by Mike Telin
On Thursday, April 23 at 7:30 pm at Severance Hall, conductor Susanna Mälkki will be making waves during her Cleveland Orchestra debut with a program that will begin with Jean Sibelius’s tone poem The Oceanides. “It’s not performed very often, which is very surprising, because it is a jewel and personally one of my favorites of Sibelius,” the Finnish conductor said during a recent telephone conversation.
This week’s concerts will also mark pianist Jeremy Denk’s Cleveland Orchestra debut in performances of Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3. “Jeremy and I performed this concerto a few months ago in San Francisco,” Mälkki pointed out. “He plays it beautifully, so I’m very happy to be able to do it again with him.” The concert will also include Stravinsky’s complete ballet music to Pétrouchka. “It’s just incredible music and I’m so thrilled to be able to conduct it again.” The program will be repeated on Friday, April 24 in Finney Chapel as part of the Oberlin Artist Recital Series, and on Saturday, April 25 at Severance Hall. Both performances will begin at 8:00 pm. [Read more…]
This week Les Délices, Cleveland’s French baroque music specialists, will present “The Angel and the Devil.” The program showcases music by the most famous pair of viola da gamba players of the eighteenth century, Marin Marais and Antoine Forqueray. Referred to respectively as The Angel and The Devil, their musical personalities will be brought to life by two modern-day gambists, Josh Lee and Emily Walhout. Oboists and recorder players Debra Nagy and Kathryn Montoya, baroque violinists Scott Metcalfe and Ingrid Matthews will join harpsichordist Michael Sponseller and the dueling gambists in music by Jean-Féry Rebel, François Couperin and Marc-Antoine Charpentier.
On Friday, April 24 at 7:00 pm, the John Knox Performance Series will present Verb Ballets in a production of Geoffrey Peterson’s Edmund Fitzgerald, a concerto for piano and strings, choreographed by Richard Dickinson. The performance will be held in Trinity Hall at John Knox Presbyterian Church in North Olmsted. Seating reservations required: see our 
The celebrated British tenor Ian Bostridge will bring the Cleveland Chamber Music Society’s 65th subscription series to a conclusion on Tuesday, April 21 at 7:30 pm at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights, when he joins pianist Wenwen Du in a program entitled “Music of the Great War.”
Born in Romania, displaced by the Nazis, educated in Hungary, and finally settling first in Vienna then in Germany after the 1956 Hungarian revolution, György Ligeti spent a lot of his life on the move. Musically nomadic as well, he chased after a number of different compositional styles. Two of Ligeti’s pieces composed thirty years apart formed the backbone of the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble’s arresting program in Gartner Auditorium of the Cleveland Museum of Art on Saturday afternoon, April 11. 
In his 2015 edition of Festival Europe, music journalist and travel writer Frank Kuznik provides would-be festival-goers with an abundance of helpful information about 70 European classical music festivals. Additionally, Kuznik entices readers with his insightful festival descriptions, accompanied by 90 exquisite photographs. Even if Europe is not in your travel plans for this summer, one look at this attractive guide and it surely will be in your plans for next summer. 
