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News: CMA announces concert series at the Transformer Station

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Transformer-StationBeginning this weekend, the Cleveland Museum of Art will present its first set of concerts at The Transformer Station in Ohio City. The concerts of “adventurous music” both composed and improvised, will feature remarkable contemporary artists in solo performances. All concerts are one hour long and are presented without intermission with an emphasis on intimacy and spontaneity. All tickets are $20.

The series begins on Saturday, October 5 at 7:30 pm with the rhythms of South Asia and Afghanistan as realized by tabla player Salar Nader, who plays regularly with Amjad Ali Khan and with the Kronos Quartet.

On Sunday, October 27 at 7:30 pm, violist Garth Knox will play early, contemporary and traditional music including works by Kurtag, Ligeti, Sciarrino, Rzewski, Knox and others with the assistance of Cleveland Orchestra bassist Scott Dixon. [Read more…]

Preview: Composer-flutist Robert Dick to visit CIM and play for Greater Cleveland Flute Society

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by Daniel Hathaway

Dick-RobertComposer and flutist Robert Dick got energized about contemporary music at Yale in the early 1970s, where he was part of a small group of students who worked in a classic electronic studio even before the birth of the synthesizer.

Dick left school after undergraduate and graduate studies with a big vision. “I thought I would have the possibility of a huge international solo career playing new music. I really thought that the best music in the best performances would win the day and overcome the reluctance of people to listen to things that were unfamiliar to them,” Dick told us in a telephone conversation.

“The size of everything turned not to be what I dreamed. Music that really asks something of the listener is challenging, and the mass audience is not willing to take that challenge. The person who actually loves the experience of really listening to music is rare.”

Dick attributes the demise of active listening to changes in education. “In the 1970s, music was stripped out of the public school curriculum all over the country, which is probably the single root cause of why things are the way they are today.” [Read more…]

Preview: CMA opens its Masters of the Violin series with concert by L. Subramaniam

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by Mike Telin

SubramaniamsIndian violinist L. Subramaniam, “The Paganini of Indian Classical music,” has performed and recorded South Indian classical music, Western classical music both orchestral and non-Orchestral, and has also composed for and conducted major orchestras, scored for films and collaborated with a wide range of some of the greatest musicians from different genres of music.

On Friday, October 4 at 7:30 p.m. in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art, L. Subramaniam will be joined by his son Ambi Subramaniam and percussionist Mahesh Krishnamurthy for a program of South Indian Carnatic music. Sonya Rhie Quintanilla, the George P. Bickford Curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art, will preview the reopening of the Indian and Southeast Asian galleries with a pre-concert talk beginning at 6:00 p.m.

Subramaniam is an enthusiastic, engaging and thankfully patient conversationalist as he tells me that Indian classical music is melodically complex and that improvisation plays a major role in performance. He continues to explain that Friday’s concert of South Indian Carnatic music will consist of compositions based on ragas in different forms. One of the forms is Kriti, which consists of three sections based on a raga. At the end of each section they will return to the first line after which they will improvise on the line of the raga on which the Kriti is based. [Read more…]

Preview: Cleveland Chamber Music Society anticipates a thrilling season

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by Daniel Hathaway

CCMS-Logo-64The lineup for the sixty-fourth season of the Cleveland Chamber Music Society has its board members buzzing with enthusiasm. “Yes, there are world famous string quartets,” said Melvin Arnoff, “but also three pianists, a guitarist, a soprano, clarinets, flutes and percussion. And the composers range from Bartók, Beethoven and Britten to Dean, Dessner and Parry. This promises to be a “WOW” season.”

Anthony Addison agrees and mentions his favorites. “All six Bartók quartets and a return of eighth blackbird are the high spots of the season, as far as I am concerned. Cuarteto Casals with Manuel Barrueco on guitar, and Pavel Haas playing Janáček, Britten and Beethoven are a very close second. It’s a fascinating season.”

CCMS’s season begins at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights on Tuesday, October 15 at 7:30 with a program of salon music from the British Isles, Russia, France, Germany and Italy performed by soprano Susanna Phillips, pianist Anne Marie McDermott and violist Paul Neubauer.

Barbara Green is especially enthusiastic about the first concert in the series. “I first heard Susanna Phillips when she was still a student at Juilliard and a participant in the Art Song Festival. She had a lovely voice, a fine command of the texts, and that certain quality which I can only describe as ‘presence’. I have followed her career for many years and was delighted to read the review of her performance [at the Metropolitan Opera] in today’s New York Times. How exciting it will be to hear her again!” [Read more…]

Preview: Les Délices —Woman Scorned

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by Mike Telin

Les-Delices-3For the past four years Les Délices have presented well-researched, thought-provoking and highly entertaining programs that explore music and themes of the French Baroque. Their concerts are performed in intimate settings that create an atmosphere similar to that in which this music was intended to be enjoyed.

This weekend Les Délices begins their Fifth Anniversary season with Woman Scorned, a program of wild, descriptive music depicting sorceresses and temptresses that explores universal themes of desire, jealousy, shame, and revenge by giving voice to the spurned lovers of antiquity. The program also includes two works never before heard in Ohio.

In addition to Les Délice’s regulars, baroque oboist Debra Nagy, baroque violinist Julie Andrijeski, viola da gambist Emily Walhout and harpsichordist Michael Sponseller, Woman Scorned also features renowned, Chicago-based mezzo-soprano Angela Young Smucker.

