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Archives for October 2013

Preview: BW Focus Festival to feature the music of Christopher Theofanidis

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by Daniel Hathaway

Theofanidis---ChristopherBaldwin Wallace University is in the middle of a busy week celebrating and performing the music of one of our century’s most popular composers. Christopher Theofanidis, whose best-known work, Rainbow Body, has been performed by more than a hundred symphony orchestras, is the subject of the University’s most recent “Focus Festival,” an immersive experience recently revived by its new composition professor Clint Needham, himself a BW graduate.

“It’s the first thing we talked about after I arrived,” Needham said in a phone conversation. “We hope to do a Focus Festival every two years.” How did BW arrive at its choice of composer this time? “Chris immediately came to mind. I’ve known his music for a long time and he mentored me with an Orpheus Chamber Music Commission. We wanted someone who could communicate and make new music engaging and interesting for undergraduates. Chris has taught at Juilliard, Peabody and Yale. It was almost a no-brainer.”

Theofanidis will find BW to be a hotbed of young composers. “I have twenty-one composition students!” Needham exclaimed. “We auditioned last year and I thought that half of the people we invited would accept, but they all came. That’s a good problem to have!” [Read more…]

Preview: CMA Performing Arts Series — Jordi Savall and Hesperion XXI in “Honey and Blood”

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by Daniel Hathaway

SAVALL-RebecFor the third November in a row, Jordi Savall will visit the Cleveland Museum of Art to play on the museum’s Performing Arts Series. In 2011, Savall appeared with his son, Ferran, in a program called “Music Dialogues from Orient and Occident,” when Jordi played lira da gamba and seven-string bass viol and Ferran played theorbo and sang. In 2012, Jordi Savall brought his ensemble, Hespèrion XXI, to Cleveland to chronicle two centuries of European Renaissance and early Baroque consort music — an occasion on which he played the treble viol.

This year, Savall and Hespèrion XXI will return to Gartner Auditorium on Friday evening, November 1, when the resourceful Catalan musician will play vielle and rebec as part of the Museum’s “Masters of the Violin” series-within-a-series in a program entitled “Honey and Blood: The Cycles of Life in the Mosaic of Christians, Sephardic Jews & Muslims of the Balkans.” The ensemble includes five singers and half a dozen other instrumentalists playing exotic regional instruments. We reached Jordi Savall via Skype in his studio near Barcelona to ask how this program came about. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Orchestra “Fate and Freedom” Festival — Beethoven 4 and Shostakovich 8 (October 25)

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by Guytano Parks

BeethovenShostakovichOn Friday, October 25 The Cleveland Orchestra, conducted by music director Franz Welser-Möst, presented the second of three concerts of Beethoven and Shostakovich Symphonies as part of a week-long “Fate and Freedom Festival” — an exploration of the highly tempestuous and deeply emotional intermingling of music and politics.

Included in the Festival were films screened at The Cleveland Institute of Art (A Clockwork Orange) and The Cleveland Museum of Art (The New Babylon, featuring Shostakovich’s first film score), in addition to pre-film and pre-concert talks and a chamber music performance by members of The Cleveland Orchestra. On Saturday afternoon as a related event, the Metropolitan Opera’s production of The Nose by Shostakovich was shown LIVE in HD in select Northeast Ohio movie theaters.

Described by Robert Schumann as a “slender Greek maiden” compared to the Third and Fifth symphonies, Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony in B-flat is considerably less forceful and dramatic. [Read more…]

Preview: Oberlin Artist Recital Series — conversations with Yolanda Kondonassis and Ellie Dehn about “Ravel: Intimate Masterpieces”

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by Mike Telin

KONDONASSIS-Yolanda“I don’t know what it is about Ravel’s music that resonates with me so much,” says harpist Yolanda Kondonassis. “But it’s like that hopeful melancholy, yet it’s so full of energy at the same time.” On Tuesday, November 5 at 8:00 pm in Finney Chapel, the Oberlin Artist Recital Series begins its 2013-14 season with Ravel: Intimate Masterpieces, featuring some of the composer’s most sublime works: Introduction et Allegro, Cinq Mélodies Populaires Grecques, Chansons madécasses and the String Quartet in F. In addition to Kondonassis, performers include Ellie Dehn, soprano, Richard Hawkins, clarinet, Spencer Myer, piano, Alexa Still, flute and the Jupiter String Quartet.

