Russian Garden Gazette

On September 25, Dmitri Shostakovich would have turned 120.

In Cleveland the anniversary nearly coincided with events that seemed to have nothing to do with him. That same day the musicians of The Cleveland Orchestra went on strike. At risk was the last major European tour of Franz Welser-Möst — the music director who, in a few months, will close a twenty-five-year era with the orchestra.

On September 27 the two sides reached agreement. The musicians ratified a new three-year contract, and the tour was saved.

But Shostakovich is no accident of the calendar here. Welser-Möst’s final Cleveland season opened with his Eighth Symphony. And the orchestra’s own history became entwined with Shostakovich’s fate long before Welser-Möst first stepped onto its podium.

On January 31, 1935, at Severance Hall, Artur Rodziński conducted the American premiere of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.

A year earlier Rodziński had heard the opera in the Soviet Union and was so taken with it that he saw it several times, met the young Shostakovich, and resolved to bring the score to Cleveland whatever it took.

It turned into something of an adventure. Taking a Soviet score out of the country required official permission; the American ambassador, William Bullitt, helped. And as Rodziński left Leningrad, a Soviet border guard found set designs among his papers — sketches full of lines and markings — and suspected they were plans of military fortifications. It took long explanations before the conductor was allowed to leave with them.

So Shostakovich’s music crossed a border and arrived in Cleveland. Lady Macbeth was heard at Severance Hall on January 31, 1935, and The Cleveland Orchestra then took the production to New York.

In March 1936 a young European conductor, George Szell, appeared in the Grand Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic. The moment was extraordinary.

Only weeks earlier, on January 28, Pravda had published its infamous editorial “Muddle Instead of Music,” aimed at Lady Macbeth. The opera The Cleveland Orchestra had brought to America with such success a year before was turning, in Shostakovich’s own country, into grounds for accusations that could cost its composer his life.

Szell had no connection to Cleveland yet. He came as a guest conductor and led the Leningrad Philharmonic. Ten years later, in 1946, he would take charge of The Cleveland Orchestra.

And nineteen years after that he would come back to this hall.

In May 1965 George Szell again walked onto the stage of the Grand Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic.

Almost everything had changed between his two appearances there. The Soviet Union had lived through the Great Terror and the war; Leningrad, through the siege. The Europe the young Szell had known had been destroyed and put back together. Szell himself had ended up in America, taken over The Cleveland Orchestra in 1946, and in two decades made it one of the great orchestras of the world.

In 1936 he had stood before the Leningrad musicians as a guest. In 1965 he returned to the same hall at the head of his own orchestra.

This time a different curtain stood between America and the Soviet Union — an iron one. And the music had to pass through it.

The trip took about three years to prepare. As early as October 1963, The New York Times reported that Szell would take his orchestra to the Soviet Union.

From April 14 to May 20, 1965, The Cleveland Orchestra played in Moscow, Kyiv, Tbilisi, Yerevan, Sochi and Leningrad under the American cultural exchange program. The orchestra’s general manager, A. Beverly Barksdale, later described the 123 members of the party as envoys of America whose public speech was music.

But the official formula of “cultural diplomacy” hardly conveys what happened between people. In Moscow the luggage with the Americans’ concert clothes was delayed. When the musicians of the Moscow Philharmonic heard, they offered their guests their own tailcoats — and set about finding the right sizes.

After concerts, Soviet musicians invited the Americans home. Conversations went on long after the official receptions. In Kyiv the Clevelanders discovered, to their surprise, the distinctness of Ukrainian culture and the difference between the Ukrainian and Russian languages — so marked that the Moscow interpreters sometimes needed help from local colleagues.

And in Leningrad the same hall was waiting for Szell. Barksdale called the Grand Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic the best hall of the entire tour — even looking back later on Western Europe as well.

And here the story almost composes itself.

The Soviet tour of 1965 confirmed the international standing the orchestra had reached under Szell. New invitations followed: in 1967 The Cleveland Orchestra became the first American orchestra invited in a single season to three of Europe’s leading festivals — Edinburgh, Salzburg and Lucerne.

From the outside the story looked almost flawless.

But a great orchestra is not only a conductor and the sound the audience hears. It is also about a hundred musicians who spend years and decades together. It is salaries, contracts, auditions, seating, tours. And the unavoidable question: where does the conductor’s authority end, and the orchestra’s own professional voice begin?

