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Archives for February 2013

Review: Heights Chamber Orchestra with violist Jeffrey Irvine at Grace Lutheran (February 17)

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by Daniel Hathaway

IRVINE-JeffreyNortheast Ohio abounds in avocational, community orchestras — more it would seem than most regions of the country can boast. One such ensemble, Heights Chamber Orchestra, now celebrating its thirtieth anniversary (with seven of its founding members still active and featured on its program cover), gave the third concert of its season on Sunday, February 17 at Grace Lutheran Church in Cleveland Heights. The imaginative program, conceived and conducted by music director Anthony Addison, was built around Lionel Tertis’s adaptation of the Elgar Cello Concerto, with CIM viola professor Jeffrey Irvine as soloist. The concert was dedicated to the late Edward Ormond, former first assistant principal violist with the Cleveland Orchestra, who played with HCO after his retirement.

Instrumentalists are fond of poaching each others’ sonatas and concertos — think of César Franck’s Violin Sonata, which has been successfully appropriated by cellists (and perhaps less convincingly by flutists). In this case, the translation from cello to viola by the foremost British violist of his era was vetted and approved by Elgar himself. [Read more…]

Preview: Akron Symphony to celebrate 20th anniversary of Gospel Meets Symphony on February 23

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by Mike Telin

ASO-GMS-20th“It really is the most coming together project in Akron” … Ann Lane Gates, honorary chair. — “We use it to come together and to share something very powerful” … Christopher Wilkins, conductor. — “It’s like stepping into the family that you never knew you had.” … Jennifer Mekel Jones, chorus master. — “It truly brings the community together and shows everyone that we can all find common ground” … Angeleina Valentine, assistant-chair. There is only one northeast Ohio event these four people could be talking about, and that is Gospel Meets Symphony.

On Saturday, February 23th beginning at 7:30 in The University of Akron’s EJ Thomas hall, the Akron Symphony Orchestra will celebrate Gospel Meets Symphony’s 20th anniversary concert featuring the 200 voice Gospel Meets Symphony Choir. The concert includes inspiring gospel and classical music under the direction of ASO Music Director, Christopher Wilkins, and Gospel Meets Symphony Chorus Master, Jennifer Mekel Jones. The concert also features performances by Divine Hope, YEPAW (Youth Excellence Performing Arts Workshops), and The LeGrair Brothers. Former ASO assistant conductor Eric Benjamin will also return for the occasion. [Read more…]

Review: A ravishing anniversary performance from the Canton Symphony (February 16)

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by Tom Wachunas

CSO-HistoricOn February 16, 1938, the newly formed Canton Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Richard W. Oppenheim, gave its first-ever concert at the Canton City Auditorium before a sold-out crowd of 3,300 listeners. Seventy-five years to the day after that rousing debut, the CSO re-created the same program in Umstattd Hall with a clearly impassioned Maestro Gerhardt Zimmermann at the podium, conducting an equally inspired orchestra. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Orchestra with Herbert Blomstedt: big symphonies by Nielsen and Beethoven (February 14)

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 by Daniel Hathaway

GuestBlomstedt-Herbert conductor Herbert Blomstedt is in a symphonic mood this weekend and next during his current appearances with The Cleveland Orchestra. Thursday evening’s program featured two of the most original works in the literature. Next weekend’s concerts include two of the most often played, but if Mozart’s No. 40 and Dvorak’s “New World” end up sounding as fresh and newly-composed as Nielsen’s No. 3 and Beethoven’s No. 7 did this week, we’ll have much to look forward to.

The Danish composer Carl Nielsen had a lot in common with his earlier Austrian colleague Anton Bruckner. Both grew up as country lads who combined native straightforwardness with the musical sophistication they acquired in Copenhagen and Vienna to produce highly original compositions that synthesized those two worlds. Both composers also built large structures out of simple but striking motives and seemed to exhaust all the possible permutations of those themes in the course of a symphonic movement (Beethoven started that, but Bruckner and Nielsen took the game to a whole new level). [Read more…]

Review: Chagrin Valley Chamber Music: Pianist Emanuela Friscioni (February 17)

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by Guytano Parks

VariationsFriscioni-Emanuela on a theme. That form has intrigued and inspired composers since the beginning of musical time. Expression through exploration and experimentation with tone, texture and effects as musical instruments (especially the piano) developed opened up endless possibilities for the composer. Pianist Emanuela Friscioni performed three such works by Mozart, Bach-Busoni and Schumann on Sunday, February 17 on the Chagrin Valley Chamber Music Concert Series at Valley Lutheran Church in Chagrin Falls.

