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Preview: Moore and Carterette to play organ/piano recital at Stambaugh Auditorium March 30

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by Daniel Hathaway

Moore-CarteretteOrganist Edward Moore and pianist Nathan Carterette will perform both as soloists and as an unusual duo on the Stambaugh Auditorium Organ Series in Youngstown on Sunday afternoon, March 30 at 4:00 pm. Both musicians are recent transplants to Pittsburgh, Moore having moved there from Washington DC, and Carterette from Cleveland.

They met when Carterette attended an organ/piano concert that Moore gave at East Liberty Presbyterian Church, where he serves as director of music. “I heard them play Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Carterette said during a Skype to two cell phones conversation during a rehearsal break at Stambaugh last week. “It was so fantastic. Ed produced every instrument in the orchestra on the organ.”

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Preview: Opera Per Tutti — Puccini’s La Rondine at Cleveland Public Theatre

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by Mike Telin

RehearsalOpera Per Tutti Artistic Director Scott Skiba has one thing to say about this week’s performances of Puccini’s La Rondine. “I want YOU to come to the opera! If you’ve never been to hear opera, this is a great place to start,” Skiba exclaimed with enthusiasm during a recent telephone conversation. “There’s comedy as well as great drama, and Puccini’s music is beautiful. And, if you’re already a lover of opera, the production presents a rare opportunity for you to see one of his lesser performed works.”

On Friday, March 28 at 7:30 pm and Sunday, March 30 at 3:00 pm in Cleveland Public Theatre’s Gordon Square Theatre, Opera Per Tutti presents a fully staged production of Giacomo Puccini’s La Rondine. “This is our biggest production to date, and it really is ideal for anyone who is new to opera,” Skiba said, adding that he believes that opera is not about things that happened hundreds of years ago. “It is something that is timeless. It isn’t a story about what happened, it is a story about what happens.”

La Rondine (The Swallow) has an interesting history, and as Skiba points out, “it is Puccini’s experiment in writing operetta.”

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Preview: The Cleveland Institute of Music presents “A Celebration of Community”

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by Carlyn Kessler, special contributor

CIM-Mahler-2bThe Cleveland Institute of Music will present its second “Celebration of Community” on Friday, March 28 at 8:00 pm in Severance Hall, when CIM president Joel Smirnoff will lead the CIM Orchestra and vocalists, the Cleveland School of the Arts (CSA) Chorus and Instrumentalists, the Singers’ Club of Cleveland, and the Antioch Baptist Church Sanctuary Choir in Beethoven’s monumental Symphony No. 9.

The concert features soloists Catheryne Shuman, soprano, Samantha Gosard, mezzo-soprano, CIM faculty member Vinson Cole, tenor, and Brian Johnson, baritone.

The concert is a public manifestation of CIM’s commitment to the Cleveland community. “Culture is the spontaneous emanation of community interaction,” Joel Smirnoff said in a recent conversation. “There is no culture without community.”

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Review: Cleveland Chamber Music Society — Takács Quartet plays complete Bartók in two evenings

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by Daniel Hathaway

Takacs-Quartet-2A colleague at Monday evening’s first installment of the Tackács Quartet’s complete Bartók Quartet cycle looked up at the packed balconies of Plymouth Church and mused about why such a crowd would turn up for an all-Bartók concert but probably not for one dedicated to the music of Webern or Schoenberg.

Good question. Part of the answer undoubtably had to do with the performers. In choosing to invite the Takács Quartet to play all six quartets over two evenings (March 17 & 18), the Cleveland Chamber Music Society delivered a tightly-wrapped package for its patrons: a half-dozen of the finest string quartets written in the twentieth century played by an originally all-Hungarian ensemble who have these pieces in their bloodlines and have made a specialty of playing them complete in a short stretch of time. (Some years ago, the Takács did that in a single day at Reinberger Chamber Music Hall, a marathon some are still talking about.)

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Preview: Cleveland Chamber Symphony’s NEOSonicFest debuts with six concerts from March 28 through April 6

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by Mike Telin

London-EdSince its founding in 1980 by the late composer and Cleveland State University professor Edwin London (left), the Cleveland Chamber Symphony has remained true to its core mission of performing and promoting new music that “dares to explore”. This week the Grammy Award-winning orchestra enters a new phase in its life when it takes on the role of organizer and host of NEOSonicFest, a festival of new music.

“We’re very excited about it,” said Cleveland Chamber Symphony music director Steven Smith during a recent telephone conversation. “We’ve been thinking about how to keep the name and activities of CCS alive over the past several years. We thought the idea of concentrating our activities into a specific period of time would give a greater focus on what CCS does.”

NEOSonicFest opens on Friday, March 28 at 7:30 pm in Cleveland State University’s Drinko Hall, when Steven Smith leads the Cleveland Chamber Symphony in a program that features Ed London’s Melodrama and Federico’s Follies. The concert also includes Geoffrey Peterson’s The Edmund Fitzgerald, a concerto for piano and strings with Nicholas Underhill as soloist, and special guests Verb Ballets, Richard Dickinson, choreographer.

