by Jarrett Hoffman
“I was trying to play Telemann in the subways, I really was,” said PROJECT Trio flutist Greg Pattillo. “And no one really cared. But you play a funny video game tune with the beatbox, and people did stop, and they did care to listen.”
On Thursday, February 5 at 8:00 pm, Brooklyn-based chamber music ensemble PROJECT Trio will present a concert in Oberlin Conservatory’s Stull Recital Hall, their program to be announced from the stage. Admission is free.
PROJECT Trio includes flutist Greg Pattillo, cellist Eric Stephenson, and double bassist Peter Seymour. Having met while studying at the Cleveland Institute of Music, the group formed in 2005. They exploded in popularity a year later when Pattillo’s beatbox flute YouTube videos went viral: his cover of the Super Mario theme and his remix to the Inspector Gadget theme have garnered 24 million and 28 million views each. [Read more…]
After winning the 1970 Chopin International Piano Competition, pianist Garrick Ohlsson has gone on to establish a reputation as a musician of magisterial interpretive and technical prowess. The celebrated pianist is certainly no stranger to area audiences: in addition to his frequent appearances as soloist with The Cleveland Orchestra, he has also presented recitals for Akron’s Tuesday Musical Series, collaborated with the Takács Quartet for the Cleveland Chamber Music Society, and performed a benefit concert for ChamberFest Cleveland. Still, there is one Northeast Ohio series that has eluded him — the Oberlin Artist Recital Series.
On Sunday, February 8, the 57th Grammy Awards will be presented in Los Angeles. ClevelandClassical.com wishes the best of luck to all the Northeast Ohio nominees.
Though The Cleveland Orchestra marketed last weekend’s concerts as “Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony,” Finnish guest conductor Hannu Lintu, Israeli violinist Vadim Gluzman and the ensemble pulled off a hat trick. All three works on Thursday evening’s program were equally infused with personality and burned themselves indelibly into memory. 
Opera in a dance club? Why not? Opera can be intimidating and ridiculous, with its gilded houses, extravagant length, fantastic plots, and the bewildering phantasmagoria that generally appears onstage. There’s a reason why it’s parodied so frequently. So it was refreshing to see digestible, one-act operas about everyday people presented by Oberlin Opera Theater in the basement Dionysus Disco, better known to the sweaty college revelers who are its normal customers as the ‘Sco. 
Jazz concerts can often be formulaic. We expect to hear selections from the Great American Songbook, most often played or sung in a predictable form. But the jazz concert on Friday, January 30 at the Bop Stop featured Amanda Powell, and she’s anything but predictable.
Every week, Cleveland Orchestra audiences look forward to hearing the cello section’s lush sounds emerging from the surrounding group. On Friday night at CWRU’s Harkness Chapel, listeners had the unique opportunity to hear the section showcased outside of its orchestral setting in a remarkably delightful concert. iCellisti is an annual event organized by the Cleveland Cello Society and headed up by Ida Mercer, but this is the first year that the entire Cleveland Orchestra cello section was able to take part — except for one player who had a conflict.