by Mike Telin
On Friday, April 11 in SPACES, the contemporary music ensemble No Exit begins their spring concert series, three extraordinary evenings of music. In addition to SPACES, concerts will take place at Heights Arts on Saturday, April 12, and in Cleveland State University’s Drinko Hall on Monday, April 14. All performances begin at 8:00 PM. Performances include two world premieres performed by Cara Tweed, violin, James Rhodes, viola, Nicholas Diodore, cello, Sean Gabriel, flute, Nicholas Underhill, piano, and Luke Rinderknecht, percussion.
Artistic director Timothy Beyer said, “Music is perhaps inherently the most abstract medium amongst the arts. And yet, it has the ability to evoke and convey a very real visual world. There is this remarkable synergy between organized sound and what our minds do with it. It’s profound, really. A composer such as Morton Feldman has been able to sonically represent what a painter like Mark Rothko accomplished visually. So in this respect, there is, or at least can be, a very iconographical element to certain music. This is the very thing that the ensemble will be focusing on in this series of concerts.” [Read more…]
MOCA Cleveland will launch the first edition of a new music competition on Thursday, April 10 beginning at 8:00 pm, when student composers from Cleveland State University and Baldwin Wallace Conservatory of Music compete for the title of “Avant-Garde Idol.” The contestants are Zach Albrecht, (BW), Joshua Fadenholz, (CSU), Nathaniel Frank, (BW), Sean Hussey, (BW), Jacob Kingzett, (CSU), James Kunselman, (BW), Aubrie Powell, (BW), Buck McDaniel, (CSU) & Neal Todten, (CSU).
Since making her debut at age eleven as a surprise guest soloist with the New York Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta in 1982, violinist Midori has become recognized as a master musician and a devoted and gifted educator. In addition to her many achievements as a performer, Midori is an active music educator for underserved communities. She runs several successful programs that have reached hundreds of thousands of children since the early 1990s, especially at New York public schools.
Since winning the Paolo Borciani competition in Italy in Spring 2005, the Pavel Haas Quartet has established itself as one of the great chamber ensembles of today. On Tuesday, April 8 beginning at 7:30 pm in Plymouth Church, the quartet returns to Cleveland for a performance for the Cleveland Chamber Music Society. The program includes Leos Janáček’s Quartet No. 1 “Kreutzer Sonata”, Benjamin Britten’s Quartet No. 2 in C, op. 36 & Beethoven’s Quartet in e, op. 59, no. 2. At 6:30 pm a pre-concert lecture will be given by Costa Petridis. You can read Daniel Hathaway’s discussion with Petridis 
Pre-concert lectures are fixtures of many concert series, offering talks by well-known musicians or musical scholars to put audiences closer in touch with the music they’re about to hear.
The debut edition of NEOSonicFest will conclude much the way it began, with a concert that pays homage to Cleveland Chamber Symphony (CCS) founder Ed London. On Sunday, April 6 beginning at 7:30 pm in Baldwin Wallace University’s Gamble Auditorium, Steve Smith will lead CCS in a concert featuring Howie Smith’s Epilogue and Charles Ives Tone Roads No. 1.
On Monday evening March 31, the audience at Trinity Methodist Church in downtown Youngstown witnessed the first modern performance of Carl Philip Emanuel Bach’s Passion According to St. Luke. The piece is actually attributed to Gottfried August Homilius, a student of Johann Sebastian Bach. 
The latest Saturday night snow massacre did little to keep patrons away from music director laureate Christoph von Dohnányi’s return to Severance Hall on March 29 and his looked-strange-on-paper program of two Schumann symphonies with The Cleveland Orchestra. As it turned out, the pairing of the two symphonies was an insightful idea and Dohnányi drew playing of both sweeping grandeur and arresting detail from the ensemble he led with such distinction from 1984-2002.
[Note: on Friday, April 4, Ms. Graham’s management announced the cancellation of her Oberlin concert and masterclass due to illness. The performance will not be rescheduled.]