by Jarrett Hoffman
New York, March 27.
Apollo’s Fire brought the house down and the heart rates up at their Carnegie Hall debut last Thursday, March 22 at the venue’s cozy Zankel Hall in New York City. The highlight of this “Evening at Bach’s Coffeehouse” was the closer: a thrilling, caffeinating performance of Vivaldi’s “La Follia” Sonata for Two Violins and Continuo, arranged by artistic director, conductor, and harpsichordist Jeannette Sorrell for this Cleveland-based Baroque orchestra.
by Tom Wachunas
I can only guess at why there were so many empty seats in the audience for the March 25 concert from the Canton Symphony Orchestra. If familiar classical music breeds ticket sales, perhaps this program was perceived (undeservedly) as too light-weight, or the selections too obscure. Or perhaps it was local Lenten fasting from orchestral music. In any case, it’s not my place to berate those otherwise faithful concertgoers who were missing in action on this occasion, except to say that they missed a real stunner.
by Daniel Hathaway
Sometimes the most interesting programs bring together pieces that wouldn’t have met under normal circumstances. Sunday afternoon’s Cleveland Orchestra concert on March 25 at Severance Hall under the direction of guest conductor Stéphane Denève was a case in point. Denève paired Poulenc’s bizarrely charming Concert champêtre for harpsichord and large orchestra with Rachmaninoff’s gorgeously overwrought Second Symphony. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Hearing the Akron Symphony’s “Planet Earth” program on Friday evening, March 23 in E.J. Thomas Hall was like playing around with Google Earth — the fascinating app that lets you zoom around between completely unrelated global destinations from the comfort of your laptop. Music Director Christopher Wilkins crafted an itinerary that visited both poles — Antarctica and the Finnish Arctic — tucking in trips to Rome and the Scottish Hebrides as well. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
Since 2014, the Grammy Award-winning Cleveland Chamber Symphony has sponsored NEOSonicFest, a festival of new music performed by musicians from Northeast Ohio and beyond. The 2018 festival will run from April 5 through 11 (see below for concert dates and times).
Clarinetist Carol Robinson and trumpeter Nate Wooley will kick things off by performing selections from Éliane Radigue’s Occam Ocean on April 5 at MOCA. The composer describes her work as “an ongoing acoustic work with influences ranging from electromagnetic waves, to William of Ockham’s philosophies, to science fiction mythologies.”
The always creative No Exit will return to the Festival on April 6 at Heights Arts. The ensemble was founded by composer Timothy Beyer as an outlet for the commissioning and performance of contemporary avant-garde concert music. No Exit is committed to promoting the works of living composers, particularly the music of young and emerging artists who haven’t yet received either the opportunities or exposure of their better-known counterparts. (Works by Leo Ornstein, Ty Emerson, Per Nørgård, James Praznik, Andrew Rindfleisch & Tristan Murail).
by David Kulma
A stylish concert of Baroque music called “Suppressed Voices: Music of the Banished” took place in the intimate Chapel at Lakewood Congregational Church on Friday night, March 23. Burning River Baroque’s program featured music by three banished composers little performed today — and the ubiquitous Handel, represented by his cantata about a Roman political exile.
by Nicholas Stevens
A white picket fence, a suburban home interior, a blue sky dotted with puffy clouds — and six opera singers, each decked out in a distinct color ranging from deep purple to highlighter orange: such were the sights onstage on the opening night of Baldwin Wallace Conservatory’s production of Domenico Cimarosa’s Il Matrimonio Segreto last week. The show’s bright imagery — Pixar meets Japanese anime, inside a dollhouse — complemented the vibrant acting and spirited singing of the student performers.
by Nicholas Stevens
“There are more things in heaven and earth,” Shakespeare wrote in the voice of the iconic character Hamlet, “Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” The line has supernatural overtones in context, but the essential message — that the staggering variety and abundance of the world defies comprehension — applies just as well to human cultural production. As Wu Man and the Huayin Shadow Puppet Band demonstrated last week at the Cleveland Museum of Art, even the traditional music of a single country can yield practices and sounds that seem universes, rather than mere miles or years, apart.
by Daniel Hathaway
For four decades, Trinity Cathedral has presented an evening concert on Good Friday, often dedicated to a setting of the Passion of Jesus drawn from one of the four Gospels.
On Friday, March 30 at 7:30 pm, music director Todd Wilson will lead the Cathedral Choir, soloists, and members of Trinity Chamber Orchestra in a particularly striking setting of the Passion according to John by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Completed in Austria in 1982, Passio was the culmination of Pärt’s tintinnabuli style, and in many ways harks back to the liturgical passion settings of the middle ages.
In one of several near-mystical statements explaining that style of composition, Pärt wrote on his website,
Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers — in my life, my music, my work. In my dark hours, I have the certain feeling that everything outside this one thing has no meaning. The complex and many-faceted only confuses me, and I must search for unity. What is it, this one thing, and how do I find my way to it?
by Jarrett Hoffman
The Brentano String Quartet has an affinity for both the standard repertoire and music very old and very new. Their program on the Oberlin Artist Recital Series at Finney Chapel on Friday, March 30 at 8:00 pm covers all those bases. Beginning with arrangements of madrigals by Monteverdi and Gesualdo, they’ll jump 400 years to the music of Oberlin Conservatory composition chair Stephen Hartke, then close with Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 12 in D-flat.
Among the Brentano’s many honors, violinists Serena Canin and Mark Steinberg, violist Misha Amory, and cellist Nina Lee celebrated the Quartet’s “silver anniversary” — 25 years — in 2017.
“Our friendship has been the real sine qua non for continuing as a long-term quartet,” Amory wrote in an email while the Quartet was in Spain. “It is possible that we spend as much time with each other as we do with our own families, which without our love and esteem for one another would be a tough proposition. We are not a group that would thrive well on a business-based type of arrangement, where we would meet for rehearsals and concerts but otherwise have nothing to do with each other.”