by Rory O’Donoghue
The Cleveland Chamber Symphony fused ballet and contemporary music on April 7 at the Maltz Performing Arts Center. Music director and conductor Steven Smith led the Grammy-winning ensemble through an energetic program with guest dancers from two local companies.
by Mike Telin
Ecstasy:
1) An overwhelming feeling of great happiness or joyful excitement.
2) An emotional or religious frenzy or trance-like state, originally one involving an experience of mystic self-transcendence.
This week at Severance Hall, guest conductor Stéphane Denève will lead The Cleveland Orchestra in a musical exploration of the realm of ecstasy. The program includes Jennifer Higdon’s blue cathedral, James MacMillan’s Piano Concerto No. 3 (“The Mysteries of Light”) featuring Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, and Scriabin’s The Poem of Ecstasy. Performances take place on Thursday, April 25 at 7:30 pm, Friday at 11:00 am (no MacMillan), and Saturday at 8:00 pm. Tickets are available online.
by David Kulma
The Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival’s April 13 concert in Gamble Auditorium featured the BW Motet Choir under Dirk Garner in motets and cantatas from across Bach’s life. The first half paired what might be Bach’s earliest motet with his longest. The short motet Ich lasse dich nicht, du segnest mich denn, BWV Anh. 159 for choir and organ was long thought to be by an older relative, Johann Christoph Bach. Now accepted to be by the most famous Bach, this work takes its text from Genesis: “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Although string quartets normally dominate its guest list, the Cleveland Chamber Music Society will take a different tack for the finale of its 69th season. William Caballero, principal horn of the Pittsburgh Symphony for the last 29 seasons, will bring two of his orchestra colleagues along to Forest Hills Presbyterian Church on Tuesday, April 30 for an unusual program of chamber music.
The 7:30 pm concert will feature Caballero and pianist Rodrigo Ojeda in Eugène Bozza’s En Foret, Anthony Plog’s Three Miniatures, Oliver Knussen’s Horn Concerto, and an arrangement of Johannes Brahms’ Intermezzo in A, Op. 118, No. 2. Pittsburgh Symphony principal oboe Cynthia DeAlmeida will join the party for Carl Reinecke’s Trio for Piano, Oboe and Horn in a, Op. 188.
In a recent phone interview, Caballero said, “My last full recital was in 2002 — I usually only play half recitals for workshops, or split recitals with colleagues. So I wanted to choose some repertoire for Cleveland that I hadn’t played before.” [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
Violetta Valéry is among the most popular of the many sopranos who die in the last acts of operas. You can relive the story of that “fallen woman” this weekend when Cleveland Opera Theater turns the Maltz Performing Arts Center into an opera house for Verdi’s La traviata.
Scott Skiba directs, Domenico Boyagian conducts, and the cast features Angela Mortellaro as Violetta, Benjamin Werley as Alfredo, and Grant Youngblood as Germont. The Act II party scene is always a highlight, but this one, featuring Cleveland Burlesque, promises to be a show-stopper. The lights go up on Friday, April 26 at 7:00 pm and on Sunday, April 28 at 3:00 pm. Tickets are available online.
“Cleveland Burlesque performs all around Cleveland,” Skiba said during a telephone conversation, “and I reached out to them because we are setting the production in contemporary times. I was thinking, who would Flora hire to perform at her party, and I thought she would hire burlesque dancers.”
by Daniel Hathaway
“Everyone’s Italian tonight,” host and conductor Carl Topilow exclaimed, greeting the capacity Cleveland POPS audience at Severance Hall on Saturday, April 13. With the engaging assistance of soprano Alyson Cambridge, tenor John Cudia, and the POPS Chorus — not to mention a special green, white, and red clarinet, assembled from Topilow’s multichromatic collection of instruments — the Orchestra lined up and checked off 21 of everyone’s favorite selections from Italian opera, leaving few corners of the repertoire unexplored. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Les Délices concluded their tenth anniversary season from April 5-7 with evocations of what our Baroque forebears thought to be the basic constituents of the natural world. The three programs sprang from founder and oboist Debra Nagy’s arrangement of Jean-Féry Rebel’s brilliant Les Elements, but also included extracts from the operas of Jean-Philippe Rameau, and a new work commissioned from Theo Chandler. Harpsichordist Mark Edwards provided a complementary interlude: two of Rameau’s keyboard works that express the powers of nature. [Read more…]
by Jarrett Hoffman
Inside every artist’s brain is a region where the words of their mentors float around like balloons, even years or decades later. During a recent phone call, bassoonist Barry Stees looked back on one such piece of advice from the late K. David Van Hoesen, his former teacher at the Eastman School of Music.
“He was always encouraging us to read literature, view art, and take in other forms of culture to fill in the context behind the music we were learning,” said Stees, who serves as assistant principal bassoon in The Cleveland Orchestra.
That stuck with him. And now, he’s developed a concert program themed around music and the visual art and artists that inspired it. He’ll bring that to life with pianist Randall Fusco, oboist Cynthia Watson Sperl, and the Callisto Quartet at Chagrin Falls United Methodist Church this Friday, April 26 at 7:30 pm as part of the Chagrin Arts series. Visual art will be displayed on the walls, and shown on projections.
by Jarrett Hoffman
By age 30, clarinetist David Krakauer began to feel that he was missing something in his life. He had already developed a high-level career as a chamber musician, including winning the Naumburg Award with the Aspen Wind Quintet. But he found himself thinking of the jazz playing he had left behind in his early twenties.
“There was this moment where I thought, wow, I kind of threw the baby out with the bathwater,” Krakauer told me during a recent phone call. “I wanted to get back to improvising and playing ‘off the page.’”
He took an interest in klezmer music, “almost as a hobby,” he said, and started doing small gigs at Jewish community centers. “I was suddenly learning all about the Jewishness that I hadn’t really known I had. There was a shock of recognition in playing that music — I thought, this sounds like the strong Yiddish accent of my grandmother. I felt like I had come home in a way.”
by Mike Telin
The decision to pursue the path of a professional musician came late for Judicaël Perroy. “I didn’t decide until I was in my twenties,” the French-born guitarist wrote in an email. Perroy, who serves on the faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory, said that although he learned to play the guitar early in life, he was always interested in other subjects while he was in school. “I was kind of a child prodigy and everybody thought that I would become a guitarist. So I decided late because I wanted it to be my decision.”
On Saturday, April 27 at 7:30 pm in Plymouth Church, Perroy will make his Cleveland debut with a concert featuring works by Bach, Sor, Mertz, Villa-Lobos, and Albéniz. The concert is presented as part of the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society’s International Series. Tickets are available online.