ClevelandClassical.com Header
Ad

Phaeton Piano Trio from Germany up next on Rocky River Series Feb. 10

by

by Daniel Hathaway

Only nine years younger than its East Side counterpart, the Rocky River Chamber Music Society will continue its 61st season with a concert by Germany’s Phaeton Piano Trio on Monday, February 10 at 7:30 pm. The performance at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church is free, but donations are welcome.

While violinist Friedemann Eichorn, cellist Peter Hörr, and pianist Florian Uhlig have been performing together and with colleagues in various combinations for 20 years, the Phaeton Trio is a relatively recent development. [Read more…]

CIM hosts Music For Food at First Baptist February 18

by

by Daniel Hathaway

One of the iterations of Music for Food, a musician-led initiative to fight hunger in local communities, is an annual concert to benefit the Greater Cleveland Food Bank. This year’s event will take place at First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights on Tuesday, February 18 at 8:00 pm. Sponsored by the Student Government Association of the Cleveland Institute of Music, the performance will bring CIM faculty and students together for music by Camille Saint-Saëns, Charles Gounod, and Felix Mendelssohn.

Faculty musicians include Jeanelle Brierley, Olga Dubossarskaya Kaler, and Jaime Laredo, violins, Sharon Robinson, cello, Mary Kay Fink, flute, Frank Rosenwein, oboe, Afendi Yusuf, clarinet, Barrick Stees, bassoon, and Richard King, horn. [Read more…]

Welcoming the Apollon Musagète Quartet to the Cleveland Chamber Music Society

by

by Daniel Hathaway

Founded in Vienna in 2006 by four young Polish musicians, the Apollon Musagète Quartet will visit the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights on Tuesday, February 4 at 7:30 pm.

Violinists Paweł Zalejski and Bartosz Zachłod, violist Piotr Szumieł, and cellist Piotr Skweres, now on a multi-city tour of North America, will bookend their program with Haydn’s Quartet in D, Op. 64, No. 5, “Lark,” and Dvořák’s Quartet in A-flat, Op. 105. Following their custom of featuring at least one work by a Polish composer on each of their concerts, the Quartet will center their program with Krzysztof Penderecki’s Quartet No. 3, “Leaves from an unwritten diary.”

Written only two years after Apollon Musagète was formed — and named after Apollo ‘The Inspirer of the Muses’ — Penderecki’s third quartet marked the composer’s first foray into chamber music in four decades. As Peter Lakí writes in his program notes for the February 4 concert, “Penderecki rarely gives his works programmatic subtitles. The fact that he chose to do so in this case shows that this quartet meant something special to him.” [Read more…]

St. Olaf Choir to sing in Severance Hall as part of its 100th East Coast Tour

by

by Daniel Hathaway

Founded in 1912 in Northfield, Minnesota by F. Melius Christiansen, the St. Olaf Choir began its tradition of East Coast Tours in 1920. Its inaugural itinerary included a concert in Cleveland that inspired Plain Dealer critic James Rogers to write on May 4 of that year, “If there is such a thing as a virtuoso chorus, we have it here.”

On Monday, February 3 at 7:30 pm, Anton Armstrong will lead the 75-voice ensemble in a concert at Severance Hall, a venue which was still in the planning stages in 1920. The performance is the sixth stop on the Choir’s 100th winter tour, which will take the singers to thirteen cities in fourteen days.

“This will be my fourth or fifth appearance with the Choir at Severance, and I love that hall,” Armstrong said in a recent telephone conversation from Northfield. “After our tours I always ask the singers which spaces were best and easiest to sing in, and for the last two tours Severance has eclipsed all the others. I’m a New Yorker, and when I step onstage at Carnegie Hall, I close my eyes and imagine Leontyne Price, or Ella Fitzgerald, or The Beatles. In Cleveland, I’m delighted to add our weave to a great tapestry that includes George Szell and Robert Shaw.” [Read more…]

