by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•OLO’s The Student Prince at 2:00, ChamberFest Cleveland’s “Extrême Expressions” at 7:30 — and perhaps a drink or two at the end of the day
•Details about Quire Cleveland’s 15th season
•News from Les Délices: new episodes of Music Meditations, and a job opening
•Almanac: Esa-Pekka Salonen, Clarence Cameron White, and Federico Mompou
by Daniel Hathaway
At the Cultural Arts Center at Disciples Church on Friday, June 24, the repertoire was indeed both colorful and expansive as the excellent musicians of ChamberFest Cleveland explored works ranging from the sentimental (Fritz Kreisler’s Three Pieces for Piano Trio) to the evanescent (Gabriel Fauré’s Piano Quintet No. 1), from the stark and compact (George Walker’s Piano Sonata No. 5) to the delightfully verbose (Zoltán Kodály’s Duo for Violin and Cello, Op. 7).
Violinist Alexi Kenney, cellist Jonathan Swensen, and pianist Andrius Žlabys raised the curtain with three light pieces arranged by a virtuoso violinist famous for his encores. Kreisler’s takes on The Old Refrain, Farewell to Cucullain (a.k.a. Londonderry Air or Oh Danny Boy), and Miniature Viennese March worked equally well as preludial bon-bons. [Read more…]
by Peter Feher
Cleveland Opera Theater saw the payoff of several years’ work when La Casa de Bernarda Alba premiered earlier this month. The production, fully realized on the mainstage at Baldwin Wallace University’s Kleist Center for Art and Drama from June 9-12, didn’t just spring out of nowhere. The company nurtured the piece through its New Opera Works Festival beginning in 2017 with a series of public readings of the source material.
And Federico García Lorca’s 1936 play is a good place to start. La Casa de Bernarda Alba makes for highly effective theater in that the simplest elements (a chair, a door, an offstage character) generate all the drama. Even in this operatic adaptation, Scott Skiba’s direction and Jeff Herrmann’s set design emphasized the essentials and communicated much of the action silently.
by Stephanie Manning
Summer 2022 has seen a surge in travel, as those who were kept from family, friends, and favorite places over the past two years try to make up for lost time. The upcoming July 4 weekend should be one of the busiest yet. But for those staying in the Cleveland area, the ENCORE Chamber Music Institute’s Music & Ideas Festival is offering audiences a musical getaway on July 3 at 4:00 pm with “Tales of Travel & Transformation.”
The featured performers, the Verona Quartet, are a group of world travelers themselves. Hailing from four different countries, the musicians — violinists Jonathan Ong and Dorothy Ro, violist Abigail Rojansky, and cellist Jonathan Dormand — have performed as a group across four continents. Over the past two years of their residency at Oberlin Conservatory, the Quartet has appeared in venues all over Northeast Ohio — this weekend, they will add the Gilmour Academy’s Dodero Center to that list.
by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY’S ENTRIES:
. OLO’s Hello, Dolly! reviewed and matinee scheduled for 2pm, UA Symphonic Band goes al fresco tonight
. In the News: ASCAP Young Composer Awards
. Interesting Reads: vocal warmups and vinyl supply chain problems
. Almanac: remembering Cleveland composer Hale Smith [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
Finnish pianist Juho Pohjonen enjoys a varied career that regularly takes him to recital and symphony halls across Europe, Asia, and North America. A computer enthusiast, in 2019 he launched MyPianist, an AI-based iOS app he both designed and programmed that provides interactive piano accompaniment for musicians. This week he makes his second appearance at ChamberFest.
I spoke to Pohjonen over Zoom from Minneapolis where he was performing Mendelssohn’s Concerto for Violin and Piano with Osmo Vänskä and the Minnesota Orchestra. I began by asking him to share his insights on Debussy’s Cello Sonata, which he will perform with Jonathan Swensen on June 30.
Juho Pohjonen: The interaction between the cello and the piano is so intimate. The music is like an exchange of ideas and that is one of the most rewarding aspects of the piece.
Debussy was able to create new colors without resorting to any fancy techniques like playing inside the piano or things like that. [Read more…]
by Jacob Strauss
In youth, everybody has dreams of becoming someone larger than they are, to drastically change the circumstance of their life. It is a story as old as drama itself and has been told continuously through thousands of generations by all people. The story is about hope in a wish, about dreams coming true not through fate or destiny, but by acting on the few opportunities we have in life.
Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella was originally produced for television in 1957 — seven years after the animated Disney film was released — and starred Julie Andrews. According to the Rodgers & Hammerstein website, it was viewed by over 100 million people. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
On June 23, Ohio Light Opera rang up the curtain on the second production of its 43rd season in Freedlander Theatre at The College of Wooster. Following on the heels of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella, the company’s first-ever staging of Hello, Dolly! continued the inclusion of Broadway in OLO’s repertoire.
The story line has its origin in an 1855 play and an 1842 farce that Thornton Wilder mined for his 1938 play The Merchant of Yonkers. When that turned out to be a flop, in 1954 Wilder made the crucial decision to re-center the show around the character of the legendary marriage broker Dolly Gallagher Levi and renamed it The Matchmaker. [Read more…]
by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•A new project from tenor Karim Sulayman, and a dive into pianistic excellence deep in the heart of Texas
•Ukraine: a ban on some Russian music, and Eurovision hosting duties taken away
•Almanac: Henry VIII, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Joseph Joachim, and Richard Rodgers
by Jacob Strauss
On Friday, June 10 the Signum Quartet, coming all the way from Germany to ENCORE at Gilmour Academy, played an eclectic program spanning the era of Schubert to rock classics by Led Zeppelin and Radiohead. The theme of this concert was war and politics, and the programming illustrated the revolutionary nature of the music.
The Dodero Center for the Performing Arts at the Gilmore Academy in Gates Mills is one feature of an impressive campus. The auditorium is shallow, the stage is deep, and the ensemble played without a shell. Throughout the program, the sound, especially in instruments’ lower registers, tended to disappear. [Read more…]