by Daniel Hautzinger
Chamber music is an intimate experience, for musicians and audience alike (you can only fit so many people into a “chamber”). And what’s more intimate than a living room as a practice space? According to ChamberFest Speaker Patrick Castillo, “the primary rehearsal space for ChamberFest Cleveland is Frank Cohen’s living room, which already creates this sense of homey-ness. It’s a very warm experience for all the artists involved and myself, and hopefully for the audience as well.”
ChamberFest, launched in 2012 by Cleveland Orchestra principal clarinet Cohen and his daughter, Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra concertmaster Diana Cohen, is a series of ten chamber music recitals in diverse venues across Cleveland. It begins on June 19 in the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Hall and continues through June 29 (see our concert listings page or the ChamberFest website for concert details). The Cohens serve as Artistic Directors of ChamberFest.
“Don’t B-sharp, Don’t B-flat, Just B-natural.” — Milt Hinton (1910-2000)
If Igor Stravinsky were alive today, he would probably get along quite well with the kind of people who live in Brooklyn, sport wispy facial hair, don ugly-patterned sweaters, and qualify their interests and appearance as “ironic.” For irony seemed to be intrinsic to Stravinsky, especially once he entered middle age and began co-opting other styles of music, from Baroque to jazz. Parody is particularly evident in his solo piano works, recently recorded by Jenny Lin for the Steinway & Sons label.
Nineteen-year old violinist Chad Hoopes is certainly not the first young violinist to play the Mendelssohn concerto. (Hoopes himself first performed it with a professional orchestra when he was nine). As Donald Rosenberg notes in his well-researched liner notes for Hoopes’s new recording of the concerto, it was written for Ferdinand David, who began his career as a prodigy, and it was later taken up by the great 19
Erich Wolfgang Korngold isn’t exactly a household name, but you’ve probably heard music by him or imitating him. Korngold, an Austrian composer active in the first half of the twentieth century, is best known in the US for his scores of such Hollywood films as The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Prince and the Pauper in the ‘30s and ‘40s. As the distinguished music journalist Donald Rosenberg said in a phone interview, “He really changed the whole trajectory of film scores by writing very lushly for the orchestra, using it almost as a character in the drama, and by writing scores that were essentially operatic, with themes for different characters.”
On her debut solo album, Obsession (Blue Point Studios Label), young classical guitarist Krystin O’Mara firmly establishes herself as “someone to watch.” Her performances of works by Regino Sainz de la Maza, Ian Krouse, Viet Cuong, Fernando Sor and Augustin Barrios Mangore are truly impressive.
Of all instrumentalists, pianists seem to commission and perform new works the least often. The repertoire for the piano is already so vast and worthy that many performers see no need to add to it. Why even play pieces from the past half-century, when there is so much great, neglected, earlier music?
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