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Archives for August 2013

Report: Cleveland International Piano Competition Conversation — The Art of Performing Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas (August 6)

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by Guytano Parks

TakacsHans von Bülow called them “The New Testament” of music (Bach’s The Well Tempered Clavier being The Old Testament) and was the first to perform all thirty-two in a single concert cycle from memory. Camille Saint-Saëns offered to play any one of the thirty-two from memory as an encore in his public recital debut at the age of ten. Artur Schnabel was the first since von Bülow to play them all from memory in a single concert cycle and was the first to make a complete recording of the monumental collection in 1927. Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas have served as a barometer of musical and scholarly achievement in the piano world since their creation between 1795 and 1822, and continue to fascinate and captivate both musical intellectuals and dilettantes.

Tuesday morning’s Competition Conversation, the fourth CIPC “Festival Event” held in the Recital Hall at The Cleveland Museum of Art was entitled “The Art of Performing Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas”. Featured speaker Peter Takács, Professor of Piano at Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, knows his subject intimately as he conquered the mountain as well, having recorded the entire cycle of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas on the CAMBRIA label. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland International Piano Competition — Round Two, Session Six (August 5)

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by Daniel Hathaway

CIPC-ButterflyThe final four contestants rolled around for a second hearing on Monday evening, beginning with a clever program devised and played by Cahill Smith, who followed a beautifully shaped reading of Scarlatti’s K. 466 sonata — in which he pointed up important harmonic details — with Sebastian Currier’s 1996 Scarlatti Cadences, a series of dreamy riffs on snippets of the composer’s works. The competition’s ‘first sighting of Chopin’s Winter Wind etude (op. 25/11) was well organized in Smith’s hands but perhaps not as wild as the composer had in mind. The left-hand themes rang out handsomely. In Brahms’s Vier Klavierstücke, op. 11, Smith created stylistically true performances on a Brahmsian scale that would in some cases have benefited from longer melodic lines. One tiny glitch and one more noticeable memory flub were minor blemishes on the surface of a satisfying set. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland International Piano Competition — Round Two, Session Five (August 5)

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by Daniel Hathaway

CIPC-ButterflyStanislav Khristenko displayed his gentle and expressive side at the opening of Monday afternoon’s session with elegant, characterful playing in Beethoven’s op. 2 sonata. Light, moody and colorful, the sonata was a delight — delicate in the scherzo, impetuous yet graceful in the rondo. His reading of Chopin’s “Torrent” etude (Op. 10/4) was nicely layered; he tossed its ending off with a dismissive musical nod. He ended his set with Montsalvatge’s witty Sonatina para Yvette from 1962, playing the opening toccata moodily, creating an eloquent “beauty and the beast” dialogue in the second movement, and stylishly molding its finale, another toccata, scampery this time, out of which twinkled the surprise of a well-known nursery rhyme (Mozart knew it by its French title). [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom with Bramwell Tovey & Mark Kosower (August 4)

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by Nicholas Jones

KosowerIt was no doubt the beautiful weather that drew many of the ample lawn crowd to Sunday evening’s Blossom concert with the Cleveland Orchestra and guest conductor Bramwell Tovey. The musical appeal, though, was surely the evening’s featured work, Gustav Holst’s justly famous suite The Planets.

Though there were no projected visuals to accompany this early “space music,” Cleveland’s NASA Glenn Research Station – many of whose employees were in attendance – installed a mock-up of the Mars rover and other astronomical displays near the entrance.

Holst’s suite, written over several years during and just after World War I, is actually less about the planets as NASA knows them than about their supposed astrological qualities. As in a baroque suite, each of the seven movements is a mood piece of its own. We encounter at each new turn a different affect – bellicose (Mars), delicate (Venus), officious (Mercury), expansive (Jupiter), exhausted (Saturn), bizarre (Uranus), and finally mystical (Neptune). [Read more…]

Preview: Cleveland Orchestra — a conversation with violin soloist Ray Chen

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by Mike Telin

CHEN-RayOn Sunday, August 11 beginning at 7:00 pm the sounds of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons will fill the Blossom Music Center grounds when violinist Ray Chen makes his debut with The Cleveland Orchestra. The concert under the direction of Jahja Ling also features Rossini’s Overture to The Thieving Magpie and Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3.

Born in Taiwan and raised in Australia, Ray Chen studied at the Curtis Institute of Music. Following wins at the Yehudi Menuhin (2008) and Queen Elisabeth (2009) competitions, Chen’s international career has been on a fast track forward. You can read about his accomplishments and numerous other interests on his website.

But let’s get directly to our conversation. We reached Ray Chen by telephone in Germany where he had just finished a recording session for his third, all-Mozart album with Christoph Eschenbach and the Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra. 

