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Archives for May 2022

DIARY: Weekend, May 20 – May 22, 2022  

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by Daniel Hathaway

IN THIS EDITION:

. A bulging weekend concert calendar

. Almanac: Clara Schumann dies, Verdi’s Requiem receives its first performance, and Richard Wagner is born

THIS WEEKEND’S EVENTS:

There appears to be something for everyone this weekend, which offers music from the very old to the very new performed by chamber groups, choruses, and orchestras. Check our Concert Listings page for program details and ticket information.

MAY 20 – FRIDAY

At 11:00 am Franz Welser-Möst will lead The Cleveland Orchestra in Berg’s Lyric Suite and Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 at Mandel Concert Hall, and almost next door at 12:15 pm, the McGaffin Carillon Springtime Concert & Live Stream will feature George Leggiero performing an all-Dutch program from the 17th and 20th centuries. [Read more…]

DIARY: Thursday, May 19, 2022

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by Jarrett Hoffman

IN THIS EDITION:

•In the news: Colin Davin heads off to Shenandoah Conservatory, Yo-Yo Ma wins the Birgit Nilsson Prize, and the League of American Orchestras announces its 2022 National Conference.

•Interesting reads: when Kyiv was a modernist musical hotbed, a classical radio station in Boston attracting young listeners, and a donkey making its Met debut.

•Almanac: an 1860s symphony by Alice Mary Smith, pianist-composer Linda Martinez’s collaborations with Destiny’s Child, and her score to the silent film The Rag Man.

[Read more…]

No Exit: Sounds of Despair at SPACES Gallery (Apr. 29)

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by Jacob Strauss

Unless you have been through it, it is impossible to grasp the brutalities of war. You cannot imagine the violence, the hunger, the desperation, the isolation. You cannot reckon the infinite death sowed through the ground. Brutality is the reality. It creates a different kind of human.

On April 29th at SPACES gallery in Hingetown, No Exit’s program gave the audience music of total anxiety and horror, melancholic hope, and of life’s long continuity without much meaning. [Read more…]

Art Song Festival rises again
from May 23-28 at CIM 

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by Daniel Hathaway

It’s been rough going for Art Song Festival for the past two years. Founder George Vassos passed away after a long teaching and entrepreneurial career in February of 2020, and although detailed plans were in place to hold the festival that year, concerns about the well-documented spread of COVID via aerosols among singers dictated a postponement.

“It feels like such a gift that the Art Song Festival is actually happening,” director Dean Southern said in a recent phone conversation. “It’s also time for reflection, and I find myself getting to a really reflective place.

“More than two years ago, George, Tamara Wilson, and Warren Jones were planning the 2020 Festival, The Cleveland Orchestra was going to do Otello, and we worked it out so that Tamara could do both, then that all got canceled. We postponed to 2021, when it all got canceled again. So it feels quite amazing that it’s all going to come back this year. For me, spring and Art Song Festival just go together.” [Read more…]

Soprano Tamara Wilson to open Cleveland Art Song Festival

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by Mike Telin

The last time Tamara Wilson was in town, she was here to perform the title role of Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos with The Cleveland Orchestra. Next week the critically acclaimed soprano will open the Cleveland Art Song Festival with a recital on Monday, May 23 at 8:00 pm in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

Assisted by pianist Warren Jones, the program, titled “Enchantment,” includes works by Debussy, Severac, Chausson, Han, Handel, Strauss, and Grieg, along with the world premiere of Evan Snyder’s Tiffandra’s Spellbook. Tickets are available online.

In addition to Monday’s recital, Wilson will present master classes on Friday, May 27 at 10:30 am and 3:00 pm in Mixon Hall. And you can also catch her down the street at Severance Music Center where she will be singing the role of Desdemona in The Cleveland Orchestra’s concert performances of Verdi’s Otello on May 21, 26, and 29.

Like many, the long absence of live performances due to the coronavirus caused Wilson to re-examine things, one of which was a program she had created for a performance that was postponed.

