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DIARY: WEEKEND, Friday-Sunday, June 12-14, 2026

by Daniel Hathaway

WEEKEND HIGHLIGHTS: 

This weekend, ChamberFest Cleveland revs up to full speed, ENCORE Chamber Music Institute continues its progress around town, and Ohio Light Opera gets underway in Wooster with My Fair Lady, the first of its six summer shows.

JUNE 12 – FRIDAY

ENCORE Gates Mills Music & Ideas Festival investigates New Sounds, including Andrew Rindfleisch’s haunting American Descent, recently named runner up for a Pulitzer (7:30 at Baldwin Wallace), and ChamberFest Cleveland presents Finding Resonance with music by Jörg Widmann, George Enescu & Anton Arensky (7:30 in Harkness Chapel at Case).

JUNE 13 – SATURDAY

Ohio Light Opera opens its season with Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady (2 pm in Freedlander Theatre, Wooster), ENCORE presents its Masters Series: In Your Arms at Last (7:30 at Federated Church in Chagrin Falls), ChamberFest Cleveland presents Homecoming with music by Mozart, Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, and Ernest Bloch. (7:30 at Mixon Hall, CIM), and North Coast Men’s Chorus presents its Pride program, We Belong (7:30 at Maltz Performing Arts Center, repeated on Sunday at 3).

JUNE 14 – SUNDAY

Cleveland Chamber Choir & The Musical Theater Project present Walk On: The Power of Carousel (3 pm at Gartner Auditorium, Cleveland Museum of Art).

For details of these and other classical music events, please visit the ClevelandClassical.com concert listings.

INTERESTING READ:

The Cleveland Residency Reconciles Opposites to Great Effect. 
Review by Charles Burns in San Francisco Classical Voice (June 9).

Allison Loggins-Hull’s latest album, The Cleveland Residency, is immediate and deeply personal music, which makes its institutional title feel almost misleading. [Read More…]

Pre•Views & Features

Week Two at ChamberFest Cleveland

by Mike Telin

Week Two of ChamberFest Cleveland is packed full of events. As the Festival’s executive director Jessica Peek Sherwood says — “there is something for everyone.”

On Monday, June 15, “Celebrating Frank” is everyone’s opportunity to pay tribute to Franklin Cohen, the founding father of ChamberFest Cleveland. His professional highlights include his tenure as Principal Clarinet of The Cleveland Orchestra and 50 years on faculty at CIM. Cohen’s colleagues, alumni, friends, and musical family will share the stage to say thank-you.

Week two will also welcome three artists who will be making their ChamberFest debuts on Wednesday, June 17.

[Read on…]

Last lap at Ohio Light Opera: a few questions for Steven A. Daigle

by Daniel Hathaway

2026 will mark the end of an era for Ohio Light Opera at the College of Wooster. Artistic director Steven A. Daigle will retire at the end of this summer’s season, which makes this a good opportunity for an exit interview. What has his job entailed for the past quarter century, and how does he see OLO moving into the future?

I reached Steve by telephone on Memorial Day in a moment of calm before the cast, orchestra and crew descended upon the Wayne County campus to set things in motion for this season’s six shows. I began by asking how he and his colleagues go about choosing the titles for a season.

Steven Daigle: Well, there is a formula that we’ve been using since I’ve been artistic director. ’Doc,’ James Stewart, used one before, but since then we’ve expanded the repertory to include musical theater. With our mission now, we pick three musicals, and we try to have one of them be an early musical — this summer, it’s The Boys from Syracuse.

We try to choose stylistically different titles for the other two, and I think we’ve achieved that in My Fair Lady and Damn Yankees. They’re golden age musicals from the 1950s and 1960s, but in a way they couldn’t be more different from each other. [Read on…]

Percussionist Jeff Stern debuts at ChamberFest

by Mike Telin

“I wasn’t sure if music was even going to stick until I found myself enthralled by percussion,” Jeff Stern said during a telephone conversation.

“It suits me in a lot of ways, particularly because it has so many options in the kinds of instruments you can play, and the kinds of music and musical settings that it lends itself to.”

On Wednesday June 17 at 7:30 pm in Mixon Hall, Stern, who serves as Instructor of Percussion at the Peabody Conservatory as well as the executive director, co-artistic director, and founding percussionist of  the two piano, two percussion group the icarus Quartet, will make his ChamberFest debut.

I began our conversation asking him how he will fit into a Spanish Baroque trio sonata. [Read on…]

See all previews

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