As part of its Close Encounters chamber music series, Heights Arts will offer master classes with Cleveland Orchestra cellist Tanya Ell on January 11 and with TCO’s associate concertmaster Amy Lee on April 19. Master classes are open to students in grades 6 through 12 and will be held in Heights Arts’ gallery at 2175 Lee Road on Sundays at 11 am.
Interested students may apply online. The deadline for Tanya Ell’s session is Monday, December 1 and applications for Lee’s class will be accepted through March 1. Master classes will be open to the public.
The new music ensemble No Exit will launch their 2014-15 concert season next week by shining a spotlight on the works of area composers, including the debut of two world premiere pieces. The performances will take place on Saturday, November 22 at 8:00 pm in Spaces Gallery and on Monday, November 24 at 8:00 pm in Cleveland State University’s Drinko Auditorium.
On Tuesday, November 25, Lorain County Community College’s Signature Series will continue with a performance by duo parnas, Madalyn Parnas, violin, and Cicely Parnas, cello. The free concert, which begins at 7:30 pm in the Studio Theatre at the Stocker Center for the Arts, includes music by Haydn, Tcherepnin, Moravec, and Handel-Halvorsen.
Chamber groups and marriages alike have their moments of unity and discord. The Cavatina Duo was the perfect case study Saturday night at Plymouth Church. Making their Cleveland debut with the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society, the married couple duo of guitarist Denis Azabagić and flutist Eugenia Moliner together made sweet, sweet music — and also aired some of their dirty laundry in extensive onstage talking. 
As much fun as it is to listen to the parade of pianists who show off their prowess during the grueling rounds of the Cleveland International Piano Competition, what’s truly rewarding is to hear performances by former laureates who have followed up on their early promise by building impressive international careers. Angela Hewitt, who took third place in the 1979 contest (then the Casadesus Competition) returned to Cleveland on Saturday evening to play on CIPC’s excellent concert series in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art. 
The San Francisco Symphony played to a packed house in Severance Hall Saturday, showcasing their adventurous programming and daring emotionalism. At the cusp of turning 70 (who could believe it!), longtime San Francisco music director Michael Tilson Thomas (known as MTT in the Bay Area) gleefully presided over a pre-Thanksgiving feast of sound. 
Last Friday evening Opera Western Reserve mounted its eleventh annual production, a solid version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. As always, by limiting the event to one performance, the organization ensured a full house. Don Giovanni combines the comic, tragic, and supernatural in a magnificent musical pastiche. The opera is not as theatrically balanced as The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute, and Act II often has significant cuts. 
Jonathan Rudy, winner of the most recent American Guild of Organists National Young Artists Competition, made his Cleveland debut on Friday evening, November 14, on the Holtkamp organs at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist. The audience was enthusiastic but sparse, undoubtedly because of heavy snowfall and several major highway closures. Currently a doctoral student at Indiana University, Rudy played a widely varied program that showcased his considerable musical ability. 
Leah Ferguson is delighted to be performing Béla Bartók’s skillfully-crafted Viola Concerto in the Cleveland Orchestra’s beautiful home of Severance Hall. On Wednesday, November 19th, beginning at 8:00 pm, guest conductor Kimbo Ishii will lead the CIM Orchestra in a dynamic concert that also includes Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture and Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra.