want to bring those back for our audiences," McNeal says. "The product commercials, with tuneful jingles, and the wonderful show themes are often as memorable as the shows themselves."
In other words, get ready for a revue that ranges from The Ballad of Davy Crockett to the Mr. Clean and Chiquita Banana jingles, the Brady Bunch theme to We Are the Men of Texaco.
TeleVisions, starring Heather Krueger and Eric Davis, above, opens Saturday and runs through April 14 in the Jaeb Theater at TBPAC. Tickets: $24.50-$27.50. (813) 229-STAR or (800) 955-1045.