by Mike Telin
We continue our preview of the Contemporary Youth Orchestra’s concert on Sunday, December 7 at 7:00 pm in Waetjen Auditorium at Cleveland State University, with a conversation with Stefan Podell, whose Concerto for Two Violas and Orchestra, will receive its premiere that evening with Lynne Ramsey and Jeffrey Irvine as soloists.
Stefan Podell has been arranging music for CYO since 2009. He has created works for artists such as Jon Anderson of YES, Jefferson Starship, Evelyn Glennie, and Sean Beasson. As a songwriter and musician, he has won awards from the likes of Billboard Magazine and VH-1. He has shared the stage with performers such as Cheap Trick, Barenaked Ladies, and Dishwalla. The Concerto for Two Violas is Podell’s second CYO concerto commission: his Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra was premiered by CYO and Cleveland Orchestra Principal Bass Maximilian Dimoff in the fall of 2012.
Stefan and I got together for lunch following Saturday’s CYO rehearsal. We talked about the important role CYO has played in the development of his career and how the music of Jon Anderson and the band YES helped inspire him to pursue classical music. [Read more…]
Bassoonist Gareth Thomas, violinist Analisé Denise Kukelhan and oboist Corbin Stair will join the ranks of The Cleveland Orchestra during the winter and spring of 2015. 
Cleveland Orchestra second trumpet Jack Sutte has been busy recently compiling a second CD, Fanfare Alone. This time Sutte appears all by himself — but in the company of a sizeable cast of Schilke brass instruments. Recorded last May in Gamble Auditorium at Baldwin Wallace University by Five-Four Production’s Robert Friedrich, the eighty-three minute, two-disc set features twenty-eight tracks of music for solo trumpet, cornet and flugelhorn comprising pieces by twenty individuals. 
Since its founding, the Contemporary Youth Orchestra has given world premieres of over two hundred works, and this weekend’s concert is no exception. On Sunday, December 7 at 7:00 pm in Waetjen Auditorium at Cleveland State University, CYO will begin its twentieth anniversary season with a concert honoring composer Bernard Rands.
We are often told that classical music seems to belong only to the elderly. It ain’t necessarily so, judging from last Tuesday evening’s concert at Lorain County Community College, when a largely college-age audience heard a sparkling recital given by duo parnas. The performers, too, are of the younger generation — two sisters barely into their twenties and already enjoying significant attention in the professional concert scene. 
If America’s entry into World War II was seen by its citizens as not only necessary but also heroic and noble, then perhaps no orchestral work better embraced such lofty resolve than Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. Thus began the program called “Remembrance” by the Canton Symphony Orchestra, with CSO assistant conductor Rachel L. Waddell on the podium, on November 23 at Umstattd Performing Arts Hall.