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Review: Cleveland Orchestra with Franz Welser-Möst, Yefim Bronfman, and a Widmann premiere (January 16)

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by Daniel Hathaway

hereFor the second of his January homestand weekends before the orchestra travels to Miami for its residency, Franz Welser-Möst gave Severance Hall audiences a Mozart symphony, a Beethoven piano concerto and the United States premiere of a substantial and brilliant new work that has been making the rounds of European and Asian concert halls.

Replacing Radu Lupu, the superb pianist Yefim Bronfman returned to Severance Hall on Thursday for a memorable reunion with the orchestra in Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto. Playing calmly and with a perfect sense of proportion and scale, Bronfman made this most engaging of concertos sound like an easy piece of work (which it really is not).

Welser-Möst and the orchestra provided a warm cocoon of sound around the soloist and arrived at tricky meeting points with pinpoint timing. The wind section achieved a particularly impressive blend. [Read more…]

CD Review: Zuill Bailey — Britten Cello Symphony and Sonata

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by Daniel Hautzinger

Bailey-Britten-CDRight at the end of his centenary year (2013), Benjamin Britten is being celebrated in a new Telarc release of the Cello Symphony and Sonata, recorded by Zuill Bailey and released January 14, 2014.

Both pieces, along with three suites, were written for the legendary cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Britten and Rostropovich were friends and collaborators, and recordings exist of Britten conducting the Symphony with Rostropovich as soloist, and of the two performing the Sonata (Britten was a fine pianist as well as a composer).

Rostropovich and Britten cast both works as epic dramas, life and death conflicts. Bailey works on a smaller scale: in the Symphony, he becomes a dire prophet warning of the apocalypse.

Titled “symphony” instead of “concerto,” it positions the cellist more as a narrator than a soloist, while the orchestra becomes both the setting and the characters. [Read more…]

Review: CMA at Transformer Station — Third Coast Percussion (January 19)

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by Daniel Hautzinger

Third-Coast-PercussionRhythm. It’s the first thing that pops into someone’s head when they hear the word “percussion.” But percussion is such a broad term that it can stretch far beyond just playing beats. Third Coast Percussion’s packed CMA concert at Transformer Station on January 19 provided many such examples of percussion’s fantastic versatility.

Surrounded by paintings in Transformer Station’s gallery space, Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, David Skidmore, and their setup of bells, marimbas, drums, bottles, and wood planks could have been an art exhibit themselves. The evening began in a more “traditional” percussion vein (whatever that means when a percussionist can be called on to play everything from a snare drum to a train whistle) with former Third Coast member Owen Clayton Condon’s Fractalia (2012). Numbering Steve Reich, electronica, and Taiko drumming among its influences, the piece is thrilling with oscillating marimba lines and bombastic drum solos, sounding almost like a song the progressive rock band Rush might have played in the 80s. [Read more…]

Review: Oberlin String Quartet Intensive & Festival — The Wasmuth Quartet (January 14)

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by Daniel Hautzinger

Wasmuth-SQFor much of its existence, chamber music was performed in private homes for small gatherings of friends. A recital by the Wasmuth Quartet on January 14 in Oberlin Conservatory’s Stull Recital Hall had the feeling of those earlier soirees, an intimate and cozy evening. The concert was part of Oberlin’s month-long String Quartet Intensive and Festival.

Stull is small as performance spaces go, with no raised stage. For the Wasmuth’s concert, standees crowded the back and extra seating surrounded the performers on three sides, putting some audience members nearly within arm’s reach of the musicians. Such a close setting also grants an unusual acoustic: resonance is lost, but every detail cuts through. That exposure could be a nightmare for a performer, but the Wasmuths easily adjusted to the venue.

And good thing they did: the sprightly lines of Haydn’s String Quartet Op. 50 No. 6 (“The Frog”) were lithe in their hands, every note clear and bright. [Read more…]

Preview: South Africa-based piano duo featured on Tri-C Classical Piano Series January 26

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by Daniel Hautzinger

Two-PianistsNina Schumann, born in South Africa, met Portuguese-born Luis Magalhães in Texas of all places, where both studied piano under Vladimir Viardo. Now, they’re based in Stellenbosch, South Africa, happily married, perform in a piano duo as TwoPianists, and record on their own label. On January 26 at 2:00 pm, they will share their talents with Cleveland as part of the free Tri-C Classical Piano Series in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium.

When they first encountered each other back in 1990, they would have never predicted this future. “The first time we played together, it was a complete disaster. We vowed we would never play together again,” said Magalhães in a Skype call across an ocean and a hemisphere. “Luis had training that was opposite from mine,” Schumann said. “In the beginning, we couldn’t match at all. But through the years, my playing actually changed: I picked up some of the things that I admired in his playing, and vice versa.”

Now the duo is so attuned to each other that when, in a recent concert, “Luis deliberately played before me on the last chord, I almost fell off my chair,” Schumann said. [Read more…]

Preview: Apollo’s Fire — Fireside Concerts to feature lutenist Ronn McFarlane and soprano Meredith Hall

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by Daniel Hathaway and Mike Telin

McFarlane-Hall“Now winter nights enlarge / The number of their hours; / And clouds their storms discharge / Upon the airy towers. / Let now the chimneys blaze / And cups o’erflow with wine, / Let well-tuned words amaze / With harmony divine.”