The concert, inspired by a recent recording by the performers, all of whom have an Oberlin connection, was a project that was a long time in the making largely due to logistics, Kondonassis told us by telephone.

“But I never shy away from a complicated project. I play the harp, so complication is my specialty.” She also says that this particular group of pieces is music that never gets old. “I don’t know if this combination of works has ever been recorded on one album. But I think Ravel achieves such a particular atmosphere of music in his more intimate combinations.” [Read more…]

Review: 34th Annual Bowling Green New Music Festival (October 16-19)

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by Larry and Arlene Dunn

BGSU George LewisWith the abundance of opportunities to hear new music in northeast Ohio, Cleveland classical music cognoscenti might not think of the musical riches that sit two hours west on the turnpike at Bowling Green State University.

The 34th annual Bowling Green New Music Festival, October 16-19, 2013, showcased the school as an international powerhouse in the field of contemporary music. Prior festivals have presented a hall-of-fame of new music artists, including composers John Cage, Philip Glass, Pauline Oliveros, and George Crumb and ensembles such as the Jack Quartet, Philip Glass Ensemble, and International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE).

George E. Lewis, Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, (pictured above) was this year’s featured guest composer and Chicago-based Ensemble Dal Niente served as featured performers. German was the dominant international flavor, thanks to partial support of Dal Niente’s participation by the Goethe-Institute Chicago. [Read more…]

Preview: Brett Mitchell takes up the reins of Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra

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by Mike Telin

MITCHELL-BrettThe 2013-14 season marks Brett Mitchell’s first year as assistant conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra. And on Sunday, November 3 at 3:00 pm, Mitchell will make his Severance Hall debut as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra (COYO) in a concert featuring the music of Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Kilar and Mussorgsky.

In addition to his position in Cleveland, Brett Mitchell is currently in his fourth season as music director of Michigan’s Saginaw Bay Symphony Orchestra. Prior to Cleveland, Mitchell served as assistant conductor of the Houston Symphony from 2007 to 2011.

Additionally, he has led an impressive list of orchestras including the London Philharmonic and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, as well as the orchestras of Baltimore, Memphis, Oregon, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Rochester, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, Washington D.C.’s National Symphony Orchestra, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the Northwest Mahler Festival Orchestra.

Mitchell says that working with young people has always been part of his career and a part that he enjoys enormously. “I love working with kids,” the Seattle native says enthusiastically during our relaxed conversation in his Severance Hall office. “They’re so eager and have such great energy, and are so open and so giving.” He adds that, technically speaking, his first music directorship was with the North Sound Youth Symphony in Bellingham, Washington. “I was halfway through my senior year of undergraduate school when they asked me to fill in for the remainder of that season.” [Read more…]

Preview: Beethoven’s Mass in C at Severance Hall — a conversation with Cleveland Orchestra Choruses director Robert Porco

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by Mike Telin

PORCO-Robert“Beethoven’s Mass in C is a wonderful piece and under-performed in my opinion — at least in this country,” Cleveland Orchestra Director of Choruses Robert Porco told us by telephone. “And I don’t know exactly why that is. People like to do the Missa Solemnis, which is an entirely different kind of piece and was written some fifteen years later.”

On Thursday, October 31 and Saturday, November 2 in Severance Hall, Franz Welser-Möst leads The Cleveland Orchestra and Cleveland Orchestra Chorus in performances of Beethoven’s Mass in C and Messiaen’s Trois petites liturgies de la Présence Divine. Also included on the program is Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue.

The Mass in C was commissioned by Prince Nikolaus Esterházy II. “He was the same person for whom Haydn wrote his wonderful masses. I only mention this because the late Haydn masses are not performed that often either.”

