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Archives for June 2017

Anderson & Roe to be guest artists for Kent State Piano Institute June 16

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by Mike Telin

22-AndersonRoe-by-Woodrow-LeungWhen pianists Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe left their respective hometowns in the Midwest to pursue their undergraduate studies at the Juilliard School, the two found themselves by happenstance assigned to the same floor of the famed music school’s dormitory.

The two became fast friends and soon discovered that they had a shared mission for their musical lives: to make classical music a relevant and powerful force in society. And both had big dreams of how to do that — by presenting programs that represent the vast range of the human experience.

On Friday, June 16 at 7:30 pm in Ludwig Recital Hall, Kent State Piano Institute will present a guest recital by the always entertaining piano duo Anderson & Roe. [Read more…]

Jupiter Quartet celebrates teaching and playing at ENCORE Chamber Music

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by Samantha Spaccasi

Jupiter-QuartetFor the Jupiter Quartet, returning to Northeast Ohio is like returning home. Cellist Dan McDonough and violinists Meg Freivogel and Nelson Lee attended the Cleveland Institute of Music, and violist Liz Freivogel attended the Oberlin Conservatory. “We all started our careers in the Cleveland area, in a way,” said McDonough in a recent phone conversation. “We got a solid education in chamber music at those schools.”

The Jupiters return to Cleveland for a performance at ENCORE Chamber Music at the Gilmour Academy on June 16 at 7:00 pm. The program includes Beethoven’s Quartets Op. 18, No. 2 and Op. 131, and György Ligeti’s Quartet No. 1, “Metamorphoses Nocturnes.” [Read more…]

Ohio Light Opera launches 2017 season with The Music Man

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by Kelly Ferjutz
Special to ClevelandClassical.com

SteveSteven Daigle is the mixmaster-in-chief at Ohio Light Opera, which takes up residence each summer at the College of Wooster. Running a residential repertory company makes things both easier and, at times, more difficult for the Artistic Director, now in his 18th season in that position. He’s an expert at picking one show from column A, and maybe two from B, or three from C, and then building on those choices. Still, no matter how astutely he picks performance possibilities, in the end, the success of a season all comes down to the performers onstage — and in the orchestra pit.

For the vocal part of that process, Daigle primarily relies on associate artistic director Julie Wright Costa, who, in her other life is head of the voice area at the University of Utah School of Music. After winnowing through the myriad applications and videotapes, Julie travels the country holding auditions. This year she visited seven different regions in her ever-elusive search for that perfect candidate. [Read more…]

ChamberFest Cleveland’s Kafka Fragments to feature filmmaker Kasumi

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Kasumi-Web“I don’t know what my brain knows,” says filmmaker Kasumi in her 2015 TEDx talk Portrait of the Artist as a Young Meme. “One tiny stimulus fuels infinite branches, reactions, associations…if we were consciously aware of everything we came in contact with, we would explode, or go crazy. I became an artist…and technology is the hammer I use to open the universe of memory.”

On Tuesday, June 20 at 6:30 and 8:30 pm at Transformer Station, ChamberFest Cleveland will present a new perspective on Kafka Fragments, György Kurtág’s hour-long work for solo violin and voice. The piece draws on excerpts from the Prague-born author’s notebooks, diaries, and letters. Joining mezzo-soprano Lauren Eberwein and the tag-teaming duo of violinists Alexi Kenney and Yura Lee will be 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and Cleveland-based filmmaker Kasumi, whose digital imagery fragments were commissioned by the Festival.

[Read more…]

ChamberFest Cleveland: a chat with pianist & CIM grad Andrius Žlabys

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by Mike Telin

ZlabysOn Thursday, June 15 at 7:30 pm in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Diana and Franklin Cohen’s always imaginative ChamberFest Cleveland kicks off its sixth season with a concert titled “Cycles — Phases” featuring Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 and Elgar’s Piano Quintet in a. The evening will also include John Adams’ playful Hallelujah Junction for two pianos. “This is quite a piece,” pianist Andrius Žlabys said during a telephone conversation. “It’s amazingly challenging, and I’m looking forward to working with Roman Rabinovich for the first time.”