Under Szell that question was especially sharp.

He demanded near-absolute precision and discipline and held enormous power over the ensemble’s artistic life. Yet it was Szell who persistently fought for year-round employment for the musicians; the opening of Blossom Music Center in 1968 finally made it possible.

So the picture of “authoritarian conductor versus musicians” does not quite work. Szell demanded a great deal from the orchestra — and demanded a great deal for it.

But there were conflicts. In 1967 the musicians struck for seven days.

George Szell died on July 30, 1970.

The news came while Pierre Boulez was conducting The Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom. The musicians were told after the concert. For the next two seasons Boulez served as the orchestra’s musical adviser, helping it through a sudden period without a music director.

But alongside the artistic problem came a labor conflict.

The 1970 strike lasted 41 days. Wages, pensions, health insurance and working conditions sat beside questions that could no longer be called purely economic: audition procedures, seating, rotation — and the orchestra’s own part in choosing its next music director.

After a quarter-century of Szell, the question was almost existential:

The answer had to be worked out practically from scratch.

The musicians decided to make their view very clear.

Ninety-eight of them took part in an informal vote on the next music director. The overwhelming majority backed the Hungarian conductor István Kertész. Lorin Maazel received two votes.

The Musical Arts Association chose Maazel.

The musicians were hurt and angry: they felt their opinion had counted for nothing.

It is very easy to tell a convenient story here: the musicians knew best, the board got it wrong.

But the story is more interesting than that.

Maazel was an outstanding conductor. Under him The Cleveland Orchestra kept its superb technical level, went on recording, and greatly widened the map of its touring.

And yet relations within the ensemble stayed difficult. In 1980 the musicians struck again — for two weeks.

An important paradox emerged: you can choose a great conductor. But a great conductor and a great partnership between conductor and orchestra are not the same thing.

In December 1981 Christoph von Dohnányi stood before The Cleveland Orchestra for the first time. Within months it was announced that he would be the next music director, and in September 1984 his eighteen-year era began.

His artistic language suited the Szell tradition remarkably well: structural clarity, discipline, transparency, respect for the score.

Under Dohnányi the orchestra’s international reputation did more than survive. In 1992 a long residency at the Salzburg Festival began; the orchestra performed in mainland China for the first time; recording after recording appeared. In 1994 Time called it the best orchestra in America.

But for our story one more thing matters — something you cannot hear on a recording.

Dohnányi’s eighteen years passed without a strike.

Hard negotiations and disagreements did not vanish — a great orchestra never becomes a conflict-free organization. But after decades of serious clashes came a long period of stability.

When Dohnányi died in 2025, the orchestra’s president and CEO André Gremillet described his relationship with the musicians precisely: deep mutual respect.

Remember that word.

Respect.

In 2002 the era of Franz Welser-Möst began.

Today, a quarter-century later, it is easy to imagine that this partnership always existed. What is more interesting is what happened to the orchestra over those twenty-five years.

Welser-Möst did not give up the famous Cleveland qualities — precision, transparency, ensemble discipline. The orchestra itself describes his contribution as added warmth and flexibility while keeping the tradition.

And one number matters especially:

That number changes the meaning of the word “orchestra.” Welser-Möst did not simply conduct the same ensemble for twenty-five years — more than half of today’s ensemble joined The Cleveland Orchestra under him.

Which means the sound of today is the result not only of his artistic ideas. It is thousands of shared rehearsals and concerts, tours, auditions, appointments — a quarter-century of daily work between conductor and musicians.

There were hard moments under him too. In January 2010, after the financial crisis, the musicians struck for one day: the dispute was over pay cuts and how the weight of the crisis should be shared between the musicians and the institution. They settled quickly.

The sequence says a lot: seven days in 1967, 41 days in 1970, two weeks in 1980, one day in 2010. So this year’s strike cannot be called the second in the orchestra’s history, as some early television reports said. It was the fifth.

That is exactly why the events of September 2026 turned out to be far more interesting than an ordinary dispute over pay.

Welser-Möst is finishing his final season. His successor has not been announced.

And during the contract talks the musicians raised the question of how new members join the orchestra. Until now, the final word at auditions belonged to the music director.