Soprano Meredith Hall will begin this week’s Apollo’s Fire Fireside Concerts, “Drive the Cold Winter Away,” with those sentiments by sixteenth-century poet, composer and lutenist Thomas Campion from his song of the same name. “Given the way the winter has been — power outages and such — this theme is a fairly easy one to latch onto,” Hall said in a phone conversation. “What we’re doing is banding together and having an evening celebrating something warm!”

“Campion’s song inspired the program,” said Grammy-nominated lutenist and guest music director Ronn McFarlane, also in a phone conversation. “It’s an Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan show focusing on the English ballad repertoire featuring works by Dowland, Purcell and my favorite composer, Anonymous. Billy [William] Sims will join us on lute and theorbo and Kathie Stewart will play flute and recorder.”

Ballads were the popular music of the Elizabethan period, often circulated as “broadsides” or printed sheets of lyrics that could be fitted to tunes — or families of tunes — that everybody knew and which may have originated as improvisations over bass patterns like the Romanesca. [Read more…]

Preview: WordStage — Bloomsbury and The Great War at Shaker Historical Society

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by Daniel Hautzinger

Bloomsbury-GroupTake a historical artist’s letters and diaries along with the impressions of their contemporaries, string them together with narration, interject related music from the period, and you get WordStage. “Its official tagline is ‘chamber music reader’s theatre,’” said Tim Tavcar over the phone. Tavcar, who is WordStage’s artistic director, sees it as “a cross-pollination of the arts, the point of which is the words and their marriage to the appropriate music.”

It’s also educational, “a catalyst to excite people’s curiosities,” which explains why WordStage is often presented by institutions like the Beachwood, Lakewood, and Cleveland Public Libraries and the Shaker Heights Art Council. The latter commissioned the upcoming Bloomsbury and the Great War, which will be performed on Jan. 24 at the Shaker Historical Society in Shaker Heights.

The Arts Council wanted a work to commemorate World War I, which began 100 years ago. [Read more…]

CIPC updates its Young Artists Competition for 2015

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CIPC-ButterflyThe Cleveland International Piano Competition’s Young Artist Competition, begun in 2005 as a one-day contest, will expand in 2015 into something that much resembles CIPC itself. Approximately 25 students aged 12 to 15 and 16 to 18 (Junior and Senior divisions) will take up residence on the campus of Baldwin Wallace University from May 13-22, 2015 to compete in three solo rounds and a final round with the CIPC Orchestra. As in the case of CIPC itself, students in each age divisions will play two rounds before the initial jury vote. Six in each age group will advance to the Semi-Finals and two each to the Finals.

An institute will run alongside the competition including master classes, coaching, guest recitals and symposia.

The Jury includes Paul Schenly (chair, USA), Yoheved Kaplinsky (USA), Dorian Leljak (Serbia), Sean Schulze (USA/South Africa), Alexander Schimpf (Germany), Kyung Sook Lee (South Korea) and Lei Weng, China.

Further details are available on the CIPC Web site.

Preview: Mary Oliver and Han Bennink at Transformer Station January 22

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by Mike Telin

Oliver-BennickHow does an artist describe what audiences can expect to hear during a concert of free improvisations? “They will have a good time, I’m fairly confident about that,” Mary Oliver told us by telephone. On Wednesday, January 22 beginning at 7:30 pm CMA Concerts at Transformer Station presents two leading performers in the worlds of new music, free improvisation and avant-garde jazz: violinist/violist Mary Oliver and drummer/percussionist, Han Bennink.

Born in Zaandam, Netherlands in 1942, Han Bennink is a pioneer in the world of free jazz and free improvisation and is universally admired for his musical abilities that span the entire spectrum of jazz. In 1967 Bennink co-founded the Instant Composers Pool Orchestra (ICP) along with Dutch pianist Misha Mengelberg.

Born in La Jolla, California, Mary Oliver has received acclaim for her premieres of works by composers such as John Cage, Richard Barrett, Brian Ferneyhough, and Iannis Xenakis. A gifted improviser, Oliver has been described as “a rarity in the ranks of first-rate classical interpreters.”

“Han and I come from very different worlds. He never learned how to read music but he can swing like the best of jazz drummers. And I come from a tradition that is based on interpreting scores. So there will be a confluence of these different things. [Read more…]

Preview: Cleveland Orchestra MLK Celebration — a conversation with Sphinx Competition laureate, cellist Lev Mamuya

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by Mike Telin

MAMUYA-Lev-(Susan-Wilson)On Sunday, January 19, beginning at 7:00 p.m. in Severance Hall The Cleveland Orchestra, under the direction of Chelsea Tipton, will perform its 34th annual concert in celebration of the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. The concert will feature the 165-member volunteer Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Chorus, prepared by William Henry Caldwell. Although the concert is sold out, the performance will be broadcast live on WCLV (104.9 FM) and WCPN (90.3 FM). A free Prelude Concert begins at 6 p.m. performed by members of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra.

In keeping with recent tradition, Sunday’s concert also features a laureate of the Sphinx Competition as soloist. “I’m definitely excited,” sixteen year-old cellist Lev Mamuya, said during a recent telephone conversation. “Obviously getting a chance to work with an orchestra like The Cleveland Orchestra is amazing and I’m looking forward to learning a lot.”

For his debut, Mamuya (pronounced MA-mu-ya) will perform the first movement of Luigi Boccherini’s Cello Concerto in B-flat major, a work he performed on his way to winning First Place in the Junior Division at the 2013 Sphinx Competition. [Read more…]

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