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To•Day

DIARY: Weekend, September 30-October 1, 2023

By Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:

On Saturday, a 3pm Baldwin Wallace Faculty Recital features J.R. Fralick, tenor, Christine Fuoco, piano, and Khari Joyner, cello, a 4pm Stars in the Classics classical cabaret at Praxis Fiber Gallery includes dance and the first performance of a work inspired by memories of Euclid Beach Park, and a 7:30 performance by Les Délices and Kaleidoscope Vocal Ensemble in Kulas Hall at CIM repeats Friday’s program, “The Pow’r of Music.”

On Sunday, The Cleveland Orchestra repeats its season opener at 3pm with Franz Welser-Möst on the podium and Daniil Trifonov at the Steinway (pictured — read our review on Cleveland.com here), new music director Kevin Jones plays a 4pm organ recital at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights, and at 6pm, CIM celebrates the life and compositions of its celebrated alumna Dolores White.

Check our Concert Listings for details of these and forthcoming events.

WEEKEND ALMANAC:

SEPTEMBER 30

Today marks the anniversaries of the birth of Irish composer and organist Charles Villiers Stanford (1852) and Russian violinist David Oistrakh (1908), and the death of American composer and music critic Virgil Thomson (1989). [Read More…]

Pre•Views & Features

Cleveland Museum of Art’s Performing Arts Series returns

by Mike Telin

The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Performing Arts Series is back with a new director and a full schedule of diverse shows. To get a sense of it all, I spoke with Gabe Pollack, who came to that post at the Museum after many years of serving as manager of the Bop Stop. Here’s what he told me.

I started the job in October 2022 and I inherited three programs. A couple were rescheduled concerts that had been canceled during COVID. And since booking those shows was taken off my plate, that allowed me to just learn the processes involved with producing a show at the Museum.

This 2023-24 season is truly my first Performing Arts Series. The “Summer Solstice” and “City Stages” are signature programs of the Museum. But they operate separately from the Performing Arts Series in Gartner. So when I was hired, my main task was to program those events.

I had a lot of fun booking “Solstice.” I think it takes a mix of skill and luck, especially when dealing with international artists because they have to be in the U.S. and have permits that allow them to perform here. And they have to be in the region around the time of “Solstice.” But I thought the artists complemented each other very well.

[Read on…]

Come As You Are —
Banks & Bjerken at CIM

by Jarrett Hoffman

In one way, saxophonist-composer Steven Banks’ Come As You Are is straightforward: it’s about family, and it’s about church. Its movements are dedicated to his mother and three sisters, and inspired by their favorite spirituals and works of sacred music.

In another way, the piece — which will conclude his free program with pianist Xak Bjerken on October 5 at 7:30 pm in Mixon Hall at CIM, where Banks is a visiting faculty member — is about something more abstract: a merging of different parts of his identity that previously didn’t feel as if they could coexist.

“As a classical musician, the vast majority of my colleagues have little knowledge or understanding of Black culture or how it influences my music-making,” Banks writes in his program note from 2021, when he performed the piece as part of his Young Concert Artists debut recital. “As a Black man from North Carolina, many of my family and friends don’t have a true sense of what I do and love as a classical performer and composer. I have also spent an incredible amount of time and energy on keeping these worlds separate and trying to show up in each as if the other didn’t exist.”

[Read on…]

See all previews

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