But for twenty-five years the words “the music director’s decision” meant one very specific person — Franz Welser-Möst. A man the musicians knew. Played with. Argued with. Who heard the candidates and, together with the orchestra, shaped the current roster over a quarter-century.

Now the question was no longer about him. It was about the powers of a next music director no one yet knows.

And suddenly the dispute of 2026 began to rhyme strangely with 1970. Then, after Szell’s death, the musicians asked: what voice should the orchestra have in choosing the person who will lead it?

Now the question was turned around:

September 25: Shostakovich turns 120. The strike begins the same day.

The concert in Ann Arbor is canceled. Then Saturday’s concert at Severance. Instead, many of the musicians gather at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights and play for the public free of charge.

Meanwhile the departure for Europe draws near. For Welser-Möst this is his last major European tour as music director. For the orchestra, it is the next chapter of an international story that includes Moscow and Leningrad in 1965, Salzburg, Lucerne, Edinburgh, Asia and dozens of other cities.

On September 27 the news comes: an agreement has been reached and ratified. The new contract runs three years. Base compensation rises 5 percent a year — from $165,516 to $191,620 by the end of the term. The health plan changes; there are provisions for workload when sections have vacancies — and, most important for our story, the contract secures the musicians’ role in auditions.

The music director keeps the final right of appointment. But a candidate cannot reach that final choice without the approval of a majority of the musicians on the audition committee.

It would be too simple to say the agreement was reached for Welser-Möst’s sake. Neither the musicians nor the management claimed so, and Franz himself deliberately stayed out of the talks.

But the context is impossible to miss. He is closing a twenty-five-year era. By the end of the season he will have given more than 1,200 performances with The Cleveland Orchestra — in 93 cities, 26 countries and 15 states.

The European tour is meant to be one of the last great international statements of this partnership. And on September 27 it became clear: it will happen.

The instruments are packed. On September 29 the musicians fly to Europe; the first concert is on October 2.

Welser-Möst’s final season opened with Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony — music of 1943, written at the very center of Europe’s catastrophe, and ending not in triumph but in an almost impossible, quiet continuation of life.

Perhaps that is why it fits this story so unexpectedly well.

In 1935 The Cleveland Orchestra brought Lady Macbeth to America. A year later, almost immediately after “Muddle Instead of Music,” the young George Szell stood before the Leningrad Philharmonic. In 1965 he returned to the same hall with The Cleveland Orchestra. In 2026 Welser-Möst opened his last season with Shostakovich — and days later the orchestra faced the question of how to preserve a great legacy when people, powers and eras change.

After Szell there remained a sound — and an orchestra that had to learn to live without Szell.

After Maazel, a wider international map and the experience of a difficult relationship between artistic authority and the ensemble.

After Dohnányi, eighteen years of stability and that same deep mutual respect.

After Welser-Möst there will remain an orchestra more than half of which he helped assemble. And a procedure in which the next music director will make decisions within a somewhat different balance between conductor and musicians.

That person will inherit one of the great orchestras of the world. And with it, almost eighty years of experience gathered since Szell arrived: of discipline and resistance, conflict and compromise, strong personalities and an institution that must outlive each of them.

Perhaps this is what sets a great institution apart from a merely great moment: the ability to live through conflict without destroying what it exists for.

Some works enter history helped by their author’s name. And then there is the music of Vladimir Vavilov.

One of his best-known pieces has been performed around the world for decades as the Ave Maria of Giulio Caccini — an Italian composer who died three centuries before this music existed.

Another became one of the most recognizable Russian songs of the late twentieth century. Most people know it as “Gorod zolotoy” — “The Golden City” — sung by Boris Grebenshchikov. The words are by Anri Volokhonsky. The melody came from a record on which it was credited to another Italian, Francesco da Milano.

At the center of both stories stands one man: a Leningrad guitarist and lutenist who lived only forty-seven years and did something paradoxical. He hid his name so well that his music outlived him — and became famous under other people’s names.

Millions know Vavilov’s music, yet his biography still fits into a few paragraphs.

Born May 5, 1925, in Leningrad. Studied. Fought in the war. Was wounded. After the war, became a guitarist and lutenist.

We too began by repeating this short entry. Then we stopped at one word: fought.

Vavilov was sixteen when the war began. He lived in Leningrad. Where was he during the siege? When was he called up? In which unit did he serve? Where was he wounded? How did the war end for him?