Les Délice’s founder and artistic director Debra Nagy says the program exalts in wild, passionate music portraying characters such as Circé, Phèdre, Armide, and Medea while contemplating the somewhat misogynist portrayals of the women in these works that is – in some cases – far removed from their classical origins. [Read more…]

Review: Hawkeye Trio makes its debut in Oberlin concert (September 25)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Hawkeye-TrioThe Hawkeye Trio, a newly-hatched chamber ensemble made up of Oberlin Conservatory faculty members Michael Isaac Strauss, Richard Hawkins and James Howsmon, played its inaugural concert in Kulas Hall at the conservatory on Wednesday evening, September 25.

Three fine chamber musicians who play viola, clarinet and piano and want to concertize together need to do some research. That’s not a standard configuration of instruments. What repertory exists — like Mozart’s Kegelstatt Trio (not included on Wednesday’s program) — was usually written for domestic use by friends and family.

Case in point: Max Bruch’s Eight Pieces, op. 83, were composed for Bruch’s clarinetist son, Max. The Hawkeye elected to play two sets of four pieces each at the beginning and end of their program, leading off with Nos. 8, 6, 5 and 7 and finishing with the first four, in order. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Orchestra: Russian evening with Vassily Sinaisky & Kirill Gerstein (September 26)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Sinaisky-VassilyNow that classical music has become increasingly homogenized through globalization, there’s something deeply satisfying about experiencing works from a national tradition interpreted by conductors and soloists who grew up speaking the language. On Thursday evening, Russian conductor Vassily Sinaisky and Russian-born pianist Kirill Gerstein treated the Severance Hall audience to deeply-felt performances of music by Liadov, Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev. Led early on by Russian conductors, The Cleveland Orchestra has a near-native feel for this repertory and played it with expressive passion coupled with New World precision.

Conducting with his bare hands, Sinaisky, who is music director of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre, painted perfect little scenes for each of Anatoly Liadov’s Eight Russian Folk Songs to open the program. English horn and bassoon solos (Robert Walters and Barrick Stees) set a solemn mood for the “Religious Chant,” an affect that first assistant principal cellist Richard Weiss recaptured later in the “Plaintive Song.” “Dance of the Gnat” created a buzz both in the strings and an amused audience. Mary Kay Fink’s piccolo soared out over pizzicato strings in the “Round Dance,” and a vivacious orchestral tutti brought the set of tiny pieces to a celebratory ending in the “Village Dance Song.” [Read more…]

Review: Cantus opens 2013-2014 Tuesday Musical Series at E.J. Thomas Hall (September 24)

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by Timothy Robson

CantusAkron’s Tuesday Musical opened its 126th season on September 24 at E.J. Thomas Hall in fine fashion with the Twin Cities-based, nine-voice men’s vocal ensemble Cantus. Cantus has distinguished itself from other male vocal ensembles – especially the San Francisco-based Chanticleer – by using the traditional configuration of tenors, baritones and basses, rather than also including male altos and sopranos. Throughout this concert, Cantus was a model of beautiful vocal sound, unanimity of ensemble and thoughtful, intriguing programming.

The title of Cantus’s program was “A Place for Us,” taken from a phrase in Stephen Sondheim & Leonard Bernstein’s song “Somewhere” in West Side Story. Spoken narrative linked the individual numbers together with poetry and excerpts from prose works expressing the experience of home, and how we know that a place is home to us.

An abbreviated version of “Somewhere” opened the concert, which was followed by the traditional Protestant hymn “This is my song” sung to the main theme from Jean Sibelius’s Finlandia. Cantus member Chris Foss’s complex arrangement of a traditional fiddle song followed, using jazz scat syllables to depict a country fiddler going at it. [Read more…]

Review: Burning River Baroque and hūmAnómali — “Desperation and Desire” at Lakewood Presbyterian Church (September 27)

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by Nicholas Jones

Rauschenfels-MalinaIn his short life, Henry Purcell (1659-1695) composed hundreds of extraordinarily expressive songs. It was a rare treat this weekend to hear some of the best of them grippingly performed by the dramatic soprano Malina Rauschenfels.

I heard Rauschenfels in the acoustically vibrant sanctuary of Lakewood Presbyterian Church, with Peter Lekx on baroque violin, David Ellis on gamba, and Paula Maust on harpsichord (a second performance was to be the next night at St. Alban’s in Cleveland Heights). The program was presented jointly by Burning River Baroque and by a group named hūmAnómali (the name was not explained in the otherwise very informative program materials). Rauschenfels has played beautifully on the baroque cello in previous Burning River concerts, but her decision to perform as a vocalist gives these programs an extra focus and intensity.

One of Purcell’s talents was to elevate relatively undistinguished poetry—by, for example, Nahum Tate, who is known mostly for giving Shakespeare’s King Lear a happy ending. Purcell’s daring song settings are astonishingly modern: he is the true precursor to Benjamin Britten, of whom we are hearing a great deal this centennial year. [Read more…]

Review: Pianist/composer Lera Auerbach opens Mixon Masters Series on September 17

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by Daniel Hathaway

Auerbach-MH1-MastroianniMoving in a new direction this season, the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Masters Series is celebrating composers who are also skilled performers. Russian-born pianist and composer Lera Auerbach played the first “Return of the Composer/Virtuoso” concert on Tuesday, September 17, offering a good-sized audience her 24 Preludes for Piano, op. 41, and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an exhibition.

Auerbach, who grew up in the Ural mountains on the borders of Siberia, then trained at Juilliard, is an artistic polymath. She writes poetry and prose, paints, and composes prolifically. Prolifically and obsessively, judging from her three sets of 24 preludes, first for piano, subsequently for violin and piano and cello and piano. She couldn’t get that project out of her mind.

Auerbach prefaced her performance of the solo piano preludes with her own description of the pieces, which last about 45 minutes. They are “throwaway ideas” of “fragile beauty” that “disappear quickly”. She liked the idea of arranging a series of evanescent miniatures into a grand form — a plan she also followed with the other two sets. [Read more…]

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