ClevelandClassical.com Header
Ad

‘i Cellisti!’ — Cleveland Cello Society with Darrett Adkins & Oberlin Choir (Jan. 11)

by

by Daniel Hathaway

The Cleveland Cello Society’s annual ‘i Cellisti!’ extravaganza always finds creative ways to bring multiple cellos together, but on Friday, January 11 at St. Paul’s Church in Cleveland Heights, CCS outdid itself. Publicity originally promised a choir of 24 cellos — an impressive gathering — but that number had been upped to 40 last week. Ultimately, 52 cellists were arranged in a vast circle around the nave of the church at the beginning of the concert, along with the 45 members of the Oberlin College Choir. A critical mass indeed. [Read more…]

Art Song Festival: a conversation with baritone Benjamin Appl

by

by Daniel Hathaway

As a stop on his first United States tour, Benjamin Appl will visit Cleveland for a recital in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music on Friday, January 18 at 8:00 pm. The German-born baritone, 36, said in a telephone conversation from his New York hotel that he’s delighted to be sponsored by the Cleveland Art Song Festival. “Especially in the United States, art song recitals are quite rare and it’s very difficult to find promoters who trust there will be enough of an audience,” he said. “My agency in New York told me that it’s absolutely wonderful because the Cleveland organization is a real flagship for this art form.”

Appl, who began his singing career as a treble in the Regensburger Domspatzen — the “Sparrows” of the famous Bavarian cathedral choir of boys and men — spent his early adult years in finance and business administration. Then he became Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s last student, and his life changed.

Since then, Appl has etched out distinguished international credentials in opera and concert music, but he has specialized in Lieder, a subject he now teaches at the Guildhall School in London. It’s music dear to his heart, but he knows it’s often a hard sell in the 21st century. “When I decided to do a lot of song recitals, I knew this would not be an easy step,” he said. [Read more…]

CMA’s Creative Fusion Series begins with Henry Threadgill, Zooid, & Oberlin CME

by

by Daniel Hathaway

The Cleveland Foundation, which has brought more than eighty international artists to Cleveland since 2008 under the auspices of its Creative Fusion program, has partnered with the Cleveland Museum of Art to commission six new works to be premiered over the next two seasons.

Launching the series, composer and multi-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill will bring his Zooid ensemble to the Museum’s Performing Arts Series on Friday, January 11 at 7:30 pm in Gartner Auditorium to join Tim Weiss’s Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble in the world premiere of Threadgill’s Pathways, a partly improvisatory, partly pre-determined work.

Threadgill, now 74, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for his recording In for a Penny, In for a Pound, which the awards jury described as a “highly original work, in which notated music and improvisation mesh in a sonic tapestry that seems the very expression of modern American life.”

Although he has been been characterized as a jazz musician, Threadgill objects to being hedged in by that branding. [Read more…]

Organist Todd Wilson to be featured in BW improvisation workshops & concert

by

by Daniel Hathaway

Over his keys the musing organist, | Beginning doubtfully and far away, | First lets his fingers wander as they list, | And builds a bridge from Dreamland for his lay: | Then, as the touch of his loved instrument | Gives hopes and fervor, nearer draws his theme, | First guessed by faint auroral flushes sent | Along the wavering vista of his dream.

Thus begins James Russell Lowell’s The Vision of Sir Launfal (1867), a poetic description of an organist improvising at the keyboard — an act of instantaneous musical creation that had all but disappeared except from organ lofts, usually French, by the dawning of the 20th century.

Improvisation is now on the rise again, not only through the fingers of organists. “It’s now infecting other musicians as well,” Todd Wilson said in a recent telephone conversation. “Chamber music groups, orchestras, everybody’s doing it.”

Wilson, who is music director at Cleveland’s Trinity Cathedral, professor of organ at the Cleveland Institute of Music, curator of Severance Hall’s E.M. Skinner organ, and a well-known concert organist, is an enthusiastic improviser whose talents are expressed not only during church services. [Read more…]

Ramping up to Carnegie Hall: a conversation with Oberlin College Choir director Gregory Ristow

by

by Daniel Hathaway

On January 19, the Oberlin College Choir and Oberlin Orchestra will share the iconic stage of Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium in New York for performances of works by Tarik O’Regan, Igor Stravinsky, Elizabeth Ogonek, and Claude Debussy led by Gregory Ristow and Raphael Jiménez. That event will be previewed in a free concert in the College’s Finney Chapel on Wednesday, January 16 at 7:30 pm.

Ristow’s choir will be spending most of this month — during Oberlin’s Winter Term, when classes give way to special projects — rehearsing for the New York engagement, but also revisiting a particularly challenging set of pieces they already presented on campus during the fall semester.

