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Archives for April 2023

Johansen to solo with Women’s Orchestra on Sunday in Dvořák Cello Concerto 

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by Daniel Hathaway

The Cleveland Women’s Orchestra will make its 88th annual visit to Severance Music Center on Sunday, April 30 at 3:30 pm when Cleveland Orchestra cellist Dane Johansen will be featured in Antonin Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in b minor. Filling out the program, Jungho Kim will lead the ensemble in Dolores White’s Celebration, Salute to the Arts, and Jean Sibelius’ King Christian II Suite, Op. 27.

Johansen, a native of Fairbanks, Alaska,  joined the cello section of The Cleveland Orchestra in March of 2016, after studying at the Cleveland Institute of Music, the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris, and at the Juilliard School, and touring for five seasons with the Escher String Quartet.

In addition to performing Elliott Carter’s concerto during the composer’s centennial celebrations at Lincoln Center, Johansen made his Carnegie Hall debut as first winner of the Juilliard Leo Ruiz Memorial Award and appeared in William Walton’s Concerto with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. [Read more…]

DIARY: Weekend, April 28-30, 2023

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By Daniel Hathaway

IN THIS EDITION:

. Weekend concert agenda (by category)

. Maltz Family Foundation gifts $10 million to Blossom, Memory is a muscle, writes Angela Hewitt

. Almanac: highlighting Michael Daugherty, “Duke” Ellington & Robert Shaw

HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND (BY CATEGORY):

Orchestras: The Cleveland Orchestra continues its set featuring the premiere of Wynton Marselis’s Trumpet Concerto (Michael Sachs, Franz Welser-Möst on the podium, Friday at 7:30 & Saturday at 8), the Oberlin Sinfonietta and Oberlin Chamber Orchestra perform on Friday at 7:30, the Cleveland Women’s Orchestra makes its 88th annual trip to Severance (Jungho Kim conducting, with cellist Dane Johansen in the Dvořák Concerto, Sunday at 3:30), and the Canton Symphony and Chorus present a program featuring the Dvořák Requiem (Gerhardt Zimmermann, conducting, Sunday at 7). [Read more…]

Singers Club of Cleveland to take its spring program on tour to the Baltics

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by Daniel Hathaway

One of Northeast Ohio’s oldest continuing ensembles, The Singers Club of Cleveland, made its debut in the chapel of First Baptist Church on April 19, 1894.

The all-male chorus, which had tallied up 1,663 members by the time its entry in The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History was written in 1995, will return to First Baptist Church for a spring concert on Friday, April 28 at 7 pm  — not to the edifice where the chorus sang its first concert, but to its new Gothic building designed by Walker and Weeks and dedicated in 1929.

Friday’s concert will also set the distinguished ensemble off on a new course. Having stayed close to home for over a century, the Singers Club will embark on a week-long tour of Latvia, Estonia, and Finland in June.

“We’re going to be there during the Summer Solstice, which is a huge celebration in the Baltics,” music director Don Verkuilen said in a telephone conversation. [Read more…]

DIARY: Thursday, April 27, 2023

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by Jarrett Hoffman

IN THIS EDITION:

•Today: Cleveland Orchestra premieres Marsalis Trumpet Concerto, Tuesday Musical presents “An Evening with Itzhak Perlman,” and Oberlin College Choir & Musical Union come together in concert

•Interesting reads: news about arts entrepreneurship in the area, and new Donizetti songs discovered

•Almanac: remembering cellist Lynn Harrell

HAPPENING TODAY:

Three options, all at 7:30.

At Severance Music Center, Franz Welser-Möst leads The Cleveland Orchestra in the world premiere of Marsalis’ Trumpet Concerto, featuring Michael Sachs as soloist. The program also includes Eastman’s Symphony No. 2 and Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 (“From the New World”). Tickets are available here.

At E.J. Thomas Hall, Tuesday Musical presents “An Evening with Itzhak Perlman,” in which that musical luminary will share “intimate anecdotes and multi-media images from his life and career” in addition to performing with longtime collaborator and friend Rohan De Silva. Get tickets here.

And at Oberlin’s Finney Chapel, Ben Johns will lead the Oberlin College Choir and Musical Union in works by Parry, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Zemlinsky, Janáček, and Ives. It’s free and will be livestreamed here.

[Read more…]

15th-century fun with Les Délices (Apr. 22)

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by Stephanie Manning

In the same way that 21st-century music lovers might display their CD collection, more than 500 years ago, Isabella d’Este inlaid her favorite music in her wall.

That piece — Johannes Ockeghem’s Prenez sur moi — kicked off Les Délices’s recent program “Isabella’s Renaissance,” which celebrated the achievements of the renowned 15th-century art patron. Whether by patronage, performance, or study, the music on this hour-long concert was connected in some way to the Marchioness of Mantua.

