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Archives for October 2013

Review: Apollo’s Fire — “Virtuoso Orchestra” at Fairmount Presbyterian Church, Cleveland Heights (October 12)

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by Nicholas Jones

AF-Virtuoso-OrchestraAs Apollo’s Fire heads out on a real tour across North American, last weekend’s set of concerts gave us a virtual tour of some of the top orchestras across Europe—all without leaving our seats. Talk about not leaving a carbon footprint!

As simply and quickly as on Google Earth, listeners swooped from one musical capital to another — from Hamburg on the North Sea, south to Venice on the Adriatic, and across what we now used to call East Germany, from Cöthen and Leipzig to Dresden.

Each of the sojourns featured one of the composers who lived and worked in that town – Telemann in Hamburg, Vivaldi in Venice, and Bach in Leipzig and Cöthen. Dresden—one of the grandest of the orchestras and the pride of the Elector of Saxony—was represented by the little known Johann David Heinichen.

The theme, “virtuoso orchestra,” led music director Jeannette Sorrell to feature concertos in which Apollo’s Fire’s soloists could step forward and dazzle us as their counterparts 300 years ago must have done. [Read more…]

Review: Suburban Symphony with Angelin Chang, piano (October 13)

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by Robert Rollin

CHANG-AngelinLast Sunday afternoon the Suburban Symphony presented an interesting “All Russian Program” at the University School Shaker Campus’s Conway Hall, an acoustically effective six hundred seat auditorium. The highlight was an excellent performance of the rarely heard Shostakovich Concerto for Piano, Trumpet, and String Orchestra, Opus 35 with Angelin Chang as piano soloist. Chang chairs the Keyboard Department at Cleveland State University. The unusual instrumentation made for a transparent orchestral texture that combined well with Chang’s wonderful musical exuberance and skill.

Shostakovich wrote this humorous and witty piece at age twenty-seven, premiering the piano part himself, accompanied by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra. The Concerto precipitated the composer’s first difficulties with Stalin that were to trouble him for many years, though the piece’s tongue-in-cheek character, similar to that of his Tahiti Trot, composed four years earlier, makes Stalin’s distaste all the more incomprehensible.

Chang’s alert and intense performance of the opening Allegretto fairly sparkled and seemed to sweep up the orchestra in her wake. [Read more…]

Preview: Opera Circle to present Le Villi, Puccini’s first opera, on October 18 & 20

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by Mike Telin

SOBIESKA-DorotaGiacomo Puccini’s first staged work, Le Villi (The Wills or The Fairies), with libretto by Ferdinando Fontana, received its premiere in Milan on May 31, 1884 in its original one-act version. The opera is based on Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr’s short story, Les Willis, which in turn was based on the central European legend of the vila. On Friday, October 18 at 7:30 pm in Tucker Hall at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and Sunday, October 20 at 4 pm in the Polish-American Cultural Center, Opera Circle will present Le Villi. This weekend’s performances will be Opera Circle’s first production of any Puccini opera.

“I have a great respect for Puccini. I think he was a genius,” says Opera Circle executive director and co-founder Dorota Sobieska (left). “But it is easy to take that genius on a superficial level and create a production that is very nostalgic. While that is acceptable, I think there is much more to him. To approach Puccini seriously you need a more in-depth look into the resources that are available in order to get a bigger perspective on him and his times.”

Sobieska, who holds a doctoral degree in English from Kent State University (with an interdisciplinary dissertation on British Romantic poetry, music, and philosophy of art) says that Romanticism has always spoken to her. She sees the opera as an extended Lied. “It is written in what I [describe] as the greater romantic lyric that dominates the romantic era. I think of Puccini as a lyrical composer, but this opera is not only lyrical in terms of the musical line, but it’s lyrical as a story. It reminds me of the greater romantic lyric pieces like Schubert’s Der Erlkönig.” [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Orchestra in Britten Serenade with Matthew Polenzani and Richard King under Marek Janowski (October 10)

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by Daniel Hathaway

BRITTEN-BenjaminIt would be Benjamin Britten’s hundredth birthday this year, and The Cleveland Orchestra is programming three of the British composer’s works as a centenary tribute. This weekend’s concerts featured one of his most characteristic works. Written in 1943 for the phenomenal hornist Dennis Brain and Britten’s life partner and tenor of choice, Peter Pears, the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings sets splendid nocturnal poetry to music so well-tailored to its texts that it’s difficult to read the verse now without hearing Britten’s music running through your head.

