by David Kulma
A golden age in American popular music began about a century ago. Lasting four decades and pervading musical theater, sound recordings, film, radio, and jazz stylings, it left a body of music that has never gone out of circulation and is regularly trumpeted as one of America’s best collective creations. We now call it “The Great American Songbook.”
by David Kulma
There is something about the richly layered music of Johannes Brahms that brings out the best in musicians’ virtuosity and interpretive taste. Brahms somehow brings everything together. Exhibit A is the most recent Heights Arts Close Encounters program, “Johann Sebastian, Igor, and One French Horn,” performed on Sunday, March 10 at a board member’s house in Shaker Heights. Artistic director and violinist Isabel Trautwein and her longtime collaborative pianist Patti Wolf played duos by Bach and Stravinsky, and hornist Richard King joined them for Brahms’s Horn Trio. [Read more…]
by David Kulma
The West Shore Chorale and its longtime music director John Drotleff focused on psalms settings by Mozart and Bernstein together with a work by David Conte for its performance on the Helen D. Schubert Concert Series at The Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist on Friday, March 1.
by Mike Telin
Curating thoughtfully-programmed, politically-inspired concerts has become a calling card for the innovative, Cleveland-based ensemble Burning River Baroque.
In the past year, soprano Malina Rauschenfels and harpsichordist Paula Maust have presented “Suppressed Voices: Music of the Banished” which featured music by Johann Rosenmüller — a German who escaped to Italy after being imprisoned for homosexuality — and Peter Philips, who was imprisoned as a Catholic in Anglican England, then later fled to the Spanish Netherlands. “Destructive Desires” examined works by Couperin, Rameau, Jacquet de la Guerre, Caccini, Eccles, and Courbois under the light of the #MeToo era.
On Wednesday, March 20 at Glo, Rauschenfels and Maust will be joined by Sarah Lynn, baroque flute, and Glenna Curren, baroque cello, in a concert titled “The Other Side of the Story.” The program, which draws on ancient mythology, literature, and Biblical passages, highlights characters whose viewpoints are underrepresented.
Presented by Fresh Perspectives, the evening includes a 6:45 pm pre-concert talk with host Devin Hinzo and musician Zach Manzi. [Read more…]
by Rory O’Donoghue
Cellist Brian Thornton explores late chamber works by Debussy and Brahms with creative polish and refined sensitivity on his latest album from Steinway & Sons. Joined in masterful collaboration by a fellow Cleveland Orchestra member, principal clarinet Afendi Yusuf, and the superb pianist Spencer Myer, Thornton pairs Debussy’s 1915 Cello Sonata with Brahms’ 1891 Clarinet Trio, Op. 114, a thoughtful juxtaposition of the composers’ mature styles. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Organist Paul Jacobs will return to Severance Hall this week to play four performances of Viennese composer Bernd Richard Deutsch’s Okeanos with Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra.
The concerts, which begin on Thursday evening, March 14 and run through Sunday afternoon, March 17, include Haydn’s Symphony No. 34 and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. This week’s programs mark the first United States performances of Deutsch’s organ concerto, which received its debut in November of 2015 by Wolfgang Kogert and Radio-Symphonie-orchester Wien in the Großer Saal of Vienna’s Musikverein.
I caught up with Jacobs on his mobile phone during a break between auditions at the Juilliard School in New York to ask him for some of his impressions of Deutsch and Okeanos.
“I only knew Deutsch by name, but he has quite a successful career and reputation in Europe. It’s my hope that his music becomes better known here in the United States. It’s really excellent writing. We’ve spoken on the phone, and we’re the same age, which is an interesting feature of the collaboration.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
On Friday, March 15 at 7:30 pm, Tom Trenney will bring his Detroit-based Sounding Light Chamber Choir (“the choir of many voices…one song”) to St. John’s Cathedral in downtown Cleveland for a performance on the Helen D. Schubert series of John Muehleisen’s Pietà, a 90-minute cantata inspired by the stories of three grieving mothers.
“The first story is about the Passion of Jesus Christ,” Trenny said in a telephone conversation. “The second is about the World War II soldier John Kipling and his mother Carrie, who communicated through letters and writings by father Rudyard. The third is based on the eulogy from Matthew Shepard’s funeral.
“Pietá is about the incredible sense of hope and light that emerges on the other side of tragedy. It’s a message of compassion — the opportunity we all have to sit with someone in grief, and help them experience the joy and grace that is present even in the most difficult moments of life.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
For its spring production, Kent State Opera will present Aaron Copland’s 1954 opera, The Tender Land — a title that seems not to have been staged in Northeast Ohio for at least ten years, although a suite of orchestral excerpts has appeared with some regularity on concert programs.
In a telephone conversation with music director Jay White, the Kent professor admitted that Tender Land was not on his radar before he and Marla Berg decided to produce it at Kent. “The only thing I was familiar with was the choral arrangements of ‘The Promise of Living’ and ‘Stomp Your Foot,’” he said. “Marla wanted to do something in English again and we had done an excerpt from it in our scenes program a couple of years ago. There are essentially three main male characters and two main female characters, and for the first time, we actually had enough men to fill all the principal roles.”
Inspired by Walker Evans’ Depression-era photos and James Agee’s book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and with a libretto by Horace Everett under the pseudonym of Erik Johns, the opera was originally conceived for broadcast on television, but its producers sank the project. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
In his spoken introduction before the Cleveland Chamber Choir concert on Sunday afternoon, March 10, Charles Edward McGuire characterized the program as very difficult. The statement was true, but director Scott MacPherson and the Choir gave extraordinary and virtuosic performances of unaccompanied music by three masters of choral music — Johannes Brahms, Andrew Rindfleisch, and Benjamin Britten. First Baptist Church of Greater Cleveland was an ideal location, with resonant but not overly reverberent acoustics that flattered the group’s well-blended sound but didn’t muddy the musical textures. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
Despite the lurid title of last weekend’s Apollo’s Fire concerts — Three Duels and a Funeral — no blood was shed onstage at St. Paul’s Church in Cleveland Heights on Friday evening, March 8. The entertaining program concocted by director Jeannette Sorrell was a set of concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach and Antonio Vivaldi, plus a humorous solo cantata by Georg Philipp Telemann eulogizing a talented, but murdered, canary. Each of the works had its own imaginative character. [Read more…]