by Daniel Hathaway
“We have a penchant for the dramatic,” Burning River Baroque artistic director and violinist Peter Lekx said in a recent Skype conference call. “This program found itself when we discovered Nicola Porpora’s cantata, Destatevi, destatevi o pastore. It just screamed Burning River Baroque.”
“It’s about a broken-hearted shepherd who falls hopelessly in love with a nymph,” added Burning River Baroque soprano and executive director Malina Rauschenfels. “He takes himself way too seriously and writes his own epitaph on a tree.”
According to Lekx and Rauschenfels, who collaborate to plan BRB’s programs and finish each other’s sentences when they talk about that process, the rest of the program of Italian baroque cantatas and instrumental sonatas that the ensemble will perform three times this weekend began to fall neatly into place. “Giovanni Bononcini’s Alle sue pene intorno and Domenico Scarlatti’s No, non fuggire o Nice spoke to uswith their energy, and in the second case, with its Spanish flair. A very dramatic Porpora cello sonata and violin sonatas by Veracini and Scarlatti fill out the program.” [Read more…]
On Friday night, May 23, a quartet of Cleveland Orchestra musicians — Isabel Trautwein and Katherine Bormann, violins, Sonja Braaten Molloy, viola, and Tanya Ell, cello — performed at Mahall’s, a combination restaurant, bar, and vintage bowling alley with a friendly, Brooklyn-esque atmosphere.
After a week of intense master classes, a lecture, and a pair of recitals by soprano Joan Rodgers with pianist Roger Vignoles, and baritone Andrew Garland with pianist Warren Jones, the ten singer-pianist teams for whom the twenty-second Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival was designed got the opportunity to show off their vocal and pianistic wares — and presumably some newly-acquired skills — in a free recital in Gamble Auditorium on Saturday evening, May 24.
“When Dvořák came to the United States, he changed as a person and a composer, but I believe he also had a profound impact on the American music scene,” Broadway School of Music board member and Cleveland Orchestra cellist Bryan Dumm said, during a recent telephone conversation. “He was very comfortable mixing together as many stylistic elements as possible because of his experience in America.”
Italian Guitarists Matteo Mela and Lorenzo Micheli formed SoloDuo ten years ago. Their performances have received world-wide acclaim from New York’s Carnegie Hall to Seoul’s Sejong Chamber Hall, from Kiev’s Hall of Columns to Vienna’s Konzerthaus.
As the joke goes: A young musician stops a man on a New York sidewalk and asks: How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, the man replies. On Friday, May 30 beginning at 6:45 pm in Studio 113 at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Brad DeRoche will give a lecture titled “Acquisition of Expertise on the Classical Guitar: The Effects of Mindset, Willpower, Goals, and Practice in the Quest for Mastery.” Free and open to the public, the lecture is presented by the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival.
On Sunday, June 1st at 7:30 pm, Jason Vieaux, guitar, and Julien Labro, bandoneón, will close out the 2014 Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival with a dynamic recital at Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Hall.
The Cleveland Orchestra performed a concert at Lakewood Civic Auditorium last Saturday evening, May 24, the last of fifteen free public events in its 2014 neighborhood residency, “At Home in Lakewood.” The featured soloist was the orchestra’s principal trombone, Massimo La Rosa, and music director Franz Welser-Möst conducted. The event was broadcast live on WCLV 104.9 FM, streamed through the orchestra’s own website, and recorded by IdeaStream WVIZ/PBS for telecast on Friday, May 30 at 9:00 pm. Excitement ran high as the 2,000 seat Civic Auditorium filled to capacity well before curtain time.
American baritone Andrew Garland presented a recital dubbed “The Quest — Don Quixote and Other Wanderers, ” as the second faculty performance of the 22nd Art Song Festival in Gamble Auditorium at Baldwin Wallace University on Thursday evening, May 22.
For the past 22 years George Vassos, retired chair of the voice department at the Cleveland Institute of Music, has labored mightily to ensure the preservation of that rarified musical event, the art song recital. In 1985 Vassos established an annual Art Song Festival at CIM; since 2004 it has been resident at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea and is now biennial, with occasional special events in the off-years.