by Mike Telin
“In many ways we’re long overdue for a collaboration, and I wanted to do something that neither group could do on their own,” Les Délices founder and artistic director Debra Nagy said by telephone. Quire Cleveland co-founder and artistic director Ross Duffin agrees. “This is a great opportunity for us to perform repertoire that otherwise would be very difficult to pull off,” he said during a separate interview.
On Friday, April 27 at 7:30 pm at St. Noel Church in Willoughby Hills, the two groups will come together for the first performance of “Let the Heavens Rejoice,” a showcase of celebratory psalms for 22 voices and 14 instruments conducted by Scott Metcalfe and featuring tenor Owen McIntosh, baritone Jeffrey Strauss, and sopranos Elena Mullins and Sarah Coffman. The program will be repeated on Saturday, April 28 at 8:00 pm at Lakewood Congregational Church, and on Sunday, April 29 at 4:00 pm at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights. Tickets are available online. A free open rehearsal will be held on Wednesday, April 25 from 7:00 pm until 10:00 pm at Plymouth Church.
Variety, virtuosity, and vitality: by inviting the Laredo-Robinson Duo to play the penultimate concert of its 27th season, Arts Renaissance Tremont virtually guaranteed that listeners would experience all of the above. In a concert in Pilgrim Church on Sunday, April 15, the distinguished spouses Jaime Laredo, violin, and Sharon Robinson, cello, championed 20th-century and new pieces alongside familiar favorites.
Last Saturday, April 14, the Youngstown Symphony presented “Side by Side,” the fourth and last Classics Series concert under the baton of Randall Craig Fleischer. The evening’s highlight was the performance of movements from Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony with teenage Youth Symphony musicians sitting in tandem with regular orchestra members.
The final event in the Cleveland Chamber Symphony’s 2018 NEOSonicFest gave eight young composers the opportunity to hear their creations played by a professional orchestra led by Steven Smith — himself a composer. The pieces were performed in Gamble Auditorium at Baldwin Wallace University on Wednesday, April 11.
A co-founder of Splinter Reeds, a San Francisco-based reed quintet, improviser and educator 
“If we were back in Europe where the band members’ families are from, we could fairly readily drive to each other’s houses,” Harmonia founder and accordionist Walt Mahovlich said in a recent conversation. “But we would never have met being from those different backgrounds — different worlds.”