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Archives for September 2023

DIARY: Weekend, September 30-October 1, 2023

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By Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:

On Saturday, a 3pm Baldwin Wallace Faculty Recital features J.R. Fralick, tenor, Christine Fuoco, piano, and Khari Joyner, cello, a 4pm Stars in the Classics classical cabaret at Praxis Fiber Gallery includes dance and the first performance of a work inspired by memories of Euclid Beach Park, and a 7:30 performance by Les Délices and Kaleidoscope Vocal Ensemble in Kulas Hall at CIM repeats Friday’s program, “The Pow’r of Music.”

On Sunday, The Cleveland Orchestra repeats its season opener at 3pm with Franz Welser-Möst on the podium and Daniil Trifonov at the Steinway (pictured — read our review on Cleveland.com here), new music director Kevin Jones plays a 4pm organ recital at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights, and at 6pm, CIM celebrates the life and compositions of its celebrated alumna Dolores White.

Check our Concert Listings for details of these and forthcoming events.

WEEKEND ALMANAC:

SEPTEMBER 30

Today marks the anniversaries of the birth of Irish composer and organist Charles Villiers Stanford (1852) and Russian violinist David Oistrakh (1908), and the death of American composer and music critic Virgil Thomson (1989). [Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra and pianist Daniil Trifonov deliver thrilling season opener of Brahms and Prokofiev (Sept 28)

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This article was originally published on Cleveland.com (photos by Roger Mastroianni.)

By Daniel Hathaway

CLEVELAND, Ohio — The time-honored classical program format of three works was missing its overture at Severance Music Center on Thursday evening as Franz Welser-Möst led the Cleveland Orchestra in its official season opener. But a gargantuan German piano concerto and a stentorian Russian Symphony added up to a full evening overflowing with superlatives.

Not to mention the impressive pianistic pyrotechnics of international phenomenon and local hero Daniil Trifonov, or the enthralling sonorities created by the Cleveland Orchestra even when the material itself turned menacing.

[Read more…]

DIARY: Friday, September 29, 2023

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By Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING TODAY:

On Friday at Noon, the Cleveland Museum of Art presents Soh-Hyun Park Alrino (pictured), in a lunchtime lecture and concert featuring traditional Korean Sanjo on the Violin.

Friday evening sees the opening of the Akron Symphony season with music director Christopher Wilkins & guest conductor Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate leading a narrated orchestral work drawing on the culture and history of Tate’s Chickasaw heritage, plus Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9.

Also on Friday: the B-W Symphonic Wind Ensemble, Les Délices, Oberlin Orchestra (with pianist Stanislav Ioudenitch) and Hub New Music all perform at 7:30. [Read more…]

Cleveland Museum of Art’s Performing Arts Series returns

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by Mike Telin

The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Performing Arts Series is back with a new director and a full schedule of diverse shows. To get a sense of it all, I spoke with Gabe Pollack, who came to that post at the Museum after many years of serving as manager of the Bop Stop. Here’s what he told me.

I started the job in October 2022 and I inherited three programs. A couple were rescheduled concerts that had been canceled during COVID. And since booking those shows was taken off my plate, that allowed me to just learn the processes involved with producing a show at the Museum.

This 2023-24 season is truly my first Performing Arts Series. The “Summer Solstice” and “City Stages” are signature programs of the Museum. But they operate separately from the Performing Arts Series in Gartner. So when I was hired, my main task was to program those events.

I had a lot of fun booking “Solstice.” I think it takes a mix of skill and luck, especially when dealing with international artists because they have to be in the U.S. and have permits that allow them to perform here. And they have to be in the region around the time of “Solstice.” But I thought the artists complemented each other very well.

[Read more…]

Emerson Quartet launches Oberlin series with its own farewell concert (Sept. 22)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Photo: Abe Frato

Nearing the end of their distinguished 47-year run with only one change of personnel, the Emerson String Quartet bid adieu to its local fans in a nostalgic yet festive program that launched Oberlin’s Artist Recital Series on Friday, September 22 in Finney Chapel.

The Emersons (Philip Setzer and Eugene Drucker — who have always shared first violin duties — violist Lawrence Dutton, and cellist Paul Watkins — who replaced David Finckel for the past decade) gave the capacity audience parting gifts of Mendelssohn, Sarah Kirkland Snider, and Beethoven. Plus an exquisite Bach chorale arrangement which should linger long in many listeners’ memories. [Read more…]

Come As You Are —
Banks & Bjerken at CIM

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by Jarrett Hoffman

In one way, saxophonist-composer Steven Banks’ Come As You Are is straightforward: it’s about family, and it’s about church. Its movements are dedicated to his mother and three sisters, and inspired by their favorite spirituals and works of sacred music.

