by Daniel Hathaway
Michael Tilson Thomas succeeded Herbert Blomstedt as music director of the San Francisco Symphony in 1995. In a nice coincidence, Blomstedt turned the tables last month, following Tilson Thomas on the Severance Hall podium during adjacent weeks in February. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
When we talked by telephone, Daphna Mor was at home in New York, packing for her upcoming trip to Cleveland. That can be complicated for a wind player getting ready to perform with Apollo’s Fire. “I’m laying out all my instruments and making sure I’m not forgetting anything tomorrow out of the ten or twelve I usually bring,” she said.
All of those will be put to use in “O Jerusalem,” a musical and poetical tour of the Jewish, Christian, Arab, and Armenian quarters of that ancient city, to be led by Jeannette Sorrell.
Mor will join soprano Amanda Powell, tenors Sorab Wadia and Jacob Perry, baritone Jeffrey Strauss, oud and qanun player Zafer Tawil and Brian Kay, plucked instruments, in four area performances beginning in Avon Lake on March 5, followed by Fairlawn (March 9), Cleveland Heights (March 10 — note venue change!), and the Cleveland Museum of Art (March 11). Some concerts will include projections.
Daphna Mor counts herself among the legions of children who were introduced to the recorder as students in elementary school — in her case, in the third grade in her hometown near Tel Aviv. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The artistic planners at Severance Hall have taken profit of soprano Martina Janková’s current visit to Cleveland to create a mini-Mendelssohn festival. Janková appeared with Vinay Parmareswaren and the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra and Chorus on Sunday evening, March 1 in the motet Hör mein Bitten, and will be featured as a soloist in Lobgesang on March 5, 7, and 8 with The Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus led by Franz Welser-Möst.
“I feel at home in Cleveland with my beloved orchestra. I think they are the best in the world,” the Swiss soprano said in a telephone conversation. She’s had plenty of opportunity to get to know the ensemble, having starred in three Mozart operas, sung the title roles in Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen (twice) and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, and most recently appeared as soloist in Schubert’s Mass in E-flat.
The opportunity to revisit the Mendelssohn motet was nostalgic for Janková. “It was like coming back to my roots. I began my study at the Basel Academy of Music with Hör mein Bitten twenty years ago.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Jay White will lead Quire Cleveland in two performances of “Journey Home: Finding Unity after Loss,” a program of music based on the theme of exile, on Friday, February 28 at 7:30 pm at St. John Cantius Church, and Saturday, February 29 at 5:30 pm at St. Vitus Church. The performances are free, but freewill offerings will be received (suggested donation, $25) and each will be followed by a reception.
The concerts will be bookended by settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah by 16th-century English composers Thomas Tallis and Robert Whyte that mourn the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem under Nebuchadnezzar in the late 6th century BCE.
In his program notes, White writes, “Those who were important to the king were taken into captivity in Babylon. The remainder either fled for their lives or were killed. Those fortunate to escape became refugees in their own land, feeling forsaken by God.”
In a recent telephone conversation, White noted that Quire’s program grew out of his interest in engaging with Cleveland’s immigrant communities. “The idea of programming music about leaving home and moving miles away was a way of tying into those immigrants.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
In 2013, the last time Schola Antiqua of Chicago visited the Helen D. Schubert concert series at St. John’s Cathedral in downtown Cleveland, the vocal ensemble took a look inside the world of Guillaume de Machaut. On Friday evening, February 21 at 7:30 pm, Michael Alan Anderson will lead his eight singers in “Slavic Routes: Music from Renaissance Prague.” A freewill offering will be received.
In a telephone conversation from Rochester, NY, where Anderson teaches musicology at the Eastman School of Music, the conductor noted that his singers have already performed the program in Chicago in 2016. “It’s been curated by Erika Honisch, a professor at SUNY Stony Brook, and is based on research that is soon to be released as a book.”
Anderson said that part of the mission of Schola Antiqua is to explore the canon of early vocal music, but also to draw on recent research and “to package programs under themes.” The Prague program, for example, seeks to serve up a slice of musical life in that important capital of the Holy Roman Empire around the year 1600. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Through a lucky series of encounters, Irish conductor Karen Ni Bhroin (pronounced Knee VRIN) found her way first to graduate studies at Kent State University, then to the assistant conductor’s position with the Akron Symphony Chorus, and most recently — the news came down just this morning — to her appointment as assistant conductor with the Winston-Salem Symphony.
In that second capacity, the 29-year-old conductor is preparing the Akron Symphony Chorus for its performance of the Mozart Requiem under Christopher Wilkins on Saturday evening, February 22 at E.J. Thomas Hall.
I reached Ni Bhroin by telephone to ask how that chain of events got started. “I had been freelancing in Dublin for five years after my undergraduate degree at Trinity College, and in 2013 I met Jungho Kim, who was finishing his doctorate at Eastman,” she said. “We were Facebook friends, and he posted in 2018 that he was looking for an assistant at Kent State, and that’s how it all started. I applied and I won the position. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The Cleveland Orchestra — or at least half of it — marked Valentine’s Day with a straight-through, 50-minute concert led by Belgian early music guru Philippe Herreweghe. The February 14 performance, marketed as a romantic evening of orchestral classics, played to a packed house (marketing works!). [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Music is said to be a universal language, but it does speak with different accents. When you’re playing music by Jean Sibelius, it’s helpful to have a Finnish conductor on the podium, which is what made Susanna Mälkki’s pair of Cleveland Orchestra concerts so lucid and communicative earlier this month. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Today’s touring string quartets hew to so uniformly high a standard that it’s often little individual touches that make ensembles stand out. The Polish musicians who make up the Apollon Musagète Quartet showed up at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights for their debut on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series on February 4 in matching plaid suits and black shirts. And jettisoning their jackets, they played standing (except for the cellist). [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
At first glance, Moon in the Mirror: an Operatic Monodrama in Seven Scenes, with libretto by Zhang Er and Martine Bellen and score by Stephen Dembski, bears a striking resemblance to Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. Both are centered around a solo soprano who meditates on aspects of the human condition in the pale, ghostly light of Earth’s only satellite — itself a mirror that merely reflects, producing no light of its own. [Read more…]