Britten almost invariably wrote for specific performers with their special musical gifts in mind. In many cases, their interpretations have become proprietary — perhaps one of the reasons other musicians have been reticent about taking them on. But Dennis Brain ran his car into a tree returning from the Edinburgh Festival in 1957, and ten years after Britten’s own demise, Peter Pears died at the Red House in Aldeburgh in 1986. That left the Serenade field wide open — at least for virtuoso horn players with embouchures of steel and high tenors with exquisite literary sensibilities. [Read more…]

Review: Greater Cleveland Flute Society — Robert Dick at The Music Settlement (October 6)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Dick-RobertNew York-based composer and virtuoso flutist Robert Dick was a busy man last weekend. He joined his former student Mary Kay Fink and high school classmate Joel Smirnoff to serenade the Women’s Committee of the Cleveland Institute of Music, gave a master class for composers and a public forum at CIM and finished up at The Music Settlement on Sunday with a one-hour recital and master classes featuring flute students from Baldwin Wallace, Oberlin and the University of Akron — a full afternoon of activities sponsored by The Greater Cleveland Flute Society.

Dick has established a reputation both for his expert playing of flute classics and contemporary music using extended techniques, and for his original compositions, which often spring from popular music. He began his solo recital with six of his own works, quipping that “when you premiere a new piece, you usually get to hear it twice: for the first and the last time.”

Not true in the case of Dick’s 1989 piece, Lookout, commissioned for a national high school flute competition, or for Fish are Jumping (1999) or for the four excerpts he played from Flying Lessons, a two-volume set of contemporary concert etudes, all of which have taken their place in the pedagogical or concert repertoire. [Read more…]

Preview: Cleveland Chamber Music Society — fifteen minutes with soprano Susanna Phillips

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by Daniel Hathaway

PHILLIPS-SusannaTwo of the singers who joined James Levine in his triumphant return to the Metropolitan Opera for Mozart’s Così fan tutte on September 24 will find themselves in Cleveland on different missions during the next week. Tenor Matthew Polenzani will appear with The Cleveland Orchestra in performances of Britten’s Serenade, and soprano Susanna Phillips will bring two of her favorite chamber music collaborators to town for the opening concert of the Cleveland Chamber Music Society’s 64th season on Tuesday, October 15 at Plymouth Church.

New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini wrote that Phillips “had what could be a breakthrough night at the Met as Fiordiligi…She has the purity and bloom of a Mozart lyric soprano. Yet her voice can lift phrases with penetrating sound and deep richness.” Asked in a telephone conversation about that night, Susanna Phillips told us that Levine’s return was “an incredible experience — he’s an incredible guy. It was a night I won’t soon forget. It was great to see him back so full of joy and focus. Everybody was thrilled.”

Though Phillips is an international opera star, her feet are planted firmly on the ground, and she maintains a close relationship with Huntsville, the Alabama town where she grew up. When she made her Metropolitan Opera debut in La bohème in 2008, four hundred and fifty local fans flew up to New York to hear her sing. “It’s very rewarding to have the community rally behind you — and they keep showing up and sending me emails and notes,” she said. [Read more…]

Review: CMA “Masters of the Violin” features L. Subramaniam on October 4

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by Alexandra A. Vago

SubramaniamsThe “Masters of the Violin” series opened on Friday, October 4 in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art with a sublime performance of South Indian (Carnatic) classical music. Violinist L. Subramaniam joined by his son Ambi Subramaniam (violin) and Mahesh Krishnamurthy (mridangam) set the bar high in the first of ten concert in the series.

The evening was filled with virtuosic playing and command of the instrument. Subramaniam has an uncanny ability to improvise with complex and intricate patterns infused with an intensely rich color palette of sound. It is no wonder why he is often referred to as “the Paganini of Indian Classical music.”

