Cleveland Classical

Cleveland Classical Guitar Society: the Showcase Concert and into the fall

by Jarrett Hoffman

As per tradition, the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society will kick off its 2021-22 series with the free Showcase Concert highlighting musicians from around the region. This year’s event, which you can attend in person at the Maltz Performing Arts Center on Saturday, September 18 at 7:30 pm, or via livestream, might aptly be described as a Cincinnati sandwich on Cleveland bread.

There will be three sets, with Cleveland-based musicians on either end. Guitar Society educator Andy Poxon will open the concert with Mauro Giuliani’s Grande Ouverture before moving to his own arrangement of Handel’s D-Major Violin Sonata, where he’ll be joined by violinist Jeanelle Brierley.

Occupying the middle portion of the program is guitarist and composer Jeremy Collins, representing his hometown and homebase of Cincinnati, though he also studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music as an undergraduate (Cleveland-bred in addition to the Cleveland bread). He’ll perform two of his own pieces, The Starry Night and Reverie, followed by José Luis Merlin’s Suite del Recuerdo.

At the finish, bringing an impressive variety of flavors to the table is the guitar-and-flute Gruca White Ensemble. They’ll open with three miniatures by Stephen Goss (part of his From Honey to Ashes) influenced by music from around the world. They’ll continue with Masamitsu Takahashi’s Homage to the Harvest Moon, in which they’ll imitate the Japanese traditional instruments shinobue and koto. And they’ll finish with two movements from Marshall Griffith’s Jazz Impressions of Cleveland.

[Read on…]

Les Délices’ SalonEra is back and better than ever for second season

by Stephanie Manning

Last year, Cleveland’s period ensemble Les Délices dared to be different with their contribution to the world of online concerts: SalonEra. Billed as a “variety show for early music,” the web series’ unique format made it a hit among audience members, director Debra Nagy said in a recent interview.

“One thing we heard over and over again was, ‘regardless of the state of the pandemic, please continue SalonEra.’” The series’ second season, which premieres on September 13, aims to be even more ambitious and exciting than what came before it.

[Read on…]

Peter Takács announces reissue of complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas

by Daniel Hathaway

Oberlin piano professor Peter Takács celebrated the completion of a huge project in 2011 when his recordings of the complete Beethoven Sonatas were issued on the Cambria label in a handsome boxed set (read our review here).

“It was a labor of love,” Takács said in a recent Zoom interview, “as well as a kind of global enterprise.” The elaborate project included eleven discs in SACD Surround Sound produced by Sony Austria, with some elements printed in Hong Kong and designs done in Los Angeles.

The original edition of 2,000 copies had sold out by 2016, which raised the question of a reissue. Happily — albeit mysteriously — more than 500 sets of the CDs were discovered sitting in a Cambria warehouse. That inspired a reissue with several alterations in design.

[Read on…]

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Buoyed into the evening:
30 minutes of No Exit (Aug. 27)

by Jarrett Hoffman

By unofficial consensus, it’s best when virtual concerts wrap up in under an hour. The new music ensemble No Exit took that idea to another level on Friday, August 27 with a pre-recorded video of less than half that length.

In person, that might feel like an abrupt end to your plans for the night, given the effort needed to find some decent clothes and squeal out the driveway. But at home on Friday, when the concert was over, I felt refreshed in a way I didn’t expect. While full-length concerts can take something out of you energy-wise, here I felt almost buoyed into the rest of the evening.

[Read on…]

Cleveland Chamber Collective & Inlet Dance Theatre: Caliban Ascendant (Aug. 29)

by Peter Feher

Shakespeare in the park got an update over the weekend when the musicians of the Cleveland Chamber Collective partnered with Inlet Dance Theatre for a modern take on The Tempest. The collaborative result, Caliban Ascendant, premiered to an enthusiastic audience at Cain Park’s Evans Amphitheater on August 29.

The story was kept simple, though the performances were anything but. Ty Alan Emerson — who composed the score, adapted the story with friend and colleague Joshua Legg, and conducted Sunday’s premiere — didn’t skimp on the musical demands.

[Read on…]

The Cleveland Orchestra and Jonathan Biss at Blossom (Aug. 28)

by Timothy Robson

Few new works performed by The Cleveland Orchestra in recent memory have been as musically imaginative and sonically arresting as Caroline Shaw’s Watermark, which received its first Cleveland Orchestra performance at Blossom Music Center on Saturday evening, August 28. Pianist Jonathan Biss, for whom the piece was written, was the superb soloist, with associate conductor Vinay Parameswaran at the podium.

[Read on…]

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DIARY: Tuesday, September 21, 2021

by Daniel Hathaway

INTERESTING READ:

Frequent Cleveland Orchestra guest conductor Jakub Hrůša (pictured left in a 2019 performance of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony with soprano Joelle Harvey) is the subject of a New York Times interview this week in conjunction with the release of his recordings of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony with the Bamberg Symphony.

Obsessed with the piece, the composer left three distinct versions of the symphony, and Hrůša, unable to decide which he preferred, chose to commit all three to disc. The article also reveals some interesting facts about the Bamberg orchestra, which Hrusa regards as the “flagship” of its small Bavarian City, where one in ten of its residents holds season tickets for its concerts. (Cleveland Orchestra principal cello Mark Kosower was solo cellist in Bamberg before his translation to Ohio.) Read the article here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

British composer Gustav Holst was born on September 21, 1874 in Cheltenham. Prolific and inspired by such diverse influences as Hindu music and English folksong, he left a large catalogue of music, much of which has been overshadowed by works like The Planets that made his name famous.

Holst’s daughter Imogen recalls her father in a charming documentary, and this restored 1926 recording of The Planets with the composer conducting has been described as revelatory and surprising.

Explore some of Holst’s less familiar choral works with these recordings: His Two Psalms, sung by the Estudio Coral de Buenos Aires in 1981, his Hymn to Jesus, based on the Apocryphal Gospels and performed by the University of North Texas Symphony Orchestra and Grand Chorus in 2012, and — continuing the metaphor of sacred dance — his folklike but sophisticated setting of the old Cornysh carol, This have I done for my true love, performed by the choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford with scrolling score.

Or take a taste of his settings of hymns from the Rig Veda, with the Hymn of the Travellers, sung by the children’s choir and youth ensemble of the Maîtrise Notre-Dame de Paris with harp accompaniment.

And English art song composer Roger Quilter took leave of this life on September 21, 1953, leaving a legacy of over a hundred songs, many setting texts by Shakespere, that still figure importantly in vocal recitals. His Three Shakespeare Songs of 1905 are probably at the top of the list, and composer Peter Warlock wrote that O Mistress Mine is “one of the very few things that very simply send me into ecstasies every time I play it.” This performance of the set is by baritone Zak Kariithi and pianist Lemuel Grave.

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Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom: Jahja Ling’s Brahms (Aug. 22)

by Peter Feher

The Cleveland Orchestra wasn’t going to let a season go by without Jahja Ling. The veteran conductor was back at Blossom Music Center on August 22, picking up just where he left off.

Concerts cancelled in 2020 may have put a brief gap in Ling’s record with the Orchestra (a program every season since 1984-1985), but the ensemble’s former resident conductor more than made up for it Sunday with a performance both commanding and personal. [Read on…]

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