In another way, the piece — which will conclude his free program with pianist Xak Bjerken on October 5 at 7:30 pm in Mixon Hall at CIM, where Banks is a visiting faculty member — is about something more abstract: a merging of different parts of his identity that previously didn’t feel as if they could coexist.

“As a classical musician, the vast majority of my colleagues have little knowledge or understanding of Black culture or how it influences my music-making,” Banks writes in his program note from 2021, when he performed the piece as part of his Young Concert Artists debut recital. “As a Black man from North Carolina, many of my family and friends don’t have a true sense of what I do and love as a classical performer and composer. I have also spent an incredible amount of time and energy on keeping these worlds separate and trying to show up in each as if the other didn’t exist.”

[Read more…]

DIARY: Thursday, September 28, 2023

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By Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING TODAY:

Pianist Daniil Trifonov joins Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra in the first Severance Music Center concert of the season at 7:30 pm. On the docket: Brahms’ First Piano Concerto & Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony (repeated on Sunday at 3, and live streamed on the Orchestra’s Adella and Deutsche Grammophon’s Stage+ platforms).

At 6:30, Welser-Möst and Cleveland Orchestra President and CEO André Gremillet will join in a season preview conversation in Reinberger Chamber Hall.

And tonight at 8, Canton Symphony hornists Ben Reidhead and Micah Northam will perform during Canton Symphony Uncorked in the center of The Pavilion at Gervasi Vineyard.

Check our Concert Listings for forthcoming events.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Two American musical scholars and a pair of contemporary composers share birthdates on September 28, and a British musical humorist bade adieu to the world of classical music, leaving it a bit less serious about itself than before. [Read more…]

CityMusic Cleveland: “Symphonie Concertante” (Sept. 21)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

The concert by CityMusic Cleveland on Thursday, September 21 in Fairmount Presbyterian Church was a reminder of two things: that there is an abundance of appealing music yet to be heard or played out, and there are exceptional performers in Cleveland ready to play it. The consistently splendid CityMusic (now in its twentieth year) maintained its high standard with a program of infrequently heard works by George Walker, Joseph Bologne, Tōru Takemitsu, and W.A. Mozart, aided by guest solo violinists Kyung Sun Lee and Jung-Min Amy Lee (pictured at another venue).

Walker’s Lyric for Strings has the quiet solemnity of Barber’s famous Adagio for Strings, and like that piece, it started life as the second movement from an early string quartet. Walker added the title Lament (later Lyric for Strings) and dedicated it as an elegy to his grandmother. From the first notes the ensemble, led by concertmaster Laura Hamilton, conveyed the right mood and established a bath of tonal beauty that benefitted every piece to come.

[Read more…]

CD Review — Wish: Music of Valerie Coleman

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by Peter Feher

Valerie Coleman joined the flute and composition faculty at New York’s Mannes School of Music in 2021, but her work has found a second home at Oberlin Conservatory since then. Wish, the latest release from the Oberlin Music Label, features seven of Coleman’s flute pieces from the past two decades, many of them in their first recordings.

Alexa Still, Oberlin’s professor of flute, isn’t the only major player involved in the project, though her spirit for exploration and education is what unites the album. Elegy, a lively and pulsing work written for Still in 2015 which winds up here as the closing track, has the flutist backed by an ensemble of her students on instruments ranging from piccolo to contrabass flute, all conducted by Timothy Weiss.

[Read more…]

DIARY: Wednesday, September 27, 2023

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by Jarrett Hoffman

IN THIS EDITION:

•Today: pianist-composer Aldo López-Gavilán plays his own works at BW, jazz vocalist Kurt Elling and guitarist Charlie Hunter visit CMA for “SuperBlue” (pictured), and Oberlin CME performs music by Aaron Copland and Augusta Read Thomas

•Announcements: a job listing at Oberlin (Assistant Professor in TIMARA) and a Double Reed Day at BW

•Interesting reads: Lyric Opera of Chicago’s SoundShirt, a wearable technology for deaf or hearing-impaired audience members

•Almanac: Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel

HAPPENING TODAY:

At 7:00 in Gamble Auditorium, Baldwin Wallace Artist-in-Residence Aldo López-Gavilán sits down at the piano in a free program of his own compositions.

At 7:30 at Gartner Auditorium, the CMA Performing Arts Series presents “SuperBlue,” featuring jazz vocalist Kurt Elling and guitarist Charlie Hunter, joined by drummer Corey Fonville and bassist-keyboardist DJ Harrison for a “kaleidoscopic collection of new songs, surprising covers, and dynamic reinventions.” Tickets are available online.

Also at 7:30, Timothy Weiss leads the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble in Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring and Augusta Read Thomas’s The Auditions at Warner Concert Hall. It’s free.

[Read more…]

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