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Preview: Cleveland Pops Orchestra to present a night in New Orleans

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by Mike Telin

TOPILOW-red-clarinet“Music and Fun for Everyone!” For seventeen years the Cleveland Pops Orchestra has been presenting concerts that feature the music of Hollywood and Broadway along with light classics and jazz. “It’s music you can hum along with or tap your toes to and that you can just enjoy,” says Cleveland Pops founder and conductor Carl Topilow. On Friday, May 3rd beginning at 8:00 pm in Severance Hall, Topilow and his orchestra will present an evening of New Orleans Jazz featuring trumpeter Byron Stripling. We spoke to the multi-faceted Carl Topilow by telephone and began by asking him about the evening’s program.

Carl Topilow: In keeping with the New Orleans theme, the concert features Hershy Kay’s arrangement of Louis Gottschalk’s Cakewalk Suite, a medley from Showboat and Mardi Gras from Ferde Grofé’s Mississippi Suite. Byron will join the orchestra in tunes like Bourbon Street Parade, St. James Infirmary, Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone and Sweet Georgia Brown. I’ll also join in with my clarinet, that’s always something very special for me. [Read more…]

Preview: “California Masterworks” at Cleveland Museum of Art — a conversation with James Feddeck, Tom Welch and the Calder Quartet’s Andrew Bulbrook

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by Mike Telin

TCO-at-CMA-MastroianniOn Wednesday, May 1st and Friday, May 3rd in Gartner Auditorium, The Cleveland Orchestra and the Cleveland Museum of Art will come together for their second collaboration, California Masterworks.

How did the two organizations come to the idea? “That’s a good question,” says Cleveland Orchestra Assistant Conductor James Feddeck. “After the enormous success of our first ever collaboration in 2011 we all began to talk about what the next collaboration would look like so I think the question is why California? That is what we are hoping to uncover during the week.”

So why California? Following a number of discussions, the two organizations determined that they should do something that embraced American music and the American spirit, but it wasn’t until Feddeck and Tom Welsh, the museum’s Director of City Stages, began to think about the composers they wanted to highlight that they discovered a common thread between them. “We found this interesting connection in that they were all influenced by their West Coast inspiration. I’m not sure that we are presenting a conclusion with these two concerts but what we are doing is presenting the music, the story and this common thread.” [Read more…]

Preview: BlueWater Chamber Orchestra — a conversation with guest harpsichordist Kenneth Cooper

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by Daniel Hathaway

COOPER-KennethThe celebrated American harpsichordist and conductor Kenneth Cooper will revisit Cleveland this weekend for the first time since he was featured in multiple concerts with the Ohio Chamber Orchestra several years ago. On Saturday, May 4 at 7:30 pm at Plymouth Church, Cooper will play Manuel de Falla’s Concerto for harpsichord, flute, oboe, clarinet, violin and cello and Handel’s Concerto No. 15 in d minor for harpsichord and strings with BlueWater Chamber Orchestra under the baton of its assistant conductor, Neil Mueller. Also on the program: Grieg’s Holberg Suite and J.S. Bach’s Orchestra Suite No. 3 in D.

Cooper began his harpsichord studies with Sylvia Marlowe, one of the modern champions of the instrument, who was attracted to the instrument through concerts given by Wanda Landowska when Marlowe was studying with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Cooper eventually succeeded her at the Mannes College of Music and now holds posts at Columbia University and the Manhattan School of Music where he chairs the harpsichord department and directs the Baroque Aria Ensemble. He serves as music director of the Berkshire Bach Ensemble and appears regularly with Paula Robison at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as on such series as the Yale-Norfolk Summer Chamber Music Festival and Music at Menlo.

His forty-year career as a specialist in eighteenth-century music has yielded many recordings of the Baroque masterworks as well as a wide range of other music including ragtime, American music, documentary film soundtracks and even a video game.

