by Mike Telin
If you had to have musicians living above you, judging from their performance at Pilgrim Church on Sunday, October 13, cellist Darrett Adkins and pianist Cicilia Yudha are two you would want to have. Their concert, which opened Arts Renaissance Tremont’s 29th season, featured intriguing works that proved a cello recital doesn’t always need to include music by the three B’s to hold you in rapt attention.
by Daniel Hathaway
Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his six solo cello suites between 1717 and 1723, when he was employed as Kapellmeister by the Duke of Anhalt-Köthen, but it was only much later that these works became widely known and hailed for their profundity.
Credit Pablo Casals, who bought a second-hand score of the pieces in Barcelona in 1890 at the age of 13, and worked on them for a dozen years before daring to play them in public. He preserved his performances between 1936 and 1939 in a recording that the Library of Congress chose earlier this year for inclusion in the National Recording Registry.
Performances of the six suites have become something of an Everest for cellists. The Cleveland Orchestra’s Dane Johansen hiked the 600-mile Camino de Santiago in 2014, recording the suites in 36 churches along the pilgrimage route. More conventionally but no less impressively, Yo-Yo Ma played all six in one evening at Blossom in August of 2018.
Now, Apollo’s Fire principal cello René Schiffer has decided to take the suites on, but in a different format and from a special point of view. He’ll perform and record them two at a time beginning this weekend. [Read more…]
by Jarrett Hoffman
Murder, cannibalism, a return from the dead, and revenge — basically everything you could want from an evening out. You get all of that in Philip Glass’ and Robert Moran’s The Juniper Tree, presented by CIM Opera Theater beginning on Halloween night, October 31.
Arthur Yorinks’ libretto is based on the Brothers Grimm story, which begins where else but with a stepmother. She worries that her stepson reminds her husband of his own late wife. Her solution? We might call it unique. She kills the kid — gruesomely — then feeds him to her unsuspecting husband in the form of a stew. The boy later returns as a bird, seeking vengeance.
In a phone call, director Dean Southern (above) said he’s long been drawn to the realms of fantasy and horror. “As a kid, I was probably a vampire for Halloween more than anything else.”
by Daniel Hathaway
The nice thing about cultural density is that you can catch more than one concert in an afternoon without much travel or downtime. On Sunday, October 13 at 2:00 pm, the Tri-C Classical Piano Series brought 17-year-old Mexican pianist Daniela Liebman to Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Then at 4:00 pm, Church of the Covenant organist Jonathan Moyer celebrated his first decade in Cleveland with a recital using both of the organs in the nave. Beautiful fall weather in University Circle both enhanced the experience and took its toll on audiences. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
Washington, D.C.-based choir The Thirteen sang a concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in downtown Cleveland on Wednesday evening, October 23, as part of their current tour. The group includes twelve singers, plus director Matthew Robertson, hence his joking suggestion of the hashtag #bakersdozen for social media. The ensemble, founded in 2012, was making its first Cleveland appearance. [Read more…]
by Peter Feher
Max Bruch’s Kol Nidre is a piece that’s both oversold and undersold. It’s a favorite of cello superstars, student concerto competitions, and classical compilation CDs. Conductor and cellist Amit Peled made the intriguing decision to place the work on his debut program as CityMusic Cleveland’s new music director. In a memorable performance, he made a redemptive case for the music itself. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
What do marriage and an octopus have in common? They both served as inspirations for Gregg Kallor’s new work for string octet. On Wednesday, October 30 at 7:30 pm at E.J. Thomas Hall, Tuesday Musical will present “October Octets” featuring the Dover and Escher String Quartets. The program will include the premiere of Kallor’s String Octet as well as Shostakovich’s Two Pieces for String Octet, Op. 11, and Enescu’s Octet for Strings in C, Op. 7. A conversation with the musicians will be held in the Flying Balcony Club beginning at 6:30 pm. Tickets are available online.
First, the marriages. Kallor’s new work will bring together two brilliant string quartets. That’s a marriage of a sort. But there’s more — Dover violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt and Escher cellist Brook Speltz are in fact married. And when composing his String Octet, marriage was at the forefront of Kallor’s thoughts. “I started writing it in the late winter of last year,” the composer said during a recent interview. “But I had proposed to my wife in November, so marriage was very much on my mind.” That marriage took place in September.
Second, the octopus. “My wife has this thing for octopuses, and we’re dealing with eight musicians. It wasn’t a conscious decision but this was all floating around in my head when I was writing the piece.”
by Jarrett Hoffman
You might expect that someone who’s a leader in their field was hooked from their initial encounter with it. Colin Lawson, described as “the doyen of period clarinettists” by BBC Magazine, had a different first impression of early music performance.
“I was rather put off because some of the musical results were not that fantastic,” Lawson said by telephone from the Royal College of Music in London, where he directs the school, chairs its historical performance program, and teaches classical clarinet. “I was very interested in the academic side of early music, but it took me a bit of time to get ‘round to playing it.”
Audiences are certainly happy that he did get around to it. His credentials as a player include performances with Britain’s leading period orchestras, solo appearances in Wigmore and Carnegie Halls, and recordings of an array of concertos and chamber music.
Lawson’s latest project falls in the category of things that are always exciting and often challenging: meeting new musicians — some from another continent, no less — and playing chamber music with them. Next weekend, under the umbrella of Les Délices, he will join oboist Debra Nagy, bassoonist Wouter Verschuren, hornist Todd Williams, and fortepianist Sylvia Berry in three concerts of music by Mozart and Beethoven.
by David Kulma
There is something odd about only looking at audio speakers during a concert of experimental electronic music. How do you humanize such an experience? The thoughtful musicians of No Exit delightfully answered this question in an engaging and interactive concert at Appletree Books on Friday, October 18. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The original Cleveland Orchestra lineup this month was to have featured former and current New York Philharmonic music directors two weeks in a row, but Jaap van Zweden had to withdraw due to a family medical issue in the Netherlands. He was replaced on the weekend of October 17 by the 23-year-old Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä, who had made a sensational debut with the Orchestra last summer at Blossom, and if anything, topped that performance at Severance Hall. [Read more…]