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Archives for May 2016

Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival: Susan Graham with Bradley Moore (May 26)

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by Daniel Hathaway

GrahamSusan Graham’s splendidly communicative recital program on the Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival on Thursday evening, May 26 in Gamble Auditorium, involved slipping twenty extra songs in between the original eight of Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben. That resulted in a rich, nuanced commentary on the composer’s chronicle of a woman’s life cycle from the first glimpse of her beloved all the way through marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth, ending with his demise. [Read more…]

Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival: Edwin Crossley-Mercer & Jason Paul Peterson (May 24)

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by Timothy Robson

Crossley-Mercer-RecitalOn Tuesday, May 24, French baritone Edwin Crossley-Mercer and pianist Jason Paul Peterson opened the 2016 edition of the Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival with a recital in Gamble Auditorium. Now in its 30th year, the week-long festival, which focuses on the combination of solo singer and piano, is the brainchild of retired Cleveland Institute of Music voice professor George Vassos. [Read more…]

OpEd:
Musical Genius

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by Julian Ring, special to ClevelandClassical.com

Prince-KantnerEditors’s note: this think piece was written for the Oberlin course “Practicing the Art of Musical Criticism,” team-taught by Daniel Hathaway, Donald Rosenberg, and Mike Telin.

Prince Rogers Nelson, one of the most influential artists of the 1980s and ‘90s, died April 21 at his studio in Minneapolis. When the news broke, friends and fans were in disbelief. The pop icon was only 57, seemingly healthy, and prolific as ever. In the hours and days after his passing was confirmed, an intense wave of grief rocked the music world. Suddenly an idiosyncratic, genderbending black superstar was gone. There had never been, and would probably never be, another like him.

Paul Lorin Kantner, founder of the band Jefferson Airplane, died January 28 in San Francisco. A handful of major publications, including Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Billboard, ran obituaries about him. Friends and colleagues, among them the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir and  Kantner’s bandmate Grace Slick, mourned him. His musical ideas were zany; his guitar playing was masterful and oft-imitated. Jefferson Airplane defined the San Francisco sound and the psychedelic rock era. [Read more…]

OpEd:
The Search for the Classical Beyoncé

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by Christine Jay, special to ClevelandClassical.com

BeyonceLemonadeEditors’s note: this think piece was written for the Oberlin course “Practicing the Art of Musical Criticism,” team-taught by Daniel Hathaway, Donald Rosenberg, and Mike Telin.

Beyoncé — aka Yoncé, Queen Bey, Queen B, Sasha Fierce, M. Carter — the name brings to mind a myriad of hits spanning several decades. But she is also a symbol of feminism, free speech, and downright personal freedom in general.

I will echo what many have said and no doubt will continue to say: Queen Bey slays — like no other popstar. Extreme innovation in the way she delivers her artistic product is the engine and the key to her empire, something that has yet to be unlocked in the Classical world.

Such innovation was clearly on display on Saturday, April 23, when Beyoncé’s most recent studio and visual album, Lemonade, was released via Tidal, a fledgling audio and music video streaming service, along with a one-hour film of the album that aired on HBO. Social media, especially Twitter, erupted with reactions to the film and to the music itself. [Read more…]

McCalmont’s List 2: Johann Sebastian Bach — Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 (1721)

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by Neil McCalmont

BACH-JSGenre: Concerto – a composition for one or more solo instruments and orchestra
Scoring: Chamber orchestra
Era: Baroque
Length: 10-15 min
Will you recognize it? Perhaps as what your grandmother played for background music
Recommended Recordings: John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists, or Otto Klemperer and the Philharmonia Orchestra

Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). Bach’s career was strange in that while he was well-known as a keyboardist, he received little recognition for his compositions while he was alive. [Read more…]

Choral Arts Cleveland: “Chiaroscuro, Light and Shadow, Bodies in Motion” (May 22)

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by Robert Rollin

Choral-Arts-Rehearsal-Christ-ChurchOn Sunday evening, May 22, Choral Arts Cleveland presented its third and final concert of the season at Christ Episcopal Church in Shaker Heights. The program, titled “Chiaroscuro, Light and Shadow, Bodies in Motion,” included an interesting variety of styles and performance forces, including solo songs; a capella choruses; choruses accompanied by piano, organ, and additional instruments; and dancers from Verb Ballets. In the waning golden evening light, the sanctuary sparkled with atmosphere. [Read more…]

NOYO Young Composers at the Bop Stop (May 15)

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by Mike Telin

NOYO-ComposersHearing a concert featuring six premieres is not unusual. However, when those new works are all written by high-school age composers, that is a reason to take note. On Sunday afternoon, May 15, a capacity crowd gathered at the Bop Stop to hear an impressive concert that featured works by students in the Northern Ohio Youth Orchestra Young Composers Program. The concert also included performances by ensembles from NOYO’s Chamber Music Extension. [Read more…]

Trinity Chamber Orchestra: Brownbag Season Finale (May 18)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Trinity-051816For the finale of the 2015-2016 Wednesday Noon Brownbag Concert season, music director Todd Wilson invited his predecessor, Horst Buchholz, back to conduct the Trinity Chamber Orchestra in works by George Frideric Handel and Howard Hanson featuring organist Nicholas Haigh, soprano Margaret Carpenter Haigh, and Wilson himself. [Read more…]

Quire Cleveland: William Byrd at Historic St. Peter Church (May 22)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Quire4Constructing a concert devoted to the work of a single composer is like curating a gallery retrospective. On Sunday afternoon, May 22 at Historic St. Peter Church in downtown Cleveland, Ross W. Duffin and the 24 professional singers of Quire Cleveland treated a large audience to a well-chosen selection from the sacred music of “England’s Phoenix,” William Byrd, a composer who led a charmed life. [Read more…]

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