According to history, Esterházy did not like the work — which caused Beethoven to leave abruptly. “Esterházy wrote letters about how much the piece embarrassed him. People have asked me why he thought that and I can’t really answer that either except that he was very accustomed to hearing what Haydn had written.” In his The Life of Beethoven, (1998) musicologist David Wyn Jones recounts, “Nikolaus later wrote to Countess Henriette Zielinska, ‘Beethoven’s music is unbearably ridiculous and detestable; I am not convinced it can ever be performed properly. I am angry and ashamed.'” [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Orchestra Fate and Freedom Festival — Beethoven 5 and Shostakovich 10 (October 26)

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by Timothy Robson

BeethovenShostakovichSeverance Hall was sold out for Saturday evening for the third and final concert in The Cleveland Orchestra’s mini-series, Fate and Freedom: Music of Beethoven and Shostakovich. Music director Franz Welser-Möst conducted riveting performances of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67, and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93. The orchestra and it soloists sounded in particularly top form from beginning to end.

The program book featured specially written essays by Welser-Möst and composer/journalist Frank J. Oteri on the relationship of Beethoven’s and Shostakovich’s music to politics. For Beethoven, especially composing the third, fourth and fifth symphonies following the French revolution and under the philosophy of the Enlightenment; and for Shostokovich, enduring the Stalinist period of World War II and the grim Soviet era 1950s following Stalin’s death.

Beethoven’s was a period of social upheaval and political protest; Shostakovich lived in an era of political repression, where a statement against the regime likely would have dire consequences. Both composers expressed their political views through their music: Beethoven the concept of the freedom of all humankind; Shostokovich the idea of political protest hidden in secret messages within his music. The appreciation of these two great symphonies is not dependent on awareness of their context—even when performed together; however, the written commentary did enhance the experience. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Orchestra “Fate and Freedom” Festival — Beethoven 3 and Shostakovich 6 (October 24)

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by Daniel Hathaway

BeethovenShostakovichFranz Welser-Möst returned to the Severance Hall stage on Thursday evening to lead The Cleveland Orchestra in the first of three concerts on consecutive evenings that paired symphonies by Beethoven and Shostakovich under the banner of the orchestra’s “Fate and Freedom Festival.”

In a pre-concert chat in Reinberger Chamber Music Hall with director of artistic planning Mark Williams, Welser-Möst noted that he had been looking for a new way to program a Vienna Musikverein Beethoven cycle and credited the Takács Quartet with the idea of pairing Beethoven and Shostakovich on the same program. (The orchestra will repeat this three-concert cycle in the Austrian capital from November 20-22.)

Whether you care to go deeply into the philosophical and political similarities and contrasts between the two composers, as Welser-Möst did in his program book essay, or simply enjoy hearing a pair of their symphonies in close succession, there was a lot to stimulate the mind and the ear last weekend. Thursday evening’s short performance coupled Beethoven’s third symphony with Shostakovich’s sixth — each written during the composers’ thirty-third year. [Read more…]

Review: Akron Symphony in Finnish & Russian music with Cynthia Warren & Martina Filjak (October 26)

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by Daniel Hathaway

FILJAK-Martina-GreenThough the Finns and the Russians have often had a complicated relationship in recent times, their musical icons — Sibelius and Tchaikovsky — made agreeable partners on Saturday evening’s Akron Symphony program in E.J. Thomas Hall when Christopher Wilkins led Sibelius’s Finlandia, The Swan of Tuonela and Symphony No. 7 and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Two extraordinary soloists, the ASO’s English hornist Cynthia Warren and Croatian pianist Martina Filjak (left), were out in front for the occasion.

The first half of the program belonged to Jan Sibelius, beginning with a robust performance of his patriotic tone poem, Finlandia, composed for an 1899 tableau, Suomi, that advocated the overthrow of Russian rule. As in the previous ASO concert, winds and brass were elevated on risers, which gave those sections more prominence. But with a smaller orchestra this time, sections didn’t blend with each other quite as well. Percussion and brass stood out, sometimes engulfing the strings.

Sibelius set to music four legends of Lemminkainen from the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. In the composer’s words, “Tuonela, the land of death, the hell of Finnish mythology, is surrounded by a broad river with black waters and rapid currents, on which the Swan of Tuonela floats majestically, singing.” There’s more to the legend, but The Swan of Tuonela contents itself with painting the scene of the river and the swan in a gorgeously mournful melody for English horn and orchestra. [Read more…]

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