The Sonata, K. 331 in A major is Mozart’s only piano sonata which utilizes a theme with variations rather than the standard Sonata Allegro form for its first movement. Friscioni played it with lovely tone and a fine sense of classical style and proportions. In the opening Andante grazioso (performed without repeats), Friscioni’s cantabile approach allowed the music to breathe, her phrasing leaving plenty of room for details of articulation and dynamics. The six variations which followed, all in A major except for the third which is in minor, unfolded beautifully. Running scale passages, accidentals, repeated staccato notes plus unexpected accents and dynamic changes peppered and at times camouflaged the original theme. [Read more…]

Preview: Tenor Alek Shrader returns to Oberlin on March 1, kicking off a series of area concerts by superb singers

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by Daniel Hathaway

Fresh fromSHRADER-Alek critically acclaimed performances at the Met and Hamburg Opera, tenor Alek Shrader will return to the Oberlin Conservatory, where he graduated in 2007, for a recital with pianist Keun-A Lee on Friday, March 1 at 8:00 pm in Warner Concert Hall. That performance coincidentally ushers in ten days’ worth of performances by esteemed singers: soprano Jane Eaglen sings Wagner with the Blue Water Chamber Orchestra on Saturday, March 2, baritones Thomas Hampson and Edwin Crossley-Mercer go head to head in separate recitals at E.J. Thomas Hall in Akron and Baldwin Wallace in Berea on Sunday afternoon, March 3, and soprano Christine Brewer sings on the Mixon Masters Series at CIM on Thursday, March 7, followed by soprano Deborah Voigt on the Oberlin Artist Recital Series on Sunday, March 10.

We last spoke to Alek Shrader in 2009, when he sang Count Almaviva in Rossini’s Barber of Seville with the now-defunct Opera Cleveland (download that article here). “Since then, I’ve worked a lot in Europe”, Shrader told us by telephone, “in Munich and Bordeaux — the majority of my European gigs have been there — and I’ve also worked a few other places: in France in Lille and Toulouse, in England at Glyndebourne, in Germany in Hamburg. But the thing I really consider the high point has been my return to the United States when I sang in Chicago, in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and then in New York with the Met. I made my Met debut last season in The Tempest by Thomas Adès. I’ve hit most of the major houses, and that was always the goal for my career — to work in the States.” [Read more…]

Preview: CMA VIVA! & Gala: Victoire on February 22— a conversation with composer-keyboardist Missy Mazzoli

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by Mike Telin

HailedVictoire as “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York” by the New York Times, and “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart” by Time Out New York, composer and keyboardist Missy Mazzoli added band leader to her impressive resumé in 2008 when she formed Victoire, an all-female ensemble of winds, strings, keyboards, and lo-fi electronics.

“It was my attempt to take control over where, when and how my music was performed. As a classical composer you’re usually at the whim of other performers and presenters. My goal was to take the best aspects of having a band, and the best aspects of being a composer and combine them, which is what I have done with the group,” Mazzoli told us by telephone. On Friday, February 22 beginning at 7:30pm in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art, VIVA! & Gala performing arts series presents Victoire in concert.  [Read more…]

Review: Les Délices — Portrait of Love at Tregoning and Co. Gallery (February 16)

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by Nicholas Jones

Shaw-NorthThe second of Les Délices’s offerings for this, its fourth season, gave its audience a Valentine’s Day treat (a couple of days late), replete with musical confections, kisses, sentiment, and…ah, je ne sais quoi!

Love, usually thought of in reference to a couple, became here a matter of the four players, sometimes flirting, sometimes fierce, sometimes laughing, sometimes in earnest, but clearly bound to each other in the bonds of the music. [Read more…]

Preview: Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival guest recital: a conversation with baritone Edwin Crossley-Mercer

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by Daniel Hathaway

ThisCrossley-Mercer is the gap year for the biennial Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival — and time for a solo recital to keep the buzz going for next year’s week-long event. This year’s invitee is the rising young French baritone Edwin Crossley-Mercer, who will join pianist Semjon Skigin for his U.S. solo recital debut on Sunday, March 3 at 4 pm in Gamble Auditorium at the BW Conservatory in Berea. We reached him via Skype in Dijon, France, where he had just begun his rehearsals for the title role in Mozart’s Don Giovanni with Opéra Dijon. [Read more…]

Review: An Atmospheric Turn of the Screw at Baldwin Wallace (February 14)

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by Timothy Robson

VenuesSMITH-WILLIAMSON around the world are this year preparing works by Benjamin Britten in honor of his centenary, so it is appropriate that the Opera Department at Baldwin Wallace University is presenting an atmospheric student production of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw for its Spring opera this weekend at the Kleist Center for Art and Drama on the BW campus. The production is directed by Benjamin Wayne Smith and guest conducted by Dean Williamson. The production is double cast; this review is based on Thursday evening’s opening performance. The show runs through Sunday and is reported to be mostly sold out.

The Turn of the Screw (1954) is based on Henry James’s novella of the same name, and relates a series of episodes in the career of a young governess supervising two children, a boy and a girl, in a remote English house, with the assistance of a housekeeper. The Governess comes to believe that the house is haunted by two former servants, Peter Quint, a valet, and Miss Jessel, the previous governess, both of whom died in mysterious circumstances. The ghosts may be preying upon the innocent children, Miles and Flora. [Read more…]

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