We decided to try to find out. The search took far longer than we expected. We went through military databases, tried different spellings of his name and birth date, and cross-checked records from the Memory of the People database and the Book of Memory of Besieged Leningrad. At first some of the digital record cards only added confusion: abbreviations of military units are easy to misread, and details taken one by one, without checking them against each other, sketched an entirely different life.

But gradually several documents added up to a much more concrete story. Records of the Frunzensky district military enlistment office in Leningrad give Vladimir Fyodorovich Vavilov’s place of service: the 45th Reserve Rifle Regiment of the 44th Reserve Rifle Brigade. The same records note a severe wound, treatment in an evacuation hospital, and demobilization on June 5, 1945. And one more small detail suddenly turns an archive card into a human document: his mother’s name — Nadezhda Nikolaevna.

Behind a few lines of military paperwork appears a very young Leningrader who came through the war and a severe wound — and returned to music.

Here it is important to draw a line between what we could establish and what the documents do not say. We cannot reconstruct his war day by day, and we should not invent for the archive what is not in it. But instead of the stock phrase “served in the war, was wounded,” we now have a few real coordinates of his life.

And that may be especially fitting in the story of a man whose name met the opposite fate: his own coordinates gradually faded, while the music he created traveled the world under other names.

After the war Vavilov studied guitar and composition, played the seven-string Russian guitar, then took up the lute and became one of the notable figures in the Soviet revival of early music.

But he did not only perform early music. He composed it — and gave the authorship away.

In 1970 Vavilov recorded an album for Melodiya, Lute Music of the 16th and 17th Centuries. The title promised old European music, and the sleeve did indeed carry the names of old masters. But over time it emerged that much of this musical past was most likely created by Vavilov himself.

One piece he credited to Francesco Canova da Milano, the great Italian lutenist of the sixteenth century. Another he prudently labeled simply “Anonymous.”

That was the Ave Maria.

Caccini’s name was not on the record. This detail matters. We are used to saying, “Vavilov wrote an Ave Maria and attributed it to Caccini.” The story is subtler: in Vavilov’s lifetime it was published as the work of an unknown composer.

Vavilov died in 1973. By 1975 the Ave Maria had appeared in a recording by Irina Bogacheva — under the name of Giulio Caccini. Who first attached that name is still not known; some popular versions of the story do not survive a simple check of the dates. In 1988 Irina Arkhipova recorded it, again as Caccini. Worldwide fame came in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union — above all after the recording by the Latvian soprano Inessa Galante.

Giulio Caccini is a real and major figure of the early Baroque: Florence at the turn of the seventeenth century, the new monody, the birth of opera. The famous Ave Maria simply has nothing to do with him. There is no seventeenth-century manuscript, no early edition, no performance history leading back to his time. There is a twentieth-century recording by Vladimir Vavilov.

And yet the borrowed name proved astonishingly durable. It became a kind of passport for this music. With it the piece set off into the world — in vocal, choral and instrumental versions, in concert programs and recordings by famous performers.

And a paradox arose: the more famous the piece became, the further its real author receded.

We met Italy in our previous issue. Now it returns in a completely unexpected way: a Russian composer wrote music the whole world took for Italian.

But that is only half the story. On the same record was a “Canzona” credited to Francesco da Milano.

The piece is not among Francesco’s published works. Scholars have found a related melody in a sixteenth-century Netherlandish collection printed by Pierre Phalèse, where it appears as a pavane derived from an even earlier French song. So the “Canzona” may indeed have a Renaissance ancestor. But the piece as the world knows it is Vavilov.

And it was this record that the Leningrad poet Anri Volokhonsky heard.

In November 1972 a melody from Vavilov’s record was running through Volokhonsky’s head — the very “Canzona” he believed to be by Francesco da Milano. In the studio of the artist Boris Axelrod — “Axel” — a text took shape, beginning with the words “Above the blue sky…”

Volokhonsky himself linked the song’s imagery to the atmosphere of that studio and the artistic world being made there. And so a piece that already had an invented Italian author acquired Russian verse.

The first to sing it was Alexei Khvostenko. Vavilov died on March 11, 1973, at forty-seven — just as the song was beginning its life.

The song made its way through Leningrad’s unofficial culture, passed from singer to singer, and eventually reached Boris Grebenshchikov. He changed the famous first word: Volokhonsky’s city was “above the blue sky,” Grebenshchikov’s — “beneath the blue sky.”

