by Nicholas Stevens
“Forging New Paths,” the title of ChamberFest Cleveland’s sixth concert this season, refers to a time when critics feared that classical music was dying. In an article titled “New Paths,” Robert Schumann predicted that his young colleague Brahms would become German art music’s savior. The unstated premise was that it needed one. [Read more…]
by Delaney Meyers
Credo Music’s official summer concert season of over 12 performances will kick off on Tuesday, July 3 at 7:30 pm with a performance by the Arianna String Quartet at Oberlin Conservatory’s Kulas Recital Hall. Returning as festival faculty for the third time, the Quartet has programmed chamber music fan favorites as well as some less-often heard pieces.
The first piece will be Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 1. In a recent phone conversation, Arianna violist Joanna Mendoza said that this quartet is “not so well known.” She explained that the early composition was written “during a good time in Shostakovich’s life, when he’d just had his first baby, Maxim. It has a real freshness and brightness to it that his later works don’t.” She added that, out of his fifteen quartets, “it sounds least like the Shostakovich many listeners have come to expect.”
The Quartet will be also be performing a new work composed for them by jazz pianist, Webster University professor, and friend Kim Portnoy. This commission came about after first violinist John McGrosso heard Portnoy’s jazz trio perform a version of it at a house concert and thought, “What would this be like for string quartet?”
by Delaney Meyers
Opening night of ContempOpera Cleveland’s production of Mark Kohn’s one-woman opera Mary Chestnut left a powerful and emotional impact on Friday, June 15, in the intimate James Levine Theater at Cleveland Public Theater. [Read more…]
by Delaney Meyers
ENCORE Chamber Music festival continued on Sunday, June 17 at Gilmour Academy’s Tudor House with Mozart’s String Quintet No. 3 in C and Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence. Festival director and violinist Jinjoo Cho and faculty artists violist Eric Wong and cellist Si-Yan Darren Li were joined by guest violist Mathieu Herzog, as well as two ENCORE Festival student artists, violinist Aaron Chan and cellist Tate Zawadiuk. [Read more…]
by David Kulma
A rare operatic treat graced the Ohio Theatre at Playhouse Square on Saturday, June 16: a single performance of Stanisław Moniuszko’s 19th-century, Polish-language gem Straszny dwór. Designed to celebrate the centenary of Polish independence, this traditionally-staged production with Cleveland Ballet added up to an uneven evening. [Read more…]
by Jarrett Hoffman
Beginning with a silly plot of romance, then traversing the dramas of capital-R Romance, and ending with a look back at a spouse’s death — the first faculty concert at this year’s Kent Blossom Music Festival will be “quite a journey, for sure,” cellist Mark Kosower said during a phone call.
He and pianist Jee-Won Oh will take the stage of Ludwig Recital Hall at Kent State on Tuesday, July 3 at 7:30 pm for a program that’s especially intriguing for its ending: the cellist’s arrangement of J.S. Bach’s Violin Partita No. 2 in d.
“It’s part of a project I launched in the spring here in Cleveland called ‘Bach for Humanity,’” Kosower said. “Basically what I’m doing over three years is bringing all of the cello suites and the violin sonatas and partitas to a cross-section of the community through educational performances, outreach, and performances in concert halls and perhaps some unconventional venues.”
by Kelly Ferjutz
Special to ClevelandClassical.com
If you enjoy music from the Great American Songbook or the Golden Age of Broadway, then you’re already familiar with a good number of songs from Richard Rodgers’ and Lorenz Hart’s Babes in Arms. After opening on April 14, 1937 and running for 289 performances, the musical never again appeared on Broadway, quite possibly because of the show’s politically incorrect views and language. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Stevens
What requires thirty-five music stands, involves movement and memorization, and sheds new light on the works of the classical canon? Last Saturday afternoon, June 23 at Cleveland State University’s Drinko Hall, it was the student participants and associates of the Cleveland Trombone Seminar, playing together as a choir. The low brass players worked wonders in a program of Austro-German Baroque and Romantic repertoire. [Read more…]
by David Kulma
The Syndicate for the New Arts has evolved from its origin as a contemporary classical ensemble and has slowly become a local presenting organization in the genreless underground music scene. With the most recent offering on Tuesday, June 19 at Historic St. Johns in Ohio City, wholly pre-composed music fit the new curating Syndicate’s zeitgeist, but even with some raucous weirdness, this evening was one of its tamest. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Stevens
In the fifth concert of this year’s ChamberFest Cleveland season, programming took “A Turn in the Road” amid the festival’s theme of searching for freedom. Three trios played works by Alban Berg, George Crumb, and Antonín Dvořák, each of whom sought liberation from aesthetic constraints in some way. The resulting musical experience on June 21 in the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Hall had remarkable stylistic and sonic range. [Read more…]