The evening’s six sections each included two to three pieces, often sandwiching instrumental works in between vocal ones for a sense of balance. Smooth and simple stage changes led the audience at Lakewood Presbyterian Church on April 22 to instinctively hold their applause until the end of each section.

[Read more…]

DIARY: Wednesday, April 26, 2023

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By Daniel Hathaway

IN THIS EDITION:

. Bach at noon

. Liu at Oberlin, Apple finally speaks classical music

. Remembering Margaret Bonds

HAPPENING TODAY:

Trinity Cathedral’s BachFest continues at noon today with violinist Andrew Sords performing the B-Minor Partita, and organist Todd Wilson playing the E-minor Trio Sonata. It’s free and you can enjoy it both in person and as a live stream.  Details in our Concert Listings.

INTERESTING READ:

San Francisco Chronicle critic Joshua Kosman writes about Apple’s new classical streaming service, which finally speaks the language of classical musicians and solves many of the search problems that the latter have found so frustrating when using other sources of streaming music. [Read more…]

Chopin Competition Winner Bruce Liu To Perform on Oberlin Artist Recital Series

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This article is posted with the permission of the author and Oberlin Conservatory 

by Cathy Partlow Strauss

Rising Canadian pianist Bruce Liu, winner of the 18th Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw, Poland, will perform the closing program on the Oberlin Artist Recital Series 2022-23 season. The concert is at 2:30 p.m. on April 30 in historic Finney Chapel.

Liu will play pieces by Frederic Chopin and Franz Liszt—two great pianist-composers who expanded the piano repertoire in ways that still astound and move artists and audiences.

He describes the music on his spring recital programs as “operatic and full of romantic scenes.”

This concert features Chopin—the poet of the piano—at two distinct stages in his tragically brief career: his early time in Poland in the 1820s, and his artistic maturity during the following decade in Paris. [Read more…]

Akron Symphony shines in Mahler 3 (Apr. 15)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Thinking small was not Mahler’s usual symphonic strategy. “A symphony must be like the world,” he famously asserted to Sibelius in 1907. “It must contain everything.”

But the whole world? Yes — and heaven, too.

The Third Symphony, written between 1895 and 1897, is Mahler’s longest and grandest. Many orchestras pass on it, due to the swollen forces required (lots of winds, brass, and percussion) and the huge lift asked of every section. The Akron Symphony, led by music director Christopher Wilkins, lifted it all very high on Saturday, April 15, sagging only rarely.
[Read more…]

Cleveland Cello Society: music & art with Santiago Cañón-Valencia (Apr. 14)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

On Friday, April 14, a packed LatinUs Theater audience in Cleveland’s Clark-Fulton neighborhood enthusiastically greeted Columbian cellist Santiago Cañón-Valencia. They in turn were treated to an unforgettable evening of music and art in a compelling black box venue.

The concert, titled “Ascenso,” is also the name of Cañón-Valencia’s latest recording — copies of which the cellist graciously signed in the lobby after the performance.

The experience of each of the five musical works was enhanced and enlarged by the projection of paintings onto a wall at the back of the stage. Each picture, rendered by the cellist himself, served as a kind of commentary on, or in some cases, visual representation of the music, done in the performer’s own abstract, mostly black and white style (“I’m not really a painter,” he declared, modestly). Musicians who paint may not be an unheard-of concept — composers Arnold Schoenberg and George Gershwin and cellist Aldo Parisot all painted, as does pianist Stephen Hough — but seeing the artwork on display while the music that inspired it is being performed makes for a special occasion indeed.

[Read more…]

The Cleveland Orchestra: Rafael Payare excites with Shostakovich & Bernstein (Apr. 6)

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by Peter Feher

The Russians won the Cold War, judging by The Cleveland Orchestra’s stirring and subversive program at Severance Music Center earlier this month.

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 and Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2 (“The Age of Anxiety”) went head-to-head in an exciting evening shot through with creative uncertainty. The fact that both pieces could have coexisted on a concert 60 years ago — specifically, the sort of concert Bernstein would have conducted with the New York Philharmonic during their 1959 tour of the Soviet Union — didn’t ease the tension.

Still, The Cleveland Orchestra made an admirable effort at diplomacy, giving stellar performances of both works on Thursday, April 6. Guest conductor Rafael Payare whipped up the conflict, however, creating a sense of real stakes with a program that could have ended predictably.

Every interpretation of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony has made a point of hammering home the finale. Following the piece’s 1937 premiere, the official Soviet line was that those repetitive final measures represented tragedy over triumph, effectively dispelling the darkness that had come in the movements before. The dissenting view, which has become the standard today, is to read the ending as brutal and coercive, and conductors typically communicate this by slowing the tempo to an unbearable degree, leaving little room to doubt what the composer “really meant.”

[Read more…]

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