by Daniel Hathaway
A crowd estimated at 10,000 blanketed the lawn and filled the center section of the vast pavilion on Saturday evening, July 11, as The Cleveland Orchestra settled into its Blossom season. The program included striking performances of Olivier Messiaen’s L’Ascension and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 led by music director Franz Welser-Möst. That seemingly odd pairing of pieces added up to an evening of orchestral and choral ecstasy from two very different points of view.
by Kelly Ferjutz, special to clevelandclassical
Get your laughter on, as you’ll surely need it in this marvelous recreation of the 1926 Broadway musical that the super-talented Gershwin brothers wrote for the great Gertrude Lawrence. With a book by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse and a little help from Howard Dietz, Oh, Kay! is, in the words of director Ted Christopher, “a madcap romp — a drawing room comedy, with a Busby Berkley dance routine in the middle of it.” [Read more…]
by Nicholas Jones
Friday’s Cleveland Orchestra program, the first of 2015’s three Summers@Severance concerts, opened with Olivier Messiaen’s Hymne, composed in 1933. The score was lost during the war and reconstructed from memory by the composer in 1947. The original title (Hymne au Saint-Sacrement) indicated explicitly that it was an act of reverence to the Holy Eucharist of the Catholic Mass, and it apparently represents that ritual. [Read more…]
by J.D. Goddard
On Friday, July 10, after the customary singing of God Save the Queen, the curtain went up on the second performance of Ohio Light Opera’s Ruddigore in Freedlander Theater at the College of Wooster, and the audience was immediately swept into the action in the Cornish town of Rederring. Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1887 operetta has a rather baffling story line and a whimsical musical style. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Fresh air was blowing into Friday evening’s chamber music concert by Credo faculty, even if the Oberlin Conservatory’s Clonick Hall — being the recording studio that it is — has no windows to open. Departing from the usual concert format, where pieces are played in some kind of curated sequence from beginning to end, concert designers Lee Joiner and Steuart Pincombe took works by Henry Purcell, John Dowland, Benjamin Britten, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. and rearranged their movements into a kind of musical crazy-quilt. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
What do you do if you’re running a summer music festival and you discover that for one week, the majority of your teachers will be unavailable to coach ensembles and give private lessons? The obvious answer is to present an opera! On Saturday, July 18 at 3:00 pm in Ludwig Recital Hall, vocal music returns to the Kent/Blossom Music Festival when festival director Charles Latshaw will lead the Kent/Blossom Chamber Orchestra and soloists in a concert version of Giaochino Rossini’s first opera, La Cambiale di Matrimonio.
“It is an exciting undertaking, but there were a lot of things that came together in order for it to happen,” Charles Latshaw said during a telephone conversation. “This year we had a unique challenge and opportunity in that The Cleveland Orchestra is in New York this week as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, which left us with fewer coaches for that period of time. We talked about different options, and in the end we decided to bring opera back to the festival, and I think the audience is going to be receptive to the idea.” [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
The saxophone duo “Jake and Sarah” are no strangers to Cleveland audiences. “We have really grown to love the city,” Jake Swanson told us in an interview prior to their October 2014 performances at Trinity Cathedral and Lorain Country Community College’s Signature Series. “The audiences are not only so sophisticated, they are also so open to new things.” This week Jake Swanson and Sarah Marchitelli will return to Cleveland along with their Decho Ensemble colleagues, saxophonists Nicholas Childs and Jared Yackiw, for two performances that celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of the inventor of the saxophone, Adolph Sax. The concerts take place on Saturday, July 18 at 7:00 pm in Tucker hall at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, and Sunday, July 19 at 3:00 pm at the Bop Stop.
“We keep finding ourselves back in Cleveland. It’s become like a second home to us,” Swanson said during a recent telephone conversation. “We’re very excited about this program. It’s a lot of fun, and it celebrates the early tradition of our instruments.” The concerts will include the first work ever written for saxophone quartet, Jean Baptiste Singelée’s Premier Quaturo, Op. 53, and another early work for sax quartet by American composer Caryl Florio. The program will also include works by Dan Knorr, Philip Glass, and J.S. Bach. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Music for French horn, mezzo-soprano and piano isn’t an everyday flavor of chamber music, so if you happen to be Jeff Nelsen and you marry Nina Yoshida and decide to perform together, you have to undertake some exploring, some arranging, and some commissioning, to come up with enough repertoire to build a concert program. Last Wednesday evening, July 1, Jeff and Nina Nelsen, in cahoots with pianist Elizabeth DeMio, proved that a delightful evening of chamber music can result from unlikely ingredients — if the performers and the music are as excellent and committed as these were. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
The 2015 season of ChamberFest Cleveland closed with a mostly American program in a spectacular venue: the angular, modernist home of Dr. Eugene and Janet Blackstone in Bratenahl along the shore of Lake Erie. The house, with its west-facing glass curtain wall, overlooks manicured lawns, and, after weeks of unending rain in Cleveland, there were sailboats on the lake as the sun set. The house also integrates a four-manual, custom-built pipe organ sprouting seemingly from every surface. The spaces not occupied by organ pipes (and a concert grand piano) were taken by audience members, in the main living area, an upper gallery and on the stairs. [Read more…]
by Jane Berkner
Apollo’s Fire regaled the audience with a musically satisfying and well-played concert on June 29 at First United Methodist Church in Akron. One of its gala send-off concerts planned for this summer, the group played the same program at the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts at the end of the week. The concert opened with selections from Telemann’s Don Quixote Suite, a musical portrayal of Cervantes’ novel. [Read more…]