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Archives for February 2025

DIARY, Weekend, February 28 — March 2, 2025

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by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND: 

A whopping 19 events are listed in our calendar from Friday through Sunday, including pairs of performances by BlueWater Chamber Orchestra (soloists Afendi Yusuf and Amy Zoloto pictured) and Cleveland Chamber Choir, ensembles that are celebrating their 15th and 10th anniversaries this season.

Click here to read an interview with Ladonna Woods, widow of BlueWater founder Carlton Woods, and here to watch a brief video of Cleveland Chamber Choir and youth choir HaZamir Cleveland rehearsing a Salamone Rossi psalm at Congregation Mishkan Or (concert preview here).

Let’s cut to the chase and send you directly to our Concert Listings page for details and ticket information for these and other performances this weekend. Enjoy the richness and depth of classical performances in Northeast Ohio!

NEWS BRIEFS:

The Cleveland Institute of Music announced on Thursday that Tito Muñoz, former music director of The Phoenix Symphony and former assistant conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra, has been appointed interim principal conductor of the CIM Orchestra from next fall through the 2026-27 academic year. Read a press release here. [Read more…]

Les Délices: music fosters meaningful conversation at Cleveland’s VA Medical Center (Feb. 21)

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by Stephanie Manning

Navigating dementia — a common, yet devastating part of aging — requires confronting all sorts of complex emotions. People with memory loss, their caregivers, and the medical teams who interact with them all understand this well. So when Les Délices commissioned a piece tackling this difficult topic, they made a special effort to bring the music to those who would resonate with it the most.

The Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center hosted the early music ensemble for two performance-discussion sessions on February 21, a moving and emotional afternoon of empathetic, honest conversations about memory loss all framed by the solace of music.

At 12:00 pm, medical professionals and providers gathered in the rec hall, where flags of the U.S., the Department of VA, and the military’s many branches now provided a backdrop to a harpsichord and a collection of music stands. As part of the “Bioethics at Noon” series, the Les Délices musicians performed François Couperin’s La Visionnaire and selections from Viet Cuong’s world premiere, A Moment’s Oblivion. [Read more…]

Les Délices contemplates what makes us human in “A Moment’s Oblivion” (Feb. 23)

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by Stephanie Manning

“How wretched to forget,” sings the son in A Moment’s Oblivion — a character whose father now struggles to recognize members of his own family. “For all we were forms who we are.”

But the miracle cure that restores his father’s memory turns out to be a more fraught solution than it appears. Such is the conflict at the heart of Les Délices’ recent commission, with music by Viet Cuong and libretto by Cleveland poet Dave Lucas. The early music ensemble’s latest program surrounded the world premiere of A Moment’s Oblivion with more musical opportunities to reflect on the complex, and sometimes contradictory, emotions that make us human. [Read more…]

Baldwin Wallace Conservatory Opera: Speed Dating Tonight! (Feb. 15)

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by Peter Feher

In 2023, Axios reported that according to a recent poll, only about 20 percent of college students said they regularly used dating apps. The survey didn’t ask if anyone had ever tried good old-fashioned speed dating — presumably, that number would have been even lower.

The undergraduate performers in Baldwin Wallace Conservatory’s opera studies program can therefore claim a special distinction. More than a dozen BW singers took the stage at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium over Valentine’s Day weekend for the local premiere of Speed Dating Tonight!

This quirky one-act opera, with words and music by composer Michael Ching, has received upward of 100 small productions since its 2013 premiere, and it’s easy to see why. If Ching’s concept is somewhat outmoded, the dramatic setup he contrives is perfect for a college or community organization that has talent and ambition to spare.

[Read more…]

BlueWater Chamber Orchestra turns fifteen! (Part 1)

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by Mike Telin

Conductor Carlton Woods led the Midland, Michigan Symphony from 1997 to 2007 while teaching at Central Michigan University. When he and his wife Ladonna retired, they chose to relocate to Westlake, where they spent their first year soaking up all that Northeast Ohio’s classical music scene had to offer.

“We had season tickets to everything — The Cleveland Orchestra, Apollo’s Fire — and we went to concerts at CIM, Baldwin Wallace, Oberlin, and Cleveland State University,” Ladonna said during a Zoom conversation.

Describing her late husband as the quintessential promoter in the world of classical music, Ladonna Woods said that after spending a lifetime in music, during that first year of retirement she could see that her husband was getting bored. Then one day he asked her what she would think if he started a chamber orchestra.

