by Daniel Hathaway
Ohio Light Opera will produce 58 performances of 8 shows this summer in Freedlander Theatre at the College of Wooster, kicking off its season with Lerner & Loewe’s Brigadoon on Saturday, June 13 at 7:30 pm.
Founder James Stuart originally had a summer Gilbert & Sullivan festival in mind in 1979, but since its inaugural season in Wooster, OLO has evolved to embrace a wider range of light opera, including European operetta and American musical theater. OLO is now under the leadership of artistic director Steven A. Daigle and general director Julie Wright Costa.
The mix of operettas and Broadway shows to be performed in 2015 by the 40 members of the vocal ensemble includes Cole Porter & Abe Burrows’ Can-Can, Ogden Nash & Kurt Weill’s One Touch of Venus, George & Ira Gershwin’s Oh, Kay!, Gilbert & Sullivan’s Ruddigore and Yeoman of the Guard, and Franz Lehár’s Friederike. [Read more…]
ing the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra in their final US concert of the year on Sunday, June 14 at 3:00 pm in Severance Hall, Brett Mitchell will pack his bags to travel with the musicians to China to direct the same program in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Ningbo. In recent telephone conversations, Mitchell and principal cellist Henry Shapard shared their excitement and concerns about the upcoming international tour.
Since its founding in 1973, the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition — the largest chamber music competition in the world — has helped launch the careers of many notable chamber music ensembles. Alumni and past winners with ties to Northeast Ohio include the Aeolus Quartet, Cavani Quartet, eighth blackbird, Imani Winds, Jasper Quartet, Jupiter Quartet, Miami String Quartet, Miro Quartet, Pacifica Quartet, and Prima Trio. Most recently, the Omer Quartet, representing the Cleveland Institute of Music, won the senior division string and grand prizes in 2013.
Among the recipients of the 2015 Cleveland Arts Prize, to be presented on Thursday, June 25 at 6:00 pm in Gartner Auditorium of the Cleveland Museum of Art is composer H. Leslie Adams. A graduate of Oberlin College, California State University Long Beach and the Ohio State University, Adams will receive the Lifetime Achievement Reward of $10,000 for bringing great distinction to himself and the region over the course of several decades. His compositions include an opera, Blake, and most recently, a set of Piano Etudes (read a ClevelandClassical review 
Contrapunctus Early Music is a relatively recent constellation in the Cleveland musical heavens. The a capella chamber ensemble is led by English conductor David Acres and comprises a number of Northeast Ohio’s finest professional and semi-professional singers (17 for this concert). On Sunday in Mary Queen of Peace Church on Pearl Road, Contrapunctus presented an intriguing program of polyphonic music by Spanish composers from the 13th to the 17th century. 
Franz Welser-Möst led the apparently indefatigable musicians of The Cleveland Orchestra in the third of four challenging, all-in-a-row concerts on Friday evening, May 29, major attractions on the agenda for the League of American Orchestras Cleveland meeting. Olivier Messiaen’s dazzling Chronochromie and Antonín Dvořák’s infrequently performed fifth symphony made different but compelling connections to the natural world, while Messiaen’s theologically-infused Hymne opened a portal to the heavenly realms. 
On Russian Duo’s latest CD, Interplay, pianist Terry Boyarsky and balalaika virtuoso Oleg Kruglyakov present a thirteen-track feast of music that beautifully marries traditional folk-tunes with classical elegance. On Sunday, June 7 at 7:00 pm, audiences can hear the music from the album performed live when Russian Duo hosts a CD release party at 
Having expanded its June season from five concerts in 2012 to eight in 2013, Franklin and Diana Cohen’s ChamberFest Cleveland grew again in 2014 to encompass ten events. Ten seems now to be the magic number for this enterprising festival, which offers everything you can imagine in the category of chamber music, played by an all-star cast of young musicians who come to Cleveland from far and wide. The ten concerts scheduled for the 2015 festival will begin on Wednesday, June 17 at Spaces and conclude on Wednesday, July 1 at a new venue, the Blackstone Organ House in Bratenahl.