We reached Kenneth Cooper at his home in New York after a busy week of opera conducting to ask about his forthcoming concert in Cleveland. [Read more…]

Review: Peter Richard Conte on the Skinner organ in Stambaugh Auditorium, Youngstown (April 28)

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by Robert Rollin

ContePeter Richard Conte’s Sunday afternoon Stambaugh Auditorium organ concert was a delight. The large, recently renovated Skinner organ, putatively a gem of its type, was certainly put through its paces. The program, full of interesting highlights, included music from the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-century organ literature.

Conte, who presides at the mammoth organs at Macy’s in Philadelphia (formerly Wanamaker’s) and Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA as well as serving as music director at St. Clement’s Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, performed two interesting transcriptions of his own during the first half. The Mondscheinmusik from Richard Strauss’ opera Capriccio, opus 85 provided evocative post-Wagnerian harmony and tone color. Originally an orchestral interlude, the transcription provided the opportunity to feature string and French horn organ timbres. The music, enriched with many non-chord tones, presented lovely translucent accompaniment to beautiful melodic material.

Otto Nicolai’s lusty comic opera overture to The Merry Wives of Windsor provided source material for Conte’s second transcription. Here the irrepressible Falstaff pursues two married women who ultimately throw him into the river. [Read more…]

Review: Oberlin Artist Recital Series — Apollo’s Fire in “Mozart & Papa Haydn” in Finney Chapel (April 28)

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by Nicholas Jones

AFJSConductingIn its concerts this weekend, Apollo’s Fire burnt bright with the intensity of the mature Haydn and the brilliance of the young Mozart (not that he was ever old, alas!)

This winter has seen Cleveland’s baroque orchestra presenting “intimate” concerts of Vivaldi and Bach with reduced forces, perhaps for budget reasons. By contrast, this concert assembled a big band—almost thirty instrumentalists—fitting for late 18th-century operatic and symphonic literature. The investment in such a richness of talent paid off in an extraordinary mixture of precision, energy, and richness.

Full string sections were backed by pairs of natural horns and paired woodwinds—baroque bassoons, oboes, and flutes. In Oberlin’s Finney Chapel—acoustically clear and relatively dry—the group could play at faster tempos than in the resonant churches in which Apollo’s Fire normally performs, and with a tighter sense of ensemble.

This was Apollo’s Fire at its best: crisp, exciting, and beautifully transparent. Bass lines energized the music from below; in the middle, inner voices shone through with ease; oboes, flutes, and violins dazzled with rapid and always-varying intricacies. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus in Haydn’s The Seasons (April 25)

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by Daniel Hathaway

TCO&COCThe Cleveland Orchestra Chorus has had a lot on its plate this month, preparing and performing two major works just two weeks apart. This fine, all-volunteer ensemble — now celebrating its sixtieth anniversary — handily swapped the faux-medieval pastiche of Carmina Burana for the witty, cultured music of The Seasons, turning in a splendid performance of Haydn’s underappreciated, second oratorio under the baton of Franz Welser-Möst on Thursday evening, April 25 in Severance Hall — with a little help from The Cleveland Orchestra and three top-notch soloists.

The suddenly-flowering trees out front augured well for the occasion, which opened with an orchestral introduction depicting “the passage from winter to spring”. That was followed closely by the choral caveat: “Do not rejoice all too soon / for often, wrapped in mists, / winter creeps back again and strews / on blossom and bud his rigid poison.” Apparently, what goes for Cleveland also goes for Vienna. Though all four seasons cycled by onstage, Spring prevailed outside on Thursday night.