He’ll take faculty cellist Darrett Adkins, the Choir, and Sofia Gubaidulina’s Canticle of the Sun to the Cleveland Cello Society’s annual “i Cellisti” extravaganza at St. Paul’s Church in Cleveland Heights on Friday, January 11 at 7:30 pm. And he and his singers will repeat a program they gave for the Oberlin Board of Trustees on the FIRST•Music series at First Lutheran Church in Lorain on Sunday, January 13 at 3:00 pm. [Read more…]

Interesting events on tap in January: here’s a selection of ‘Save the Dates’

by

by Daniel Hathaway

The first event in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Creative Fusion project — a series of commissions by the Cleveland Foundation — brings jazz composer and multi-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill and his Zooid ensemble to Gartner Auditorium on Friday, January 11 at 7:30 pm. They’ll join Timothy Weiss and the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble in the world premiere of an “expanded and improvising chamber ensemble” (click here for tickets).

Organist Todd Wilson mostly plays recitals and services in churches, but his alter ego is equally at home as a theater organist — accompanying silent movies in Severance Hall, Stambaugh Auditorium, and other venues. He’ll demonstrate those skills in Gamble Auditorium at Baldwin Wallace on Saturday, January 12 at 7:00 pm when he improvises scores to Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid and Laurel & Hardy’s Big Business as part of BW’s Kulas Keyboard Series. Want to find out how he does it? Wilson will reveal some of his secrets in two workshops. Details and tickets here. [Read more…]

Les Délices & Quire Cleveland: a conversation with guest conductor Eric Milnes

by

by Daniel Hathaway

If you stop to think about it, most of our American Christmas traditions have their roots in British and German culture. Far fewer trace their origins to France, even though colonization brought French influence to a large portion of what is now the United States. Les Délices, Cleveland’s French Baroque ensemble, will join the singers of Quire Cleveland this weekend to explore this less-familiar, Gallic side of Christmas in three concerts of music by Marc-Antoine Charpentier led by guest conductor Eric Milnes.

The concerts, at Holy Trinity Lutheran in Akron on December 21 at 7:30 pm, at Lakewood Congregational on December 22 at 8:00 pm, and Our Lady of Peace on December 23 at 4:00 pm, will be anchored by Charpentier’s unique Midnight Mass on French Noëls. “There are eleven French Noëls incorporated into the Mass either in instrumental interludes or in ingenious interpolations throughout the text,” Milnes said in a telephone conversation. “Almost every main motive is derived from a carol tune. It’s hard for us in our Anglo-German culture to imagine a mass built on Silent Night or Joy to the World.”

Will all those tunes be as familiar to the audience as the carols he mentioned? “Maybe one or two of them have made their way into our holiday traditions, maybe not,” Milnes said. “I have the benefit of working a lot in Québec, so I get to experience more directly how that population relates to the tradition. But these carols are still far less known, far less performed, and far less familiar than their German or English counterparts, even in the Baroque community.” [Read more…]

Oberlin Orchestra webcast: Spano conducts Hartke premiere (Dec. 12)

by

by Daniel Hathaway

Atlanta Symphony music director and Oberlin alum Robert Spano led the Oberlin Orchestra in impressive performances of Stephen Hartke’s cello concerto, Da Pacem — a world premiere featuring faculty cellist Darrett Adkins — and Jennifer Higdon’s Concerto for Orchestra in Finney Chapel on December 12. I caught the performance remotely via the live webcast. [Read more…]

A Bouquet of CDs & a Book: 18 recommendations for the holidays by our correspondents

by

To guide your last-minute shopping, the staff of ClevelandClassical.com has compiled a list of 17 CDs by artists who work or have a regular presence in the classical music scene in Northeast Ohio, and a book about New York City Opera that will interest local opera fans. Support your local musicians by gifting their music to family and friends!

Some of the following recordings are being reviewed here for the first time, while reviews of others are reposted from editions of ClevelandClassical.com since our last CD roundup in December of 2017.

[Read more…]

Book Review —
Heidi Waleson, Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America

by

by Daniel Hathaway

The saga of New York City Opera, the company founded in 1944 at the behest of mayor Fiorello Laguardia to act as a populist foil to the socially elite Metropolitan Opera, is largely peculiar to New York, but its multiple near-death experiences and ultimate filing for bankruptcy in 2013 flash some warning signs across the industry. Will the most expensive of art forms continue to be viable as audiences and financial resources undergo gradual but seismic changes? [Read more…]

Follow ClevelandClassical.com

Contact us