by Daniel Hathaway
The “Christmas Truce” of 1914, the famous, spontaneous cessation of hostilities on the Western Front during “The Great War,” has inspired The Singers’ Club of Cleveland’s 2014 Christmas program, “A Season of Peace.”
On Saturday, December 13 at 7:30 at the Breen Center in Ohio City, Mel Unger will direct the 50 male singers who form the Singers’ Club in a program of music commemorating that event, when opposing troops left their foxholes to greet each other, bury their dead, exchange mementos, play games, and generally forget the horrors of war for a brief period of time.
In a phone conversation from his office at Baldwin Wallace where he is director of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute, Unger noted that the idea came from a committee member, but he had fun fleshing it out with musical ideas. “We’ll begin with a very imaginative arrangement of God rest ye merry, gentlemen by Mark Riese, then commingle English, German and French carols and other pieces that suggest the era, like Keep the home fires burning. [Read more…]
One size didn’t fit all the pieces on last Thursday evening’s program at Severance Hall. Guest conductor Marek Janowski ordered up a small Cleveland Orchestra for Beethoven’s Haydnesque first symphony, brought on a very large Cleveland Orchestra for Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber, then sent most of those players home, leaving a medium-sized Cleveland Orchestra to end the evening with Beethoven’s second symphony. 
On Wednesday, December 3rd I found myself in an odd situation – I wasn’t scheduled to attend any concerts, yet I had the urge to hear some live classical music. Checking our concert calendar, I discovered two interesting, and best of all, free concerts in University Circle. 
Cleveland Institute of Music faculty members Jason Vieaux, Jaime Laredo, Alan Bise and Bruce Egre and pianist Daniil Trifonov are among the nominees for the 57th Grammy Awards, to be presented in Los Angeles on February 8. 
Packed tight on a Wednesday night, the Oberlin Conservatory Lounge played host to the Punch Brothers for their latest jam session on December 3. Joining the band were a legion of thirty-some college and conservatory musicians playing violin, trombone, oboe, double bass, accordion, djembe, and tuba, to name a few. A big crowd of fans snapping photos, shooting video, nodding, singing, and wiggling along helped keep the night going until near closing time. 
It was Austrian night in Cleveland last Tuesday. In Severance Hall, the Vienna Boys Choir was working its holiday magic, no doubt beautifully. In Plymouth Church in Shaker, where I was, the Juilliard String Quartet gave a different sampling of Vienna, presenting three masterpieces by composers intimately associated with Vienna — Anton Webern, Franz Josef Haydn, and Franz Schubert. 
Typically, only a few faculty and devotees warm the seats at Oberlin Conservatory’s historical performance (HP) division concerts. Be warned: that may not be the case for much longer. Students Parker Ramsay and Jackson Studzinski assembled a bunch of historically informed tricksters on December 2 in Oberlin’s Fairchild Chapel, for the first concert in the new Tenth Muse series. 
CityMusic Cleveland continued to move into new territory with the first of its five “Holiday Concerts” on Wednesday evening, December 3. Led by Peter Bennett and collaborating with members of the choirs of Sagrada Familia Parish on their home turf on Cleveland’s West Side, CityMusic ventured into Latino repertoire with a performance of Ariel Ramirez’s forkloric Missa Criolla. The curtain-raiser was a Sinfonia by Antonio Sarrier, a Spanish-born composer and trumpeter who emigrated to Mexico in the mid-eighteenth century. In between, Laura Koepke was the featured soloist in Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto.