By Mike Telin and Daniel Hautzinger
After four concerts and a family program, ChamberFest Cleveland now moves into its second and final week with five more concerts. One of those includes a performance of Chinese composer Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera with world premiere choreography. As part of our continuing coverage of ChamberFest, we spoke with three participants.
Noah Bendix-Balgley
Sometime in the next year, Noah Bendix-Balgley will leave his position as concertmaster of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, which he won when he was 27 in 2011. Why leave such a desirable chair, especially when he was appointed at such a young age? To become first concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic, one of the most prestigious orchestras in the world.
But before he leaves for Berlin, Bendix-Balgley will come to Cleveland to join “a really wonderful cast of some of the best young musicians around,” as he described his fellow ChamberFest participants in a phone interview. Needless to say, Bendix-Balgley is a worthy addition to that cast.
He joins ChamberFest to play some Romantic masterworks, “some of the best chamber music out there and some of my favorite pieces to play:” Brahms’s piano Quintet, Dvořák’s E-flat piano quartet, and Tchaikovsky’s “Souvenir de Florence” sextet. Beyond those pieces, he’ll also perform two pieces for the first time. “I’m very much looking forward to working with [pianist] Orion Weiss on the Janáček violin sonata, it’s a really wonderful piece,” he said. Osvaldo Golijov’s Last Round for double string quartet and bass, on ChamberFest’s final concert, is also new to him. [Read more…]
ClevelandClassical staffers Mike Telin, Daniel Hautzinger and myself were among the thirty-three members of the Music Critics Association of North America who gathered in Chicago from June 17-19 for the association’s annual meeting.
ChamberFest Cleveland’s savvy programming strategy continued on Saturday, June 21 with a 5:00 pm concert at MOCA Cleveland that paired an edgy solo cello work by Iannis Xenakis with a daring arrangement of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations for string trio.
“Another opening, another show…” And so it was on Thursday afternoon, June 19 when the Ohio Light Opera staged its opening performance Irving Berlin’s Call me Madam in Freedlander Theater on the campus of The College of Wooster. Filled to capacity, the house was teeming with enthusiasm as OLO launched its 36th season with a political topic that, not coincidentally, hit close to home.
Apollo Fire’s Sunday evening performance at the Baroque Music Barn in Hunting Valley shows why the early music/Baroque ensemble can and should make forays outside of classical and into the heart of American folk music. Their latest program “Glory on the Mountain,” is a follow-up to their highly successful “Come to the River” tour and CD, and is now in the midst of a 10 performance tour of the Cleveland area. “Glory on the Mountain” is an exploration into the music and culture of 18th and 19th century Appalachia, a place populated by British settlers. It combines haunting melodies, foot-stomping jigs and reels, stories, and a healthy dose of comedy, all with musicianship of the highest order. The audience sang, clapped, shed a few tears, and laughed, ultimately enjoying a taste of the good times that our mountain forebears must have had.
Opera Circle staged an enticing production of Erich Korngold’s Die tote Stadt (“The Dead City”) on Saturday, June 14 at the Ohio Theatre in PlayHouseSquare. The opera is something of a rarity, probably because of the challenges of dealing with the eerie subtleties of its plot, its demand for a Heldentenor to sing the role of Paul, and its opulent 1920s orchestration. Die tote Stadt is a major undertaking for any small company, but Opera Circle admirably rose to the task.
Chamber music is an intimate experience, for musicians and audience alike (you can only fit so many people into a “chamber”). And what’s more intimate than a living room as a practice space? According to ChamberFest Speaker Patrick Castillo, “the primary rehearsal space for ChamberFest Cleveland is Frank Cohen’s living room, which already creates this sense of homey-ness. It’s a very warm experience for all the artists involved and myself, and hopefully for the audience as well.”