by Daniel Hathaway
Conductor Scott MacPherson had two things in mind when choosing repertoire for Cleveland Chamber Choir’s first pair of concerts this season. The program had to reflect this season’s concentration on music by women composers, and the works needed to flourish in the lively acoustic of venues in Cleveland and Akron. The first performance, on Friday, November 8 at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, scored high on both counts. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Cincinnati-based pianist Awadagin Pratt will perform on the Lorain County Community College Signature Series on Monday, November 18 at 7:30 pm in the Cinema Hall at the Stocker Arts Center in Elyria. The free event is the annual Eva Hornyak Memorial Concert, for which Pratt will play Beethoven’s Sonata No. 31, Op. 110, Franck’s Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, and Liszt’s Sonata in b.
We last caught up with the pianist two years ago this month, before his performance on the Tri-C Classical Piano Series. In an interview with Jarrett Hoffman, Pratt talked about his training at the Peabody Conservatory (where he was the first to graduate with three diplomas — in piano, violin, and conducting), his prizes (he won the 1992 Naumburg Piano Competition and an Avery Fisher Career Grant two years later), his three visits to the White House (under presidents Clinton and Obama), and his appearance on Sesame Street (when he shared a piano with Big Bird).
I spoke with Awadagin Pratt by telephone at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory, where he teaches, and began by asking what’s been happening in his life during the last two years. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
No longer just a French Baroque ensemble, Les Délices has recently branched out into earlier and later musical periods and crossed national borders. In the latest development, founder, artistic director, and oboist Debra Nagy invited fortepianist Sylvia Berry and three period wind instrument colleagues — clarinetist Colin Lawson, bassoonist Wouter Verschuren, and hornist Todd Williams — to join her in well-known quintets from the Viennese Classical period.
by Daniel Hathaway
To begin its fifth season, the professional singers of Scott MacPherson’s Cleveland Chamber Choir will present identical programs at St. John’s Cathedral in downtown Cleveland on Friday, November 8 at 7:30 pm, and at St. Sebastian Church in Akron on Sunday, November 10 at 5:00 pm.
“Our overall theme this season is ‘Women’s Voices Resounding,’” MacPherson said in a telephone conversation. “A good chunk of the repertoire is by women composers and poets. And the first pair of concerts will be given in memory of my dear friend Helen Tremaine Gregory, who passed away last winter. She was a businesswoman and philanthropist who sang in my town-gown Kent Chorale.”
When MacPherson puts a concert program together, he often begins with a central piece out of which companion works spring. “The centerpiece of these programs is Timothy Kramer’s Lux Caelestis, a piece he wrote for me when I was at Trinity University in San Antonio,” the conductor said. “I asked him for a piece we could sing on tour in Cologne Cathedral — one that was appropriate for a watery acoustic.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The special, spatial music of the Gabrielis and their early Baroque successors at San Marco in Venice has been famous for a long time. But until modern performers took up and mastered the instruments and playing style of the mixed wind and string ensembles that held forth from the galleries of that Byzantine basilica, replicating the timbres of 17th-century polychoral music that drew Northern composers like Heinrich Schütz to the Most Serene Republic just wasn’t possible. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his six solo cello suites between 1717 and 1723, when he was employed as Kapellmeister by the Duke of Anhalt-Köthen, but it was only much later that these works became widely known and hailed for their profundity.
Credit Pablo Casals, who bought a second-hand score of the pieces in Barcelona in 1890 at the age of 13, and worked on them for a dozen years before daring to play them in public. He preserved his performances between 1936 and 1939 in a recording that the Library of Congress chose earlier this year for inclusion in the National Recording Registry.
Performances of the six suites have become something of an Everest for cellists. The Cleveland Orchestra’s Dane Johansen hiked the 600-mile Camino de Santiago in 2014, recording the suites in 36 churches along the pilgrimage route. More conventionally but no less impressively, Yo-Yo Ma played all six in one evening at Blossom in August of 2018.
Now, Apollo’s Fire principal cello René Schiffer has decided to take the suites on, but in a different format and from a special point of view. He’ll perform and record them two at a time beginning this weekend. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The nice thing about cultural density is that you can catch more than one concert in an afternoon without much travel or downtime. On Sunday, October 13 at 2:00 pm, the Tri-C Classical Piano Series brought 17-year-old Mexican pianist Daniela Liebman to Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Then at 4:00 pm, Church of the Covenant organist Jonathan Moyer celebrated his first decade in Cleveland with a recital using both of the organs in the nave. Beautiful fall weather in University Circle both enhanced the experience and took its toll on audiences. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The original Cleveland Orchestra lineup this month was to have featured former and current New York Philharmonic music directors two weeks in a row, but Jaap van Zweden had to withdraw due to a family medical issue in the Netherlands. He was replaced on the weekend of October 17 by the 23-year-old Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä, who had made a sensational debut with the Orchestra last summer at Blossom, and if anything, topped that performance at Severance Hall. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Pianist Kirill Gerstein brought the resplendent new concerto that Thomas Adès has written for him to Severance Hall on October 11. Debuted by the Boston Symphony earlier this year when it was led by Adès himself, the simply titled Piano Concerto formed the torso of a topsy-turvy Cleveland Orchestra program guest conducted by Alan Gilbert that began with a symphony, and ended with an overture. In 25 eventful minutes, Adès creates a sendup of the Romantic piano concerto, clothing a traditional body in the latest fashion. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Baldwin Wallace Opera Theater will stage Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at Red Space in downtown Cleveland on Wednesday and Thursday, October 23 and 24 at 7:00 pm, in a production directed by Kathryn Frady of Knoxville’s Marble City Opera.
Frady returns to BW at the invitation of opera studies director Scott Skiba, after having directed scenes and sung in a premiere during Cleveland Opera Theater’s {New Opera Works} Festival two years ago. “I love contemporary opera,” she said in a recent telephone conversation. “This season, Marble City Opera is producing the world premiere of Shadowlight by Larry Delinger and Emily Anderson. It’s about Beauford Delaney, a famous artist who grew up in Knoxville. We’re building a whole festival around the opera from January through May.
Dido and Aeneas, on the other hand, is a very old theater piece, perhaps having been first performed in London at a dancing school in the late 1680s. “Dido was Scott’s idea,” Frady said. “Originally, we were to have staged Menotti’s The Medium, but casting issues made a switch necessary. But Dido is a great piece.” [Read more…]
