by Mike Telin
Over the years Jean-Yves Thibaudet has developed what he calls a “beautiful relationship” with The Cleveland Orchestra. “There are the recordings we did in the ‘90s of all the Rachmaninoff works for piano and orchestra, and we’ve done so many concertos over the years — but never this one.”
On Thursday, February 22 at 7:30 pm at Severance Hall, the French pianist will perform Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand. The all-Ravel concert, under the direction of Matthias Pintscher, will also include the Suite from Mother Goose and the complete ballet Daphnis and Chloë. The program will be repeated on Friday and Saturday at 8:00 pm. Tickets are available online.
Although Thibaudet had learned all of Ravel’s works for solo piano as well as the G-major concerto by the time he was 15, he avoided tackling the left-hand concerto. [Read more…]
“We don’t often play all-Czech programs,” Bennewitz Quartet second violinist Štěpán Ježek said from the stage of West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church on Monday evening, February 12. But the Rocky River Chamber Music Society audience can be glad they did on that occasion. Ježek joined his colleagues Jakub Fišer, violin, Jiří Pinkas, viola, and Štěpán Doležal, cello, in white-hot performances of works by Leoš Janáček, Bedřich Smetana, and Antonín Dvořák, playing with the pure intensity that only native Czechs could have achieved.
On Tuesday, February 20, the 
Antonio Pompa-Baldi’s piano recital on Sunday afternoon, February 11 on the Music From the Western Reserve series at Christ Episcopal Church in Hudson checked all the boxes on the Perfect Sunday Afternoon Concert scorecard. It lasted just over an hour, visited some unusual repertoire in varying styles, let the music speak for itself without extraneous commentary from the stage, and was brilliantly performed, to boot.