Mike Telin: Congratulations on your Cleveland Orchestra debut

Ray Chen: Thanks! I’m really excited. I went to the Encore School for Strings in 2006 and 2007 and I attended some concerts at Blossom. I remember hearing Christian Tetzlaff play the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and the second half was Scheherazade. That is a strong memory — sitting on the lawn — because as students we weren’t going to pay for pavilion seats. So I am really excited because there is more of a personal connection when you go back to the places you have been as a student. And to be able to be on the other side is fantastic. [Read more…]

Review: Hudson Chamber Players at Western Reserve Academy (August 4)

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by Robert Rollin

HCP-080413The intimate and atmospheric Western Reserve Academy Chapel (1836) provided a beautiful setting for the Hudson Chamber Players’ excellent Sunday August 4th afternoon concert. The group showed itself to be remarkably well prepared and accomplished. The afternoon’s highpoint was a beautifully nuanced performance of Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E flat major, Op. 44. The piece is one of the Schumann’s greatest chamber works, and indeed ranks very highly among all nineteenth-century chamber music. Pianist Elizabeth DeMio played the challenging solo part with power and sensitivity, and the string quartet balanced very effectively.

The quintet opened full force to an amazingly harmonically rich and brilliant tutti. The small hall resonated with the group’s fine sound. At the onset of the second theme, the cello and viola took the lead in a plaintively beautiful question and answer dialogue. The performance was worthy of this masterpiece. When the piano did not preside, it always had lovely passage work accompanying the strings. The wonderful late Romantic chromatic harmony, often borrowed from parallel keys, kept the music pulsating forcefully. [Read more…]

Review: Nightingale Opera Theatre: Werther at Solon Center for the Arts (August 2)

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by Robert Rollin

werther_banner_360Last Friday evening’s Nightingale Opera Theatre production of Jules Massenet’s opera, Werther, was a delight. Above all it was meticulously prepared. Music Director John Simmons’ piano rendition was so exceptionally flawless that the orchestra was not missed. His expression was constant, and his balance of contrapuntal sections with and without the singers was meticulous.

Equally important was that tempos, climaxes and other details were so well ingrained that the pace was swift and effective. All cast members and even the children’s chorus kept things moving and did not not let the plot’s overwhelming sadness overcome the dramatic flow. The Solon Center for the Arts has an intimate, but well-equipped, stage that helped make scene changes seamless. The fine acoustics made the English translation easily intelligible.

Massenet imbued the opera with a wonderful musical tapestry that Simmons and the cast took great pains to delineate. [Read more…]

Review: Karabits makes Cleveland Orchestra debut with Shaham in Tchaikovsky violin concerto (August 3)

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by Timothy Robson

Shaham,-Gil---by-Christian-SteinerThe rising young Ukrainian-born conductor Kirill Karabits made his Cleveland Orchestra debut on Saturday evening, August 3, at Blossom Music Center, in an all-Russian program. Gil Shaham was the soloist in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35. It was a beautiful summer’s eve, and there was a large audience enjoying the fresh air on the lawn, as well as in the Blossom pavilion.

Mr. Karabits opened the concert with an energetic reading of Glinka’s Overture to Ruslan and Ludmila. The momentum never lagged, even in the more lyrical moments of the five-minute curtain raiser, whose eponymous opera is almost never performed in the West. Mr. Karabits was a model of efficiency in his conducting, with minimalist baton movements, nods and flicks of his fingers to communicate his directions.

In an interview last week with ClevelandClassical’s Mike Telin, Gil Shaham expressed his enthusiasm for performing the Tchaikovsky concerto, one of the enduring favorites of the romantic violin repertoire. His enthusiasm was apparent in his performance at Blossom. His playing and stage presence showed his total involvement with the music. [Read more…]

Report: Cleveland International Piano Competition Conversation — Jury Roundtable (August 5)

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by Guytano Parks

Jury-Roundtable“Technical prowess is assumed and expected, but it is not enough by itself,” said HaeSun Paik of Korea, 2013 Cleveland International Piano Competition jury member, regarding competition success at Monday morning’s Jury Roundtable, the third “Festival Event” at The Cleveland Museum of Art. This sentiment was echoed unanimously by all the other jurors: Nelita True, USA; Frank Weinstock, USA; Daejin Kim, Korea; Elinar Steen-Nokleberg, Jury Chairman, Norway; Robert Plano, Italy; Andrzej Jasinski, Poland and Alexander Korsantia, Georgia.

CIPC Executive Director Pierre van der Westhuitzen moderated the discussion which touched on key issues such as what the jurors listen for during performances and how music competitions impact careers. The Roundtable also included refreshing humor as HaeSun Paik led off the provocative conversation with a candid recounting of some of her own experiences as both competitor and juror in several major piano competitions. “You need huge luck to win,” she said of one of the competitions in which she competed, adding, “with 200 competitors, the jury was surely bound to have difficulties remembering you, let alone staying awake!” [Read more…]

Eight advance to semifinals in the Cleveland International Piano Competition

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CIPC-ButterflyCleveland — August 5

The following eight contestants will play in the semifinal rounds on Tuesday and Wednesday:

Tuesday at 1:00 pm and 7:00 pm

Ruoyu Huang
Jin Uk Kim
•           •           •
Jiayan Sun
Arseny Tarasevich-Nikolaev

Wednesday at 1:00 pm and 7:00 pm

Annika Treutler
Oskar Jezior
•           •           •
Stanislav Khristenko
François Dumont

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