Les Délices & Blue Heron in Lessons of Love at Plymouth (Jan. 19)

by

by Daniel Hathaway

Romantic love has worked its magic and wrought its afflictions on humankind in similar ways throughout history. Last weekend, Cleveland’s Les Délices joined Boston’s Blue Heron to chronicle how 14th-century European composers addressed that subject. The matrix for the collaboration between the ensembles was the celebrated Roman de la Rose, whose earliest layer by Guillaume de Lorris dates from ca. 1230. [Read more…]

Ehnes & Armstrong in second of three CCMS concerts (Jan. 14)

by

by Daniel Hathaway

When a pianist is performing center stage and seating is open, audiences tend to drift toward the keyboard side of the auditorium to get a good view of the performer’s hands. I like to head toward stage left, the better to catch the expressions on the pianist’s face. That paid off on Tuesday evening, January 14 on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society’s series at the Maltz Performing Arts Center when violinist James Ehnes and pianist Andrew Armstrong continued their progress through Beethoven’s complete sonatas. Per il Clavicembalo o Forte-Piano con un Violino is how the first edition subtitled them, making it clear that if the pianist isn’t the major actor, the two instruments are at least equal partners in this musical enterprise. [Read more…]

Mack & McGuire’s Ghosts of Gatsby at Music Box Supper Club (Jan. 12)

by

by Daniel Hathaway

Although the turbulent marriage of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald —  self-caricatures of the Jazz Age — has inspired a number of literary efforts in addition to their own near-autobiographical novels, the subject never seems to have been approached through the lens of opera. Composer Evan Mack and librettist Joshua McGuire have stepped in to fill that void with their one-act The Ghosts of Gatsby, commissioned by Samford University (Montgomery, Alabama), where it premiered in November 2018. [Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra with Bronfman & Welser-Möst (Jan. 10)

by

by Daniel Hathaway

While many American orchestras were just beginning to stir again after the holidays, Franz Welser-Möst and the Clevelanders were busy pulling off one of the most impressive programs in recent memory. A neglected Dvořák symphony, a darkish Mozart piano concerto featuring Yefim Bronfman, and a standout among Janáček’s few orchestral works served up sequential delights on Friday, January 10. [Read more…]

Announcements

by

Tuesday Musical invites college-age students pursuing careers as music performers and/or educators to apply online for its 2020 Scholarship Competition to be held in Akron on March 21. The deadline is February 1. Click here for information.

Cleveland’s Broadway School of Music and the Arts is hiring part-time teachers of violin, piano, woodwinds & drums for classes on weekdays between 2:00 and 8:00 pm and possibly on Saturdays. Click here to download application details.

Cleveland Chamber Symphony will be accepting scores from Northeast Ohio composers until midnight on January 17 to be considered for its April 7 NeoSonicFest concert at Baldwin Wallace. Click here for criteria and details.

Cleveland Chamber Music Society: Second Ehnes & Armstrong recital features Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata

by

by Daniel Hathaway

Credit Opus 47 for inspiring the complete cycle of Beethoven’s violin sonatas that James Ehnes and Andrew Armstrong are touring this season to celebrate the composer’s 250th birthday.

As the Canadian-born violinist told us in a phone conversation last fall, he and his piano colleague once booked a studio in England to record a commissioned piece, but the work wasn’t ready yet. “The space, the recording engineer, and the producer were all on hold and we were faced with a whole day of dead time. What could we do to turn this into a useful day?”

Having performed Beethoven’s Ninth Sonata (the “Kreutzer”) quite frequently around that time, Ehnes proposed using that day to record it. “It’s never a bad idea to have a recording of the ‘Kreutzer,’ and we could figure out what to do with it later.”

What they did with it later was to record Beethoven’s Sixth Sonata and release the two sonatas on the same disc. “Some publications assumed that this was the start of a cycle,” Ehnes said, and that prediction came true when the violinist was looking for a way to mark the big anniversary of the composer’s birth in 2020. [Read more…]

Follow ClevelandClassical.com

Contact us