“I was looking at it and I thought, you know what, I don’t want to sing these songs anymore,” Wilson said during a recent telephone conversation. “So I talked to Warren and said, can we just build a whole new program? And he said sure.” [Read more…]

Quire Cleveland: “Resonant Glory” at St. John’s Cathedral (May 15)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Of the three venues that Quire Cleveland’s artistic director Jay White chose for the ensemble’s “Music for Grand Spaces” trilogy, none fits the description quite so aptly as the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in downtown Cleveland. It was there that Quire opened its series of programs designed for churches with a resonant acoustic on Friday, May 13 with a splendid selection of pieces.

You wouldn’t expect that acoustic from a glance at the nave, which is wide and long, but not especially lofty. But when I guest conducted a local amateur choir and professional orchestra in Beethoven’s Mass in C there a few years back, during the first rehearsal we released the final chord of the “Gloria” and listened in astonishment for the next several seconds. The sound continued to roll down the space like the big wave that surfers dream about. [Read more…]

Fourth time’s the charm: Blue Streak celebrates CIM

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Any graph tracking cases of coronavirus is a looping one: up, down, up, down. So if the timing is just unlucky enough, the same program could potentially be postponed once, twice, thrice…

That hypothetical has been a reality for the Blue Streak Ensemble. The group aimed to celebrate the Cleveland Institute of Music’s centennial in 2020 with a set of three programs that would include, in part, music by composers connected to CIM. But new variants, new spikes, and rescheduled student recitals have meant cycling through one date after another.

So composer and Blue Streak director Margaret Brouwer had a proclamation to make during our recent conversation on Zoom. “We’re giving these concerts no matter what!” she said with a laugh. “Even if we have to stand in the street and play.”

[Read more…]

The Cleveland Orchestra: Honoring Black Composers

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by Jarrett Hoffman

It was disappointing in January when The Cleveland Orchestra’s Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Concert had to be postponed due to a surge in COVID. But there’s good news, and it’s two-fold.

First, time has passed, and the rescheduled date is not far away: early next month. Second, the concert’s companion program, “Honoring Black Composers,” has found a new setting of its own, or rather three new settings. A very good thing, because the first date, an hour-long program on May 24 at Karamu House, has already sold out.

That still leaves you with two options. On Friday, May 27 at 6:30 pm and Saturday, May 28 at 7:00 pm, the program will move to Reinberger Chamber Hall at Severance, albeit in a slightly different form: a half-hour concert of music by Brian R. Nabors, Dolores White, George Walker, Melika Fitzhugh, H. Leslie Adams, and William Grant Still.

[Read more…]

DIARY: Wednesday, May 18, 2022

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by Daniel Hathaway

IN THIS EDITION:

. Third FranckFest Brownbag Concert caps the Noontime Concert Series at Trinity Cathedral & WCLV broadcasts joint April 5 ChamberFest Cleveland & Cleveland Chamber Music Society collaboration

. British organist and choirmaster Simon Preston dies at 83

. Interesting read: Composer Brett Dean discusses his Hamlet chord

. Almanac: Froberger, Böhm, Pinza, Fischer-Dieskau make debuts while Mahler and Anderson exit.

TODAY’S EVENTS:

At 12:00 pm the Trinity Cathedral Brownbag Concert Series wraps up its season as well as its three-concert César FranckFest with music in celebration of the Belgian composer’s 200th birthday. Nicole Keller & Todd Wilson, organ, Mark Laseter, tenor & Pam Kelly, cello. Chorale in b minor (Keller), Panis angelicus, Pastorale, Sortie l’Organiste & Chorale in E. Trinity Cathedral, 2230 Euclid Ave., Cleveland. Freewill offering. Hybrid concert will also be livestreamed and archived. [Read more…]

DIARY: Tuesday, May 17, 2022

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by Jarrett Hoffman

IN THIS EDITION:

•Oberlin Conservatory students performing on campus and off

•The Eurovision Song Contest, the winning group from Ukraine (pictured), and the flute-like folk instruments heard in their performance

•A woodwind-themed almanac: flutist Marcel Moyse, oboist John de Lancie, and Christopher Rouse’s Clarinet Concerto

[Read more…]

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