by Daniel Hathaway
Held in the black box Studio Theater at the Stocker Center in Elyria, the Signature Series concerts curated by composer Jeffrey Mumford for Lorain Community College are usually spaced throughout the season. Last week there were two in a row. On Monday, March 2, pianist Nicholas Underhill played a solo recital, followed by harpist Shelly Du on Thursday, March 5, who in addition to performing solo pieces was joined by violinist Jeanelle Brierley in a work by Mumford. [Read more…]
This week at Severance Hall, renowned French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet returns to Cleveland, a city that played an important role early in his career when he won second prize at the Robert Casadesus Piano Competition in 1979 (now the Cleveland International Piano Competition).
The Vienna Piano Trio’s program at West Shore Unitarian seemed traditional at first glance, but looks are deceptive. This well-respected group (now 25 years old, though with some changes of personnel over the years) specializes in the familiar classical repertoire of Austria and Germany, and last night was no exception — Beethoven, Brahms, and Schoenberg. But both the performances and the pieces themselves were full of surprises. 
When British-born cellist Steven Isserlis and American fortepianist Robert Levin present their all-Beethoven program on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series at Plymouth Church on Tuesday evening, March 10, the audience will come as close as humanly possible to hearing the three sonatas and a variation set as Beethoven conceived them. Isserlis will play a period cello with gut strings, and Levin will perform on a Wilhelm Leschen instrument built in Vienna in 1825.
Mozart’s La finta giardiniera is an ideal teaching opera for young singers, with its wealth of approachable arias and challenging recitatives. It also boasts a plot so complicated that few have been able to sum it up in a paragraph. “I could not make this opera stranger than it already is,” director Jonathon Field said in a telephone conversation. Tenor Daniel McGrew, who sings the role of the Count, said, “It takes a long time just to get to know what it is about.”
We know about serial relationships, but what do you call an event that celebrates the overlapping anniversaries of two performing arts organizations? On Sunday, March 15 at 3:30 pm in the Masonic Auditorium Performing Arts Center, the Suburban Symphony and Choral Arts Cleveland will mark their respective sixtieth and fortieth anniversaries — adding up to a hundred years of music-making — with a performance of Georges Bizet’s opera, Carmen.
The biennial Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival likes to keep the buzz alive by presenting a solo recital by an international artist every other year. On Sunday evening, March 15 at 7:00 p.m., Canadian baritone Elliot Madore will bring lieder, chansons and songs by Robert Schumann, Francis Poulenc and Charles Ives to the stage of Gamble Auditorium in Berea, in collaboration with pianist Natalia Katyukova.
Stephen Hartke will become Professor of Composition and Chair of the Composition Department at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music on July 1, 2015. Hartke, who draws his inspiration from sources ranging from medieval music to the blues, comes to Ohio after serving as Distinguished Professor of Composition at the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California, where he has taught since 1987.
On Saturday evening, February 28 at the Breen Center for the Performing Arts, the BlueWater Chamber Orchestra, under the baton of guest conductor Raphael Jiménez, performed a sumptuous program of two works by giants of the Romantic era, Gabriel Fauré and Johannes Brahms.