by Daniel Hathaway
After a Wednesday evening concert in Dublin, near Columbus, CityMusic Cleveland opened its new season at Lakewood Congregational Church on October 15 with the first of four area concerts featuring violinist Sayaka Shoji. On Thursday, she turned in a tidy reading of the Brahms concerto, and the orchestra itself delivered an impressive, highly polished performance of Robert Schumann’s first symphony led by music director Avner Dorman. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
French-born bassoonist Marc Vallon will be one of the featured soloists during Apollo’s Fire’s first set of concerts this season. “Splendor of Venice: An Orchestral Extravaganza,” which runs from October 15-18 at venues in Fairlawn, Cleveland Heights, and Rocky River, will highlight solo and multiple instrument concertos by Antonio Vivaldi and Evaristo Felice Dall’Abaco.
Marc Vallon serves on the music faculty of the University of Wisconsin and plays in the Wingra Woodwind Quintet, an ensemble in residence at the School of Music. We reached him by telephone in Madison to talk about his career and his upcoming appearance with Apollo’s Fire. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
Without a doubt, Johannes Brahms’s Violin Concerto is one of the greatest works in the instrument’s concerto canon. Filled with lush melodies and Gypsy dances, the work is nonetheless formidable, placing many technical demands on the soloist. Lasting around forty minutes, it also tests the performer’s stamina.
This week CityMusic Cleveland, under the direction of music director Avner Dorman, will present five performances of the concerto featuring violinist Sayaka Shoji. The all-German program will also include Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 1 in B-flat, Op. 38 (“Spring”).
Following a performance in Dublin, Ohio on Wednesday, the CityMusic musicians will return to Cleveland for four concerts, beginning on Thursday, October 15 at 7:30 pm with a performance in Lakewood Congregational Church. See our Concert Listings page for additional times and locations. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
Sometimes one simply must wait for the right time to assemble all of the collaborators necessary in order to bring an opera production to fruition.
For Opera Circle Cleveland, Voices of Canton Incorporated, The Bohemian National Hall, and the Cleveland Women’s Orchestra, the time to present a fully staged production of Bedřich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride has arrived. On Sunday, October 18 in Canton’s Timken High School Auditorium, and Sunday, October 25 in Cleveland’s Bohemian National Hall, audiences can enjoy Smetana’s comic opera about an arranged marriage gone awry.
“For us this project has been nine years in the making,” Opera Circle Cleveland co-founder and executive director Dorota Sobieska said over coffee in Ohio City’s Hingetown neighborhood. “It is a very difficult opera in every respect, and the only way for us to produce it would for it to become a large-scale community collaboration.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
It all started with a disastrous fire on August 28, 2014 that destroyed Lorain’s First Lutheran Church and its historic John Brombaugh organ. Brian Wentzel, the church’s music director, was crushed by the loss. While waiting until a new church and organ could rise from the ashes, he decided to dedicate some of his time to learning all 48 preludes and fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier.
Wentzel will present them in a series of six concerts over the next three years on the Rudolf von Beckerath organ at Trinity Lutheran Church in Ohio City. The first performance will take place on Trinity’s “Music Near the Market” series on Wednesday, October 14 at 12:15 pm. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
For the past five months the Akron Symphony Orchestra and composer Clint Needham have been asking people one question: what does Akron sound like to you? The Symphony and Needham are currently working with the community to create a collaborative symphony using sound submissions from the public. Needham will use these as the inspiration for a new work that will be premiered by the Akron Symphony at E.J. Thomas Hall under the direction of Christopher Wilkins on April 16, 2016.
“This project is cool,” an enthusiastic Wilkins said during a recent telephone conversation. “It really is verging on performance art in that it’s breaking down the fourth wall in making the community part of the creative process. In a way, asking what Akron sounds like is similar to asking who you are — from a sonic point of view.” Wilkins encourages everyone to download the iOS app or the Android app and upload their recordings to Sounds of Akron. On Sunday, October 11 the Symphony invites area residents to collect sounds during an outing at the Akron Zoo. “People should know that we still want submissions,” Wilkins said, adding, “they should send us anything that they think is interesting.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The three programs scheduled by The Cleveland Orchestra last weekend were each colorful in their own right, but the blueprint of works being performed was complicated enough that the program book color-coded each evening to keep patrons apprised about what they were hearing, and in what order. Come to think of it, the orchestra and stage crew probably appreciated those navigational aids as well. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Vespers is the only service of the medieval church outside of Mass to have survived and prospered from the Protestant Reformation. Some elaborate musical settings of this early evening rite have come from the Roman Catholic pens of Claudio Monteverdi and Wolfgang Amadè Mozart, but the tradition has really gone on to thrive in Lutheran and Anglican circles, where musical Vespers services and Choral Evensongs have inspired countless settings of the psalms and canticles (especially the Magnificat) which form the backbone of the service. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Jones
The opening concert of the Cleveland Philharmonic Orchestra season on Sunday, October 11 was an exuberant memorial to long-time Philharmonic music director William Slocum. Maestro Slocum, who conducted the orchestra for twenty-six years, passed away in the spring of 2015. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Jones
Arts Renaissance Tremont opened its twenty-fifth anniversary season Sunday with an ambitious and satisfying program of two masterpieces of the piano trio repertoire: Beethoven’s Opus 97 in B-flat (“Archduke”) and Shostakovich’s Opus 67 in e-minor. Performing were the members of the Autana Trio (Venezuelan violinist Rubén Rengel, cellist Anna Hurt — originally from Utah — and South Korean pianist Yuri Noh), who are participants in the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Advanced Piano Trio Program, directed by noted cellist Sharon Robinson. [Read more…]