“I thought, ‘Oh, no, here we go.’ I knew that he wasn’t asking my permission, he was telling me that he had already worked all out. So I told him, ‘I think you’re crazy, and I was really looking forward to us just going places and being a normal everyday couple.’ The interesting thing was that he had so much fun conducting. It was his love. And he kept saying, ‘Ladonna, someday they’re going to find out how much fun I’m having.’ When he said that, I thought, ‘Well, this is a done deal.’”  [Read more…]

DIARY, Thursday, February 27, 2025

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by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING TODAY: 

• Kenneth Bean conducts Oberlin Sinfonietta in works by David Ludwig, Igor Stravinsky, and George Enescu (7:30, Warner Concert Hall)

• Tenor Jonathan Pierce Rhodes and violinist Alan Choo star in Apollo’s Fire’s Classical Sparks (7:30, First Methodist, Akron)

• Music Director Franz Welser-Möst (pictured) returns from medical leave to lead The Cleveland Orchestra in Shostakovich’s Second Violin Concerto with Leonidas Kavakos and Beethoven’s Third Symphony (7:30, Severance Music Center)

• The CIM Black Student Union presents a Benefit Concert for the Black Student Union’s Student Assistance Fund (7:30, Mixon Hall).

Visit our Concert Listings page for details and ticket information for these and other performances.

NEWS BRIEFS:

The Cleveland Institute of Music has announced that Jessie Montgomery will headline the school’s 2025 Young Composers Program. Read more here. [Read more…]

Yuja Wang and Víkingur Ólafsson dazzle Severance crowd with piano virtuosity (Feb. 23)

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by Peter Feher

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Rock stars are known to make certain demands on tour, stipulating everything they expect to find in their dressing rooms and onstage.

Pianists Yuja Wang and Víkingur Ólafsson — two of the biggest names in classical music today — have one request that’s absolutely essential. In order to team up in recital and tackle the virtuosic repertoire they want to play together, Wang and Ólafsson each need a separate piano.

And so a pair of Steinways sat carefully arranged in Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center on Sunday afternoon, Feb. 23. Both instruments had their lids off, and their keyboards were lined up center stage, the players side by side but facing in opposite directions. [Read more…]

Thomas Adès leads Cleveland Orchestra in colorful concert of Sibelius, Saariaho, Ives & more (Feb. 20)

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by Daniel Hathaway

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Thomas Adès is obsessed with sound color, as he vividly demonstrated with the assistance of the unflappable Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus (expertly prepared by Lisa Wong) in his guest appearance as curator, composer, and conductor at Severance Music Center on Thursday evening, February 20.

Works by Jan Sibelius, Kaija Saariaho, Charles Ives and Adès himself visited a vast spectrum of choral and orchestral hues that can be heard by the ear. Some of them use those colors to make poignant social commentary at the same time.

Color is represented impressionistically in the inexorable ebbing and flowing of the sea in Sibelius’ The Oceanides and Saariaho’s Otra Mar, and through musical collisions in Charles Ives’ Orchestral Set No. 2. And in the third, recently added movement of Adès’s America: the Prophecy, in ominous musical proclamations.

[Read more…]

Tuesday Musical presents the Isidore Quartet and pianist Jeremy Denk

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by Mike Telin

If something is meant to be, even a global pandemic can’t keep it from happening. Case in point: the Isidore String Quartet. “Technically we formed at Juilliard in 2019, but we were sent home shortly afterwards. We had not even played together for a full semester.” cellist Joshua McClendon recalled.

After reforming at Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival during the summer of 2021, McClendon and his colleagues — violinists Adrian Steele & Phoenix Avalon and violist Devin Moore — went on to win the 14th Banff International String Quartet Competition in 2022. In 2023 the group was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant.

Tuesday Musical will host the Isidore String Quartet and pianist Jeremy Denk on Tuesday, March 4 at 7:30 pm at E.J. Thomas Hall in Akron. The program includes Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet in F, Gabriella Smith’s Carrot Revolution, and Johannes Brahms’ Quintet for Piano and Strings in f. Tickets are available online.

I caught up with Joshua McClendon via Zoom in Dallas, where the Quartet is the Peak Fellowship Ensemble-in-Residence at Southern Methodist University. I began our conversation by asking him about the program they’re bringing to Akron.

[Read more…]

DIARY, Wednesday, February 26, 2025

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by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING TODAY: 

In conjunction with the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Picasso and Paper exhibition, guitarist Pipo Romero makes his Cleveland debut in a 7:30 concert at Transformer Station.

Visit our Concert Listings page for details and ticket information for these and other performances.

NEWS BRIEFS:

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has made significant changes to its regulations around federal grant applications — stating that grant recipients may not “operate any programs promoting ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’(DEI). [Read more…]

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