To set the mood, upon entering the auditorium, the audience was visually drawn into Indian culture with a slideshow featuring highlights from the Museum’s permanent collection of Indian and Southeast Asian Art that will open in December 2013. [Read more…]

Preview: Akron Symphony to celebrate fortieth anniversary of E.J. Thomas Performing Arts Hall on October 12

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by Mike Telin

EJ-Thomas-exteriorWhen the Edwin J. Thomas Performing Arts Hall opened at the University of Akron in October 1973, the multi-use space received rave reviews from critics. The 2,955 seat auditorium also became home to the Akron Symphony. On Saturday, October 12 beginning at 8:00 pm, Music Director Christopher Wilkins will lead the ASO in a concert that celebrates the Hall’s 40th anniversary. The program features Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture conducted by Guy Victor Bordo, Nikola Resanovic’s Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra (Collateral Damage) with Kristina Belisle Jones as soloist, and Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben.

As is the case with many of the world’s concert halls, E.J. Thomas has presented acoustical challenges for the symphony. But as Wilkins points out, “the positives of E.J. Thomas are easy to enumerate. It’s a very comfortable space for the audience and I think it’s an interesting piece of architecture. Also the physical location is ideal because it’s right on the line between the University campus and downtown and as the campus has moved toward downtown that whole area is so active.”

Wilkins says he chose Ein Heldenleben not so much because it was autobiographical for Strauss but rather it was a musical story of an artist’s life. [Read more…]

Preview: Stile Antico to sing English Renaissance music at St. John’s Cathedral on October 11

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by Daniel Hathaway

Stile-AnticoThe twelve-member British vocal ensemble Stile Antico will return for its second visit to the Helen D. Schubert Concert Series at St. John’s Cathedral in downtown Cleveland on Friday evening, October 11 at 7:30. The program this time, entitled “Phoenix Rising,” is devoted to church music of the English Renaissance, including William Byrd’s, Mass for Five Voices & Ave verum corpus, Thomas Tallis’s Salvator mundi & In ieiunio et fletu, Thomas Morley’s Nolo mortem peccatoris, Orlando Gibbons’s O clap your hands together & Almighty and everlasting God, Robert White’s Portio mea & Christe qui lux es, Thomas Weelkes’s, Gloria in excelsis Deo & John Taverner’s O splendor gloriae. The concert is free.

Most of Stile Antico’s singers — Helen Ashby, Kate Ashby, Rebecca Hickey, Emma Ashby, Eleanor Harries, Katie Schofield, Jim Clements, Andrew Griffiths, Benedict Hymas, Will Dawes, Tom Flint & Matthew O’Donovan — grew up in the choral tradition of the Anglican Church and many still sing professionally in cathedrals and parish churches. The ensemble operates without a conductor or artistic director, making Stile Antico unique among vocal ensembles of its size. The group also boasts three sisters among its members, two of them twins. [Read more…]

Preview: Chagrin Valley Chamber Music — Andrew Sords and Eriko Izumida in “Virtuoso’s Showcase”

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by Mike Telin

Sords-IzumidaViolinist Andrew Sords has been described by global critics as “utterly radiant” and “exceptionally heartfelt and soulful.” Having appeared as soloist with over 100 orchestras and performed on notable recital series across four continents. Sords is recognized for performances of the standard violin concerti of the 18th and 19th centuries. In 2012, Sords was the sole recipient of the Pittsburgh Concert Society Career Grant.

On Sunday, October 13 beginning at 3:00 pm in Valley Lutheran Church in Chagrin Falls, the Chagrin Valley Chamber Music Concert Series presents Andrew Sords and pianist Eriko Izumida in “Virtuoso’s Showcase.” The program includes sonatas by Mozart and Elgar, Hubay’s Carmen Fantasy, Piazzolla’s Grand Tango and Bartók’s Romanian Dances.

Andrew Sords looks forward to Sunday’s recital and the opportunity to reunite with his long time collaborator Eriko Izumida. “We’ve known each other since I was 14,” he said, adding that they first met because he needed a pianist to play a Beethoven sonata with him in high school. “She did a number of competitions with me and I continue to enjoy working with her. We have performed the Mozart we’re doing on Sunday around thirty times together.” [Read more…]

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