by Daniel Hathaway
BlueWater Chamber Orchestra’s “Strings After Sundown” program at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights on Saturday, February 3 was advertised — as late as the afternoon before in an email blast — as a conductor-less performance to be led by concertmaster Kenneth Johnston. Instead, the audience was greeted by a program insert noting that the concert would be conducted by Erie Philharmonic music director Daniel Meyer. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Boston-based soprano Amanda Forsythe returns to Apollo’s Fire this weekend to sing Johann Sebastian Bach’s wedding cantata, Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten, with oboist Debra Nagy and Jeannette Sorrell’s period instrument ensemble. The program, titled “Three Duels and a Wedding,” also includes concertos by Bach and Telemann (those are the “Duels”), and will be performed in four different venues from February 8-11.
Forsythe has been a frequent guest of Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra, having appeared with Apollo’s Fire in “Mozart and Papa Haydn” in 2013, “The Power of Love: Passions of Handel and Vivaldi” in 2014, and in Bach’s St. John Passion in 2016.
The soprano made a strong impression at the Boston Early Music Festival in 2013, when she sang the role of Edilia in Almira, Handel’s very first opera, written at the age of 19 and premiered in Hamburg in 1705. Reviewing those performances for The New York Times, James R. Oestreich found Forsythe “simply dazzling in her fioritura and her altitudinous rages.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Sometime between the unfortunate episode when Jean Baptiste Lully, leading the Paris Opera orchestra by pounding on the floor with a staff, mortally wounded himself in the foot, and the time when dedicated conductors began waving pointed sticks around in front of their ensembles, concertmasters routinely led orchestras while simultaneously playing their violins.
That’s exactly the role that BlueWater Chamber Orchestra concertmaster Ken Johnston will be reviving this Saturday evening when he presides over an 8:00 pm program of music by Mozart, Dvořák, and Schoenberg at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights.
We reached Johnston, who also serves as concertmaster of the Erie Philharmonic, to ask how he was preparing for this weekend’s assignment, and what he thought the challenges might be. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Since violinist Andrew Sords last played a recital at Lorain’s First Lutheran Church early in 2014, the building burned to the ground at the hands of an arsonist. Sords’ engaging recital last Sunday, January 28 took place in the nearly-complete sanctuary of a handsome new building complex, giving patrons of the FIRST•music series a preview of what they can look forward to in the future — especially when the new Paul Fritts organ arrives to fill the gap in the wall in the photo above. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
During Tuesday Musical’s pre-concert chat at E.J. Thomas Hall on January 23, one of the members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center referred to the touring ensemble who were appearing as part of the Clara I. Knight Young Artists Series as “Wu Han and the boys.” Afterwards, the seasoned chamber music pianist teamed up with her younger colleagues — pianist Michael Brown, violinists Chad Hoopes and Paul Huang, violist Matthew Lipman, and cellist Dmitri Atapine — for fresh, riveting performances of works by Johannes Brahms and Antonín Dvořák that melded experience with youthful exuberance. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Leave it to Cleveland to produce spring-like weather in mid-January on a day when your chorus is singing a hibernal program about walking on crunchy snow, sitting in front of cozy fires, and driving the cold winter away. Never mind. The splendid repertory Michael Carney chose for Good Company’s “Winter Fire” concert on Sunday afternoon, January 21 at Lakewood Presbyterian Church perfectly evoked the season that wasn’t. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Joseph Haydn’s two great oratorios, The Creation and The Seasons, came along late in his life after the composer had visited London and was impressed by Handel’s large dramatic works for chorus and orchestra. After bravely performing a stripped-down version of The Seasons on Thursday — two of the soloists were ailing — Franz Welser-Möst led The Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus in an enthralling performance of the complete oratorio on Saturday evening. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The Cleveland Orchestra has been tweaking the format for its Fridays@7 concerts. They were originally conceived as hour-long, straight-through performances preceded and followed by non-classical genres of music performed in the lobbies in a party ambiance with food and drink. On January 19, the concert — all-Beethoven — was nearly full-length and included an intermission, but as an innovation, it introduced informal conversations between orchestra musicians and Franz Welser-Möst. Severance Hall was packed with a multigenerational audience whose energy helped make the evening a celebration. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Most of us feel fortunate if we can make a dent in a single professional career. Thus it’s inspiring that Per Enflo has distinguished himself both as a theoretical mathematician and a concert pianist. His interest in those parallel but distinct disciplines dates from his childhood in Sweden, where he first showed an aptitude for mathematics and played his first full recital on a professional concert series at the age of 11.
As a mathematician, Enflo has cracked several seemingly unsolvable problems in functional analysis while teaching at Berkeley, Stanford, the École Polytechnique in Paris, and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. In 1989, he was appointed one of three “University Professors” at Kent State. In addition to teaching mathematics, he also worked on such cross-disciplinary issues as the zebra mussel invasion and the phosphorus loading of Lake Erie, anthropology and human evolution, and acoustics and noise reduction. Upon retirement in 2012, he moved back to Sweden, but still makes regular appearances in the States.
This weekend, Enflo will return to Northeast Ohio to play Mozart’s 17th and 21st Concertos with the Cleveland Virtuosi on the Chagrin Concert Series at Valley Lutheran Church in Chagrin Falls. [Read more…]
The Cleveland Orchestra has announced that Christian Van Horn will replace Thomas Hampson as baritone soloist in its performances of Haydn’s oratorio The Seasons on Thursday, January 18 and Saturday, January 20 at Severance Hall and on Wednesday, January 24 at Carnegie Hall in New