by David Kulma
Cleveland Orchestra principal cellist Mark Kosower and his regular collaborator, pianist Jee-Won Oh, inaugurated both the 50th year of the Kent Blossom Music Festival and the newly-laid stage floor of Kent State University’s Ludwig Hall on Tuesday, July 3. This marvelously-played faculty concert featured four B’s: sonatas by Frank Bridge and Samuel Barber bookended by Beethoven at his silliest and solo Bach at his most eloquent. [Read more…]
by Delaney Meyers
The Arianna Quartet returned to Credo Music at Oberlin Conservatory for a week of coaching, teaching, and a performance on Tuesday, July 3rd. The sold-out audience in Kulas Recital Hall was treated to a lovely escape from the summer heat with an evening of first-class chamber music. [Read more…]
by Alice Koeninger
Despite its title, Tri-C Jazz Fest deviated from true jazz to more pop styles of music on the evening of Saturday, June 30. Snarky Puppy began their sold-out set around 6:00 pm in the Ohio Theatre. The large audience included entire families, all excited to hear this Grammy-award winning band perform. [Read more…]
by Delaney Meyers
ENCORE Chamber Music continued on Friday evening, July 6 in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music, featuring violinist and founder Jinjoo Cho with renowned pianist Itamar Golan. Their partnership was immediately evident in Britten’s Suite for Violin and Piano, Op. 6. The March was fearless, vigorous, and playful, and the Molto perpetuo was full of appropriately relentless grit. [Read more…]
by Delaney Meyers
On Thursday evening, June 28, Dee Dee Bridgewater kicked off the 39th annual Tri-C JazzFest with a performance of her 2017 concept album Memphis… Yes, I’m Ready. The DIVA Jazz Orchestra (left) opened the night with original music, some of which will appear on their upcoming 25th anniversary celebration album in March. Each piece, composed by members of the band, featured various musicians as they sauntered up to the mic to take their solos. [Read more…]
by Alice Koeninger
Friday night of the Tri-C Jazz Fest was a whirl of music, from the outdoor stage on a street lined with food trucks, to the steady stream of shows in the Playhouse Square theaters. Bands such as Organ Ism, Acid Cats, and Uptown Buddha filled the blocked-off streets with their neo-soul, funk, jazz, and hip-hop hybrids. Tents were selling Cleveland-themed clothes, jewelry, and household items, plus some more unique products like wine slushies or bags made from recycled jeans. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Piano professor Robert Shannon is eagerly waiting to welcome this year’s participants in the Thomas & Evon Cooper Piano Competition to the Oberlin campus later this week. “This year the lineup is stronger than ever,” Shannon said in a recent telephone conversation. “There’re some impressive people, and the overall level is consistently high.” (Photo: the semifinalists in 2016.)
The biennial piano contest, which alternates with a violin competition, will be fueled by 31 young players from seven different countries (see the roster of competitors and their repertoire here). The 13-18 year-olds have been selected from a field of some 90 applicants who have been drawn to the Cooper event through its reputation alone. “We don’t actively recruit,” Shannon said. “We just publish the announcement and we’re well enough known by now that it just happens. The first year we held the Cooper we had something like 140 pianists apply, but then I think people figured out how challenging it was going to be. We’ve stabilized now at about 90 applicants.”
This year’s competitors include eleven U.S. citizens, seven from China, five from Canada, three from South Korea, two each from Finland and Taiwan, and one from Norway.
by Mike Telin
This year’s sole competitor from Ohio in the Cooper International Piano Competition, fourteen-year-old Kasey Shao began her studies at age six. During a recent telephone conversation from her home in Cincinnati, the Walnut Hills High School sophomore said that she has known about the Cooper Competition from the time it began. “I’ve watched the live streams and broadcasts, and I’ve always wanted to compete in it. Now that I’m finally old enough, I applied and got in. I’m very excited to compete and to meet the other contestants.”
No stranger to the competition world, Shao is a two-time grand-prize winner of the National League of Performing Arts. She has been awarded first prize at the Crescendo International Music Competition, West Chester Piano Competition, and Princeton Festival Piano Competition, as well as grand prize and first place at the Steinway Society of New Jersey Young Pianist Competition. [Read more…]
by Kelly Ferjutz
Special to ClevelandClassical.com
If you blink during the momentary lights-out between the end of the overture and the curtain going up, you might think you’ve somehow been transported to Paris in 1929. Time-travel, perhaps? Ohio Light Opera’s production of Fifty Million Frenchmen in Freedlander Theater at the College of Wooster is very realistic, to be sure, and totally enjoyable, but then, what’s not to like in a Cole Porter creation? His insouciant music and beguiling lyrics can support just about any plot imaginable. But this one, by Herbert Fields, is downright perfect. [Read more…]
by David Kulma
ENCORE Chamber Music continued its third season on Friday, June 29 in CIM’s Mixon Hall with an enjoyable concert celebrating “music written and inspired by fiery female artists” and entitled “Nasty Women.” This reference is to Donald Trump’s ad hominem attack on Hillary Clinton during the third presidential debate, which many liberal women immediately adopted as a badge of honor. [Read more…]