The change seems tiny, but the song’s space becomes different. For Volokhonsky the city lies above the sky, almost in a metaphysical realm. For Grebenshchikov it is beneath the sky — as if it could be looked for here.

Later Sergei Solovyov’s film Assa made the song known to millions. And once again the public knew above all the performer — not the whole chain of people through whom the song came into being and reached them.

Vavilov’s two stories fit together.

He composes an Ave Maria; the record lists the author as unknown; later the music is given Caccini’s name; the world remembers Caccini.

He records a “Canzona” under the name of Francesco da Milano; Volokhonsky writes words; Khvostenko sings it; Grebenshchikov makes it famous.

Each time the music passes through a new door — and each time Vladimir Vavilov’s name stays somewhere behind.

You can call it a hoax. Or a strange form of authorial self-effacement. You can guess at practical reasons for such attributions. But we have no reliable word from Vavilov himself explaining why he did it. We know the result. We do not know the motive.

Vladimir Vavilov died without knowing what lives these melodies would lead. His Ave Maria crossed countries, languages, faiths and concert halls — under the name of a man who never wrote it. His “Canzona” became Volokhonsky’s poem, Khvostenko’s song, then Grebenshchikov’s — and part of the memory of several generations.

And here the theme of this whole issue unexpectedly returns. In 1965 The Cleveland Orchestra carried music through a real Iron Curtain: the State Department, the Soviet authorities, visas, planes, trains, an enormous organizational machine. Vavilov’s music traveled from Leningrad to an Italy that never figured in its origins — and from there, around the world. Practically on its own.

I think it was 1996.

I was writing a paper on Brodsky at the time, and for some reason I decided I absolutely had to talk to Pyotr Vail.

Today I can no longer say for certain at which of Moscow’s “thick” literary journals we met — Novy Mir or Znamya. But memory keeps insisting on Znamya.

I did not go alone. I went with my beloved mother-in-law, Alevtina Anatolyevna.

The conversation soon went where a conversation about Brodsky almost inevitably goes — to Venice.

By then I had been to Italy several times and was reading Brodsky’s Fondamenta degli Incurabili over and over. Brodsky’s Venice was not a literary backdrop for me: I already knew that strange experience of seeing a city with your own eyes first, and then, after reading, finding you look at it a little differently.

But from Brodsky’s Venice we unexpectedly moved to Vail’s Venice — to stories that were already taking shape as the world of his future book Genius Loci.

One story stayed with me especially. Vail told us how he had been received in an old Venetian palazzo belonging to Count Girolamo Marcello.

The combination alone — a Venetian palazzo, a count, a family that had lived there for centuries — sounded almost like a fairy tale to us then.

And Vail’s own genuine amazement was especially funny and touching: here in front of you is an aristocrat whose ancestors owned this very palace for hundreds of years, where you are now a guest; around you is a space where family history is measured not in decades but in centuries — and the conversation flows naturally, cheerfully and easily, as with friends and colleagues.

No museum solemnity. No distance between “history” and the person who lives inside it.

Alevtina Anatolyevna was a very tactful and very well-read woman. She certainly took part in the conversation — but with that rare delicacy which does not try to take up space, yet does not stay outside the conversation either.

We were both completely enchanted by Vail.

Not only by his erudition — I have met plenty of erudite people. Vail had something else, a much rarer combination: depth and a merry mind. The ability to see in an instant the connection between things that had seemed utterly remote from each other — and to tell you about it without professorial self-importance, lightly and almost with relish.

The Severyanin chapter of his book Poems About Me captures this perfectly. The title itself is very much Vail: it seems to be about other people’s poems, and turns out to be about his own life.

Vail begins with an army “cultural landing party”: a regimental ensemble performing at the club of a factory outside Riga. The soloist steps out before the audience in a lilac plush jacket and a cream shirt with a jabot and begins to sing Igor Severyanin — “In a rustling dress of moiré…” The evening nearly ends in a brawl.

Over the next few pages, the filmmaker Juris Podnieks, soldiers’ life, Leo Tolstoy, Bryusov, Severyanin’s emigration, Estonia, the war and the memory of youth come together quite naturally. And then again — a warm night, young soldiers, girls from the assembly shop, and Severyanin read aloud.