Thursday’s concert marks Žlabys’ first-ever ChamberFest performance as well as a sort of homecoming — the Lithuanian-born pianist spent five years studying at the Cleveland Institute of Music where he was a student of Sergei Babayan. [Read more…]

ChamberFest Cleveland: introducing bassist Xavier Foley

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Xavier-Foleyby Mike Telin

When asked, most musicians are able to pinpoint an event that led them to make the decision to pursue music as a career. For bassist Xavier Foley, it was in 2006 when at eleven years old and in the sixth grade, he shifted his attention away from his teacher Miss King’s discussion of nouns, adverbs, and clauses, in favor of making a bow and arrow out of a paper clip and a rubber band. Click here to watch a video where the Marietta, Georgia native explains all. And yes, it’s quite funny.

Since that fateful day, Foley has gone on to become a First Prize winner in 2014 at the Sphinx Competition and Astral Artists National Auditions, as well as a winner at the 2016 Young Concert Artists Auditions. [Read more…]

ChamberFest Cleveland: a profile of cellist Oliver Herbert

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by Samantha Spaccasi

Herbert-OliverCellist Oliver Herbert has been busy this year. “I just got back from a three-week tour with the Curtis Orchestra,” he said in a phone interview. The tour spanned the globe, with stops in New York, Finland, the United Kingdom, and Austria. When he wasn’t touring, the San Francisco native was studying full-time at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Herbert also made his debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, playing Strauss’s Don Quixote.

“I was invited to play four family concerts with the Orchestra,” he said. “They wanted a young soloist because it was appropriate for the occasion. It was fantastic and really special to play with that group.” Oliver wasn’t the only Herbert in the orchestra that night, however: his father, David Herbert, is principal timpanist. “We played together in the same concert.” [Read more…]

ClevelandClassical.com to cover Oberlin’s Baroque Performance Institute from the inside

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by Daniel Hathaway

Oberlin BPI Viol ClassOn Sunday, your editor is going off to summer camp for two weeks.

In a recent conversation with Oberlin Conservatory baroque flute professor Michael Lynn, Mike Telin and I mused about covering the annual Baroque Performance Institute from a new perspective in this, its 46th season. Thus the idea was hatched of imbedding someone in the Institute to report on the experience from the perspective of a student. Lynn noted that this summer’s activities would especially favor the harpsichord, so guess who was put forward as the logical choice.

By the end of the day, members of the BPI faculty had enthusiastically signed off on the idea, so on June 18, I will join 123 other participants whose birth dates span a remarkable range from 1927 to 2003 for “Traveling Through the Baroque 1650-1750.”   [Read more…]

New director Ricardo Sepulveda talks about 2017 Kent/Blossom Festival

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by Mike Telin

SepulvedaBeginning next week, 43 young classical musicians from around the globe will gather on the campus of Kent State University to begin five weeks of intensive chamber music study with members of The Cleveland Orchestra as well as other renowned artists in the field. Alumni of the Kent/Blossom Music Festival, founded in 1968 by George Szell and Louis Lane, have gone on to hold positions in many of the world’s major orchestras and ensembles.

“This summer we have twelve international students, as well as participants from Juilliard, Rice, the Cleveland Institute of Music, Oberlin, the University of Akron, Northwestern, and Kent State as well as others,” KBMF Director Ricardo Sepulveda, who was appointed to his position in late March, said during a recent telephone conversation. “It’s exciting, and I look forward to this season. This Festival is close to my heart, and I’m excited and honored to be leading it.” [Read more…]

CD Review
Les Délices: Age of Indulgence

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by Daniel Hathaway

Les-Delices-Indulgence-CDWhen an ensemble’s programs are as carefully curated as those of Cleveland’s Les Délices, it makes perfect sense to preserve them nearly intact in the form of a recording. Age of Indulgence is a case in point. Presented twice in November of 2015, the program delivered everything the ensemble is known for: expert, accessible performances of French Baroque repertoire using a small number of players in inventive combinations, always chosen to make an artistic point without pretense or pedantry, and performed without intermission in the course of an hour and a quarter. [Read more…]

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