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To•Day

DIARY, Tuesday, February 25, 2025

by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING TODAY: 

At 7:00 pm, Federated Church Performing Arts Series presents Voices From the Other Side with Steven Smith, conductor, Gabrielle Haigh, soprano, and eight Erie Coast Cellists. Read a preview here.

At 7:30 pm, LCCC Signature Series presents Annie Jacobs-Perkins, cello, and the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra joins Sameer Patel, conductor, and Viviana-Zarah Baudis, piano, in Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center.

Visit our Concert Listings page for details and ticket information for these and other performances.

NEWS BRIEFS:

Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas’ brain tumor has returned, and the 80-year-old intends to lead his final performance in April. Read the story from the Associated Press here, and his personal statement here.

Roberta Flack, the magnetic singer and pianist whose intimate blend of soul, jazz and folk made her one of the most popular artists of the 1970s, died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 88. Read the New York Times article by Giovanni Russonello here. [Read More…]

Pre•Views & Features

Cleveland Chamber Choir to feature works by Salamone Rossi

by Daniel Hathaway

Cleveland Chamber Choir will devote its midwinter concerts to the music of the prolific Italian Jewish composer and violinist Salamone Rossi, a transitional figure who bridged the Renaissance and Baroque periods and was equally at home in the worlds of Jewish liturgical and Italian secular music. Like his contemporary Claudio Monteverdi, he was employed at the court of the Gonzaga family in Mantua.

Artistic director Gregory Ristow will lead the Chamber Choir and youth choir HaZamir in “Synagogue and Salon” on Saturday, March 1 at 8:00 pm at Congregation Mishkan Or in Beachwood, and Sunday, March 2 at 4:00 pm at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church in Rocky River. Admission is pay-what-you-can.

[Read on…]

“Voices from the Other Side:” a conversation with Margi Griebling-Haigh

by Mike Telin

When composer Margi Griebling-Haigh was asked to write a companion piece for Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5, for cello octet and soprano, little did she know that her 1999 work, Voices From the Other Side, a setting of three poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, would resurface years later as inspiration for a recording project.

The album, “Voices From the Other Side,” was released in September 2024 on Navona Records.

On Tuesday, February 25 at 7:00 pm at Federated Church in Chagrin Falls, the album will be presented live when conductor Steven Smith leads soprano Gabrielle Haigh and the Erie Coast Cellists in Arvo Pärt’s Fratres and L’abbé Agathon, Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5, and Margi Griebling-Haigh’s Cantilena and Voices from the Other Side. Tickets are available online.

During a recent telephone conversation, Griebling-Haigh said that when she composed “Voices,” she had no idea that her daughter would go on to become a singer. “She was a little girl when I wrote that piece. She inherited my love for the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

[Read on…]

Les Délices unveils “The Mythology Project”

By Mike Telin

When Debra Nagy asked Nicholas Phan to think about a non-Western, specifically non-European, myth that could be a fit for Les Délices’ The Mythology Project, he knew exactly where to turn.

“I had been spending a lot of time in Ann Arbor at my parents’ place because their health was starting to decline. And in my childhood bedroom was this very tattered book of Chinese myths that I had as a child,” the Grammy-winning tenor said on a recent Zoom call from Lisbon, Portugal.

“So I thumbed through the book and “The Loss of Memory Myth” jumped out at me. Probably because of what I had been experiencing with my parents’ decline in health and my needing to step up to take care of them. That role reversal really spoke to me.”

This weekend Les Délices will present A Moment’s Oblivion, the first instalment of “The Mythology Project,” a three-year initiative that will bring new life to the secular cantata that was popular in 17th and 18th-century France.

On Saturday at 4:00 pm at Heights Theater and Sunday at 4:00 pm at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church, tenor Nicholas Phan, oboist Debra Nagy, violinist Shelby Yamin, violist da gamba Rebecca Landell, and harpsichordist Mark Edwards will perform Michel de Montéclair’s La Bergère & Le Dépit généreux, Marin Marais’ “Le Labyrinthe” from Livre 4ème, and François Couperin’s “Barricades mistérieuses” and “Les Langueurs tendres” from Sixième Ordre. Tickets are available online.

[Read on…]

See all previews

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