That, perhaps, was the essential thing about Vail: culture never lay under glass for him. The lofty did not demand a solemn face. Poems were part of life — funny, coarse, tragic, beautiful, sometimes completely indecent. And that made them not smaller, but larger.

But today I understand one more reason I remember those three hours thirty years later.

For me Pyotr Vail was, and remains, one of the very few writers and people of culture I would call a moral compass.

That does not mean he divided the world into black and white. Quite the opposite. Vail saw the many layers of history very clearly. He noticed paradoxes, contradictions, unexpected connections; he could look at a single phenomenon from several cultural and historical perspectives at once.

But his ability to see complexity never turned into the convenient formula “it’s not so simple.”

For him, complexity did not cancel moral coordinates. One can understand historical context, see causes, weigh different points of view, be ironic even about one’s own convictions — and still keep the ability to tell the human from the inhuman, dignity from baseness, freedom from unfreedom.

It is here, I think, that Vail is closest to Brodsky for me. Not because they saw the world the same way, but because for neither of them was intellectual complexity an excuse for moral vagueness.

In one book Vail tells about himself through other people’s poems. In the other, about people through places.

And our Moscow meeting seemed to arrange itself on the same principle. Brodsky led us to Venice. Brodsky’s Venice led to Vail’s. Vail’s Venice — to the Marcello palace. Marcello — into several centuries of Venetian history.

And all of this took place in Moscow, in the office of an old literary journal, with two women who came to talk about Brodsky and ended up talking with Pyotr Vail for about three hours.

On September 29 Vail would have turned seventy-seven. But the date is only a reason to open the door of memory.

I want to remember that conversation now because, for Vail, culture was not kept — it was lived. Severyanin lived in a factory club outside Riga. Brodsky, in Venice. Venetian history, at Count Marcello’s table. And thirty years later that conversation unexpectedly continues in Cleveland.

The project to complete the entry plaza of the Russian Cultural Garden received final approval from the Cleveland Landmarks Commission on September 24.

For a project of modest scale, this is an important milestone. It is not about creating a new garden or radically rebuilding an existing space, but about finishing something that stayed architecturally unfinished for years: the entry plaza, which should mark the edge of the Garden more clearly and tie it more neatly to the landscape already there.

The project completes the stone framing of the two flowerbeds on either side of the central walk. The new masonry will continue the existing retaining wall along the outer and back sides of the beds, leaving open the sides along the walk, where the plantings and the curve of the landscape have already settled in. The new wall will rest on a 9-inch bed of crushed limestone.

This is a case where the architectural intervention should be almost invisible: not adding one more freestanding object to the Garden, but completing the composition that is already there. The entry plaza should look as if it had always been meant to be this way.

The Landmarks Commission’s approval completes an important part of the review process. Now the project can move from drawings, renderings and hearings to its next stage — building it.

After this issue’s stories — of music crossing borders, of Brodsky’s and Vail’s Venice, of the genius loci — this small piece of news turns out to be unexpectedly fitting. The Cultural Gardens exist precisely because people brought to Cleveland the memory of other countries — and turned it into a real city landscape.

Almost immediately after the Landmarks Commission’s decision, the whole extended family of the Cleveland Cultural Gardens will gather together.

On Saturday, October 3, the Cleveland Cultural Gardens Federation holds its annual Gala at La Villa. This year the evening celebrates the 110th anniversary of the Cultural Gardens — a uniquely Cleveland project that the Federation calls an open-air museum telling of the contributions of many ethnic communities to a shared culture.

The reception begins at 6:00 p.m., with the program and dinner at 7:00. The keynote speaker is Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne. The Federation will honor Dan and Debbie Hanson for their contributions to the Cultural Gardens; volunteer awards go to Paul Burik and Tom Corrigan. The program also includes international performances.

But this year the Gala looks forward as well as back. The funds raised will support a new visitor center the Federation is creating in the former Stonebrook Montessori building on East Boulevard, across from the Italian Cultural Garden.

The future center will be about 1,000 square feet. The Federation plans to use it for school tours, teacher programs and work with visitors and volunteers — so that the Cultural Gardens are not only a place to see, but a place to learn and understand more.

For our issue, this is an almost perfect final point: from Shostakovich and Szell, from Leningrad and Venice — back to Cleveland, where the memory of many cultures becomes part of one city.