In setting Baron von Swieten’s adaptation of a lengthy text by Scots poet James Thomson, Haydn planned a major scene as the centerpiece of each season, calling on the chorus to play joyful, grateful countryfolk in Spring, storm-frightened villagers in Summer, hunters and wine tipplers in Autumn and spinners and storytellers gathered toastily around the fire in Winter. [Read more…]

Review: CityMusic Cleveland — Intergenerational Concerts at Fairmount Temple Auditorium (April 18)

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by Daniel Hathaway

DORMAN-AvnerCityMusic Cleveland has started a tradition of sponsoring a week’s worth of Intergenerational Concerts at the end of its season. This year’s cycle included four morning performances (opening with a limited access concert at the Juvenile Detention Center) and two evening concerts conducted by David Alan Miller. The morning events began with Rossini’s Thieving Magpie overture and continued with Avner Dorman’s Uzu and Muzu from Kakaruzu, based on the children’s book of the same name by Ephraim Sidon, featuring percussionists Haruka Fujii and Luke Rinderknecht. The two evening performances at the Shrine Church of St. Stanislaus and St. Noel, Willoughby Hills added Schumann’s fourth symphony.

I caught the Thursday morning performance at Fairmount Temple Auditorium, which got off to a bit of a late start waiting for school buses to arrive. When everybody was in place, the audience was as intergenerational as one could expect at 10:00 am: students, their teachers and aides and a number of older attendees — people whose commitments and schedules allow them to come to a true “matinee.” [Read more…]

Review: Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival — four concerts in two days (April 19-20)

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by Daniel Hathaway

B-WBachFestivalBig

For the eighty-first time, Baldwin Wallace (formerly College, now University and no longer hyphenized) honored the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and some of his forebears and contemporaries with four main concerts on its campus in Berea on April 19 and 20 — plus a lecture, a Bach Institute open house, a master class, ancillary events held in area churches and a reunion of former Bach Festival participants. The Cantor of Leipzig would have been proud.

CONCERT ONE

The opening concert was an organ recital of music by Bach and music that inspired Bach given by Hungarian-born, Oberlin-trained organist Bálint Karosi, who now lives and works in Boston. Playing the 1974 Rudolf Janke organ in Berea Methodist Church, Karosi presented music by Nicolaus Bruhns, Dietrich Buxtehude and Bach, as well as music by others — Johann Friedrich Fasch, Prince Johann Ernst and François Couperin — that Bach had arranged for the organ. Additionally, Karosi improvised on a chorale theme given to him on the spot. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Chamber Music Society — Quatuor ébène at Plymouth Church (April 16)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Quatuor-ebeneAnybody who thinks that string quartet concerts can be uneventful — or downright ennui-producing — should have heard the French bad boys who make up Quatuor ébène on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series at Plymouth Church on April 16. Pierre Colombet, Gabriel Le Magadure, Mathieu Herzog and Raphaël Merlin took mostly well-mannered quartets by Mozart and Mendelssohn out and gave them a hard ride. Either you hated their interpretations for their sheer wilfulness and distortion or you adored them for their sang-froid and cockiness. And then les garçons flipped a switch during intermission and turned into an astonishingly sophisticated pop/jazz group (chouette alors! — turn down the lights and break out the cabernet!)

You know it’s going to be an odd evening when the “dissonant” introduction to Mozart’s K. 465 quartet goes by without much of a ripple but the happy-sunny musical events that follow raise multiple eyebrows. [Read more…]

Review: Opera Per Tutti: the rest of Il Trittico at Cleveland Public Theatre

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by Mike Telin

OPT-Trittico-IIThis past weekend in the Gordon Square Theatre at Cleveland Public Theatre, the always resourceful Opera Per Tutti completed its cycle of the three operas comprising Puccini’s “Il Trittico” with engaging productions of Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi, skillfully directed by Scott Skiba. The company performed the first opera of the Triptych, Il Tabarro, in October 2010.

Watching other people’s dysfunctional families unravel before your eyes has been a source of entertainment since, well probably since there have been people. And in opera, while there is plenty of dysfunction to go around, the family of deceased Buoso Donati, could easily rival, if not outdo the Kardashians in their unbridled attempt to secure their share of the family fortune. A fortune which Buoso Donati has left to the monastery. [Read more…]

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