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Review: Canton Symphony with Béla Fleck — Bewitched by the Banjo (March 22)

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by Tom Wachunas

FLECK-BelaThere was more than one surprise in the March 22 program by the Canton Symphony Orchestra at Umstattd Hall, billed as “A Béla, A Bartók, And A Surprise.” For starters, I’m fairly sure this was the first time the audience could see CSO musicians towering larger than life, captured live on camera and projected on to a screen behind the orchestra.

It’s certainly an effective tool for highlighting various sections or soloists at work, but only if the camera shots are properly coordinated with the music. On this occasion there were some shortcomings in that regard, not unlike seeing footage of football players sitting on the sidelines while a big scoring play transpires on the field. That said, I’m sure that this new element will be successfully adjusted to become a great enhancement of the concert experience.

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Review: Suddenly It’s Evening — CIM New Music Ensemble at MOCA Cleveland

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by Timothy Robson

CIM-MOCA-EveningThe current exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (MOCA) is entitled DIRGE: Reflections on [Life and] Death. As part of the programming accompanying the exhibition, a group of intrepid young performers in the Cleveland Institute of Music New Music Ensemble, under the direction of Keith Fitch, gave striking performances of iconic works composed in the last fifty years, all relating in some way to death and its rituals.

(A rhetorical question: Can one describe as “new” such works as George Crumb’s Madrigals, composed almost fifty years ago? Only the closing work on the program, Harrison Birtwistle’s 2007 Cortege, was composed in the last ten years, with Donald Erb’s Suddenly It’s Evening dating from 1997.)

The program was broken into three distinct segments, each in a different location in MOCA. The sections were separated by time allowing the audience not only to move to the next location, but also to examine the exhibition’s objects in the galleries.

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Preview: Bach’s 329th Birthday Bash at Pilgrim and Trinity

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by Mike Telin

BachBashEach year coinciding with the first full day of spring, the music world gathers to celebrate the birthday of the great Johann Sebastian Bach.

2014 marks the master’s 329th birthday and on Friday, March 21 beginning at 7:00 pm at Pilgrim Church, Arts Renaissance Tremont in partnership with Music & Art at Trinity will honor the occasion with a Birthday Bash.

Trinity Chamber Choir and strings will be led by organist and conductor Elizabeth Lenti. Soloists include Tamer Edlebi, oboe, and Jinjoo Cho, violin, and vocalists Judith Overcash, Erin Smith & Malina Rauschenfels. [Read more…]

Review: CityMusic Cleveland premieres Visconti piece at Trinity Lutheran in Ohio City (March 13)

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by Daniel Hathaway

CMC-ShanahanJames Feddeck conducted CityMusic Cleveland in the second of five themed concerts devoted to the topic of refugees on Thursday, March 13 at Trinity Lutheran Church in Ohio City, a program that began with an arresting solo cello work by Chinary Ung, moved on to an imaginative new percussion concerto by CIM-trained composer Dan Visconti featuring Shane Shanahan, and culminated in a thrilling performance of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony.

After demonstrating some of the special effects in the piece, cellist James Jaffee led off the evening with an intense, committed performance of Ung’s 1980 Khse Buon (Four Strings), a 15-minute work that the Cambodian composer wrote during his difficult transition from the troubles in his homeland to life in the United States. Playing from the conductor’s platform in front of the already seated orchestra, Jaffee produced an amazing range of sounds from growling bass figures to high, whistling harmonics, and from sudden, startling fortissimos to disappearing whispers. A fusion of eastern and western traditions, Khse Buon manages to sound strange and familiar at the same time. [Read more…]

Preview: CIM at MOCA: Suddenly It’s Evening — a conversation with Keith Fitch

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by Mike Telin

FITCH-KeithCurrently on exhibit at MOCA, DIRGE: Reflections on [Life and] Death, explores how contemporary artists use their individual practices to capture, react to, reflect on, and make sense of mortality. On Thursday, March 20 beginning at 8:00 pm, the CIM New Music Ensemble will present a concert titled “Suddenly It’s Evening,” featuring the music of George Crumb, Donald Erb and Harrison Birtwistle. Each of the evening’s works was chosen specifically in keeping with the spirit of MOCA’s current exhibition.

“There is no shortage of repertoire dealing with the subject matter,” Keith Fitch, director of the CIM New Music Ensemble, said in a recent telephone conversation. “Chris Auerbach-Brown from MOCA and I were talking about that when we were planning the program, but all three pieces just kind of said, “Include Us!”

Thursday’s performance is what Fitch calls a progressive concert and begins at 8:00 pm in MOCA’s fourth floor Main Gallery with George Crumb’s Books II and III of Madrigals. [Read more…]

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