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Archives for October 2019

Electroacoustic composer Sarah Davachi on CMA series at Transformer Station (Oct. 6)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Some composers of electroacoustic music are content to assemble collections of ear-tickling sounds — the musical equivalent of shiny objects that briefly attract attention. Others construct pieces that feature some kind of unifying narrative that invites the listener on a journey with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Canadian-born Sarah Davachi belongs to the latter persuasion, as she demonstrated at Transformer Station on Sunday evening, October 6. Her engaging, hour-long performance was part of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Performing Arts Series. [Read more…]

Cleveland Classical Guitar Society: Raphaël Feuillâtre at Plymouth (Oct. 5)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Concluding a week-long residency, 23-year-old French guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre played the opening concert of the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society’s International Series on Saturday evening, October 5. His program of works by Paraguayan, Spanish, French, Cuban, Brazilian, and Russian composers — some written for the instrument, some transcribed — covered a broad range of styles and introduced one of the bright young lights of the guitar world to a good-sized audience in Plymouth Church. [Read more…]

Kirill Gerstein to give Cleveland premiere of Thomas Adès Piano Concerto

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by Mike Telin 

A new piano concerto is always an occasion, but the premiere of Thomas Adès’ Concerto, performed by pianist Kirill Gerstein and the Boston Symphony under the direction of the composer, has caused critics and audiences to sit up and take note. Following the New York premiere of the work, Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times wrote that the Concerto was

written for Gerstein, who exhilaratingly dispatched this joyous and audacious piece’s formidable solo part… This breathless, 20-minute concerto, structured in three essentially traditional movements (fast, slow, fast), comes across as zesty and accessible. But don’t be fooled. Just below the surface, the music sizzles with modernist harmonies, fractured phrases, gaggles of counterpoint and lyrical strands that keep breaking into skittish bits. The finale is a riotous, clattering, assaultive romp. I can’t wait to hear it again.

This weekend Kirill Gerstein will play the Cleveland premiere of Adès’ Piano Concerto with The Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of Alan Gilbert. The program also includes J.S. Bach’s Suite No. 3 and Brahms’ Symphony No. 3. The Severance Hall concerts take place on Friday, October 11 at 11:00 am (no Bach) and 8:00 pm, and Saturday, October 12 at 8:00 pm. Tickets are available here.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Composers Guild kicks off 60th anniversary on Sunday

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by Mike Telin

If you’ve ever been asked to define new music, you’ve probably found yourself over-thinking the question. As the Minneapolis-based ensemble Zeitgeist explains it on their website, “In the end, new music is simply that: newly created music written by living composers.”

On Sunday, October 13 at 3:00 pm in Drinko Hall at Cleveland State University, the Cleveland Composers Guild will kick off its 60th anniversary season with a program that celebrates the membership’s diversity of musical styles. The free concert will feature works by Sebastian Birch, Margaret Brouwer, Margi Griebling-Haigh, Scott Michal, Ryan Charles Ramer, Robert Rollin, Matthew C. Saunders, and James Wilding.

“I always say that our concerts are for adventurous listeners who like a smorgasbord of the unexpected,” Composers Guild vice-chair Margi Griebling-Haigh said during a telephone interview. [Read more…]

Mexican pianist Daniela Liebman returns to Tri-C Classical Piano Series

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by Daniel Hathaway

She was fourteen when she first played on the Tri-C Classical Piano Series in 2016. Three years later, Mexican pianist Daniela Liebman returns for a free recital of works by Beethoven, Debussy, Prokofiev, and Chopin on Sunday, October 13 at 2:00 pm in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

The original invitation to play in 2016 came through Antonio Pompa-Baldi. “He was on the jury when I won the Russian Piano Competition in California at the age of nine,” Liebman said by telephone from Fort Worth, Texas. “I came to Cleveland to study with him for a couple of months, and I was delighted that he and Emanuela Friscioni invited me to play on the Tri-C series.”

Born in Guadalajara to an American father and Mexican mother, Liebman began studying the piano at a young age. “My dad’s a violinist who graduated from Eastman, but he ended up going into business. He started me on piano at the age of five. [Read more…]

Rocky River Chamber Music Society to feature cimbalom player Alexander Fedoriouk

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by Jarrett Hoffman

The Rocky River Chamber Music Society will explore “Chamber Music of Hungary” to begin its 61st season on Monday, October 14 at 7:30 pm at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church.

Four Cleveland Orchestra members — violinists Katherine Bormann and Emma Shook, violist Stanley Konopka, and cellist Martha Baldwin — will open the program with Bartók’s String Quartet No. 2.

The second half is all trios: Shook will join another Orchestra colleague, bassist Henry Peyrebrune, and cimbalom player Alexander Fedoriouk in traditional folk music from Hungary and Romania, and in works by Brahms and Vittorio Monti. A freewill offering will be taken.

The largest instrument in the hammered dulcimer family, as Fedoriouk expalined in an interview, the cimbalom is struck with wooden hammers to create sound. One feature that distinguishes the instrument from other dulcimers is its damper pedals, an innovation of József Schunda in the 1870s.

[Read more…]

Season 14 of Close Encounters, Year 20 of Heights Arts

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Close Encounters Chamber Music and artistic director Isabel Trautwein have two reasons to celebrate: the series’ 14th season, and the 20th year of its parent organization, Heights Arts.

The minds behind the scheduling have kept things simple for concertgoers to store away in their brains (and for writers to explain): the four concerts take place on Sundays at 3:00 pm, which does seem like a particularly nice time for “up close and personal” chamber music, just as the series likes it. Single and season tickets are available online.

Up first is the Omni Quartet on October 13 at a Carriage House on Herrick Mews Lane in Cleveland Heights. Cleveland Orchestra musicians Amy Lee and Alicia Koelz, violins, Wesley Collins, viola, and Tanya Ell, cello, will bring along Haydn’s Trio in C, Hob V:G1, Mozart’s Quartet No. 22 in B-flat, and Robert Schumann’s Quartet No. 3 in A — written during his exuberant, love-filled first year of marriage to Clara Wieck.

[Read more…]

Finding an unknown song by Karlheinz Stockhausen 

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by Tom Welsh, Director of Performing Arts
Cleveland Museum of Art

The discovery of an unknown song by Karlheinz Stockhausen provides a humanising footnote to his barnstorming 1958 lecture tour of the US.

Reprinted with the permission of The Wire, the article was originally published in July 2019.

I’d been doing some research into the experimental arts scene that flourished in San Francisco’s Bay Area in the 1950s when I unearthed this curious little score — an unknown vocal piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen buried in the papers of composer Seymour Shifrin at Yale University.

Dated 4 January 1959, the piece was written by the then 30-year old Stockhausen as a present to Shifrin’s young son Teddy. The lyric — “Clasp the hands and know the thoughts of men in other lands” — is the last line of the final stanza of the John Masefield poem The Ship And Her Makers, a romantic paean to the fortitude of maritime explorers that had been published early in the century in Salt-Water Poems And Ballads. [Read more…]

Arts Renaissance Tremont turns twenty-nine this season

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by Mike Telin 

Since its founding in 1991, Arts Renaissance Tremont (ART) has been a cultural pillar in that West Side Cleveland neighborhood. And from the beginning, the organization has made its home at the historic Pilgrim Congregational UCC. Under the tireless direction of its founder and director Chris Haff-Paluck (left, with Jinjoo Cho), with assistance from a group of dedicated board members and volunteers, ART has remained true to its vision of keeping concerts free of charge.

On Sunday, October 13 at 3:00 pm, ART will kick off its 29th season with a recital by cellist Darrett Adkins and pianist Cicilia Yudha. Their program will feature works by Janáček, Kodály, Messiaen, and Chopin.

“Twenty-nine years — who knows where all the time has gone?” Haff-Paluck said during an interview, noting that the Tremont neighborhood was very different in the early ‘90s. “There are so many restaurants and galleries now, but it wasn’t that way back then. People wanted arts programs to be happening in the neighborhood.”

[Read more…]

Lauren Cauley & Mariel Roberts on Signature Series at LCCC (Sept. 26)

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by Nicholas Stevens

The black box theatre, the unassuming intimacy, the ineffable crackle of composers and instrumentalists sitting ten feet apart: a recent concert at Lorain County Community College looked and felt like a typical new music occasion. Yet its unceasing flow of solos and duos foreclosed any temptation to write the experience off as just another contemporary show. To describe violinist Lauren Cauley and cellist Mariel Roberts, the performers who captivated listeners in LCCC’s Cirigliano Studio Theatre on Thursday, September 26, as “emerging” would be to conflate youth with artistic achievement — a mistake. [Read more…]

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