by David Kulma
A glorious evening of music titled “Audra McDonald Sings Broadway” featured that justly famous soprano performing with The Cleveland Orchestra and conductor Andy Einhorn. The July 29 program at Blossom Music Center included a variety of songs from musicals famous and rare, from the works of Rodgers & Hammerstein to living composers.
by Timothy Robson
On Sunday, August 5 at Blossom Music Center, The Cleveland Orchestra played a concise and musically satisfying program of works by three Czech composers: Smetana, Janáček, and Dvořák. British conductor Michael Francis led the stylish performance. With the temperature hovering around a sweltering and humid 87 degrees at concert time, the male members of the orchestra sensibly doffed their usual white dinner jackets for shirtsleeves. Even the tree-surrounded — and usually cooler — Blossom grounds failed to provide much relief from the midsummer heat.
by David Kulma
Having recently turned 91, Herbert Blomstedt is practically an institution in himself, with a career spanning more than six decades. On Saturday, July 28, he returned to Northeast Ohio to lead The Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom Music Center in two canonical symphonies by Mozart and Brahms. The “Jupiter” was so smooth and straightforward as to pass by unremarkably, while the stirringly passionate performance of Brahms 4 showed how a seasoned conductor with a top-flight orchestra can achieve magic.
by Alice Koeninger
Time Canvas Ensemble will cap off their Home Not Home concert trilogy with four performances of “Hip Hop and Minimalism,” featuring hip-hop artist and mental health advocate Archie Green (left). Three house shows will take place on Thursday, August 9 and Friday the 10th at 6:30 pm, and on Sunday the 12th at 4:00 pm. RSVP through their website and get an email with the house address the day before. A fourth performance will take place at Historic St. John’s on Saturday, August 11 at 8:00 pm — buy tickets here.
In a phone interview with Time Canvas guitarist and executive director Joshua Stauffer, he described how the title Home Not Home relates to hip-hop and minimalism through the African American experience. “Many people don’t feel at home, or completely welcome in their own country,” he said. The Ensemble — which also includes violinist and artistic director Chiara Stauffer and cellist Robert Nicholson — thought that this phenomenon was important to include in their discussion of refugees and what it means to call a country home, especially in a city like Cleveland that is becoming so gentrified.
Stauffer said he thought of Green right away because of his work advocating for mental health in the African American community in Cleveland. Time Canvas is excited to collaborate with him while he raps over and in between minimalist pieces such as John Cage’s In a landscape and Philip Glass’s Mad Rush. Stauffer emphasized that since he is not black, he could not speak to the African American experience, and that Time Canvas’s goal as an ensemble is to “get out of the way” and give Green a platform to speak. “We’re just giving him a lot of paint and putting up a canvas and saying, ‘Go for it!’”
by Robert Rollin
Kent Blossom presented its fifth and final faculty series program in Ludwig Recital Hall last Wednesday, August 1. The evening’s highlight was the gorgeous performance of Charles-Marie Widor’s Sonata for Cello and Piano in A by Richard Weiss, Cleveland Orchestra first assistant principal cello, and Joela Jones, Cleveland Orchestra keyboardist.
by David Kulma
Wind players take every opportunity to play Mozart, and when they are musicians at the highest level, it’s easy to come away smiling. That was the case on the Kent Blossom faculty concert on Wednesday, July 25 in Kent State’s Ludwig Recital Hall, where an array of Mozart’s works for winds made for a splendid evening.
by Daniel Hathaway
For his final performance with Master Singers Inc., the Akron-based chorus he founded 17 years ago, conductor J.D. Goddard will lead two of his all-time favorite works by Johannes Brahms — the Fourth Symphony and A German Requiem. The free concert, featuring some 70 singers and full orchestra, will take place on Sunday, August 12 at 3:00 pm in SS. Cosmas and Damian Church in Twinsburg.
Goddard and his singers have logged some impressive statistics over the years, having performed 61 major works, 71 world premieres, and 22 American premieres. “That’s what I set out to do,” the 73-year-old conductor said in a telephone conversation. “All I wanted to perform was classical choral literature and world premieres. There are many very good choral organizations out there that do pops and barbershop — far more than sing classical music— but I tell people up front that our motto is ‘preserve the past and premiere the future of classical choral literature.’ Come sing with us and see if that’s for you.”
The conductor’s invitation to ‘come sing with us’ is one of Goddard’s guiding principles. “We have an open-door policy and there are virtually no auditions,” he said. “Some conductors want to audition people out, but we audition to include, not exclude.” That system seems to have worked for nearly two decades, and to some extent, his singers self-select themselves. “The majority of people who come and sit in on a rehearsal don’t come back because they realize it really is just classical music.”
by Mike Telin
The sounds of Russian music will fill Blossom Music Center on Saturday, August 11 at 8:00 pm when Vasily Petrenko leads The Cleveland Orchestra in Liadov’s Baba-Yaga, Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5. Tickets are available online.
The concert also marks the return visit to the Blossom stage by pianist Simon Trpčeski. “I made my Cleveland Orchestra debut at Blossom playing Rachmaninoff’s second concerto and it was an honor to be asked to perform that same piece the following year on the subscription series at Severance Hall,” the pianist said by telephone from California, where he was premiering a new concerto at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music.
“It’s not just my opinion, but Cleveland is one of the top orchestras in the world, and Blossom is such a beautiful venue. This time I am playing a different concerto, but it is by the same composer,” the Macedonian pianist said. “And to play it with my good friend Vasily — we’ve played and recorded all of the Rachmaninoff concertos — is going to be a fantastic musical journey.”
by Kelly Ferjutz
Special to ClevelandClassical.com
Ohio Light Opera is no stranger to the works of Franz Lehár: prior to this year, seven of his operettas had been performed by the company, the most frequent being his luscious The Merry Widow. Number eight, having opened at Freedlander Theatre on July 25, is Cloclo, which is not in the usual Viennese operetta mode. First off, it takes place in Paris, as well as the French countryside near Perpignan. And written a few years after the end of WWI, its musical sensibility sensibility is a good bit different: it includes jazz, a tango, blues, and even a take-off on the final scene from Fledermaus — not originally written by Lehár. You know the one, when the inmates and jailor are happily mixed with champagne. [Read more…]
Andrea Kalyn, Dean of the Oberlin Conservatory since February 2014, has been appointed 17th president of the New England Conservatory. She will take up her new duties in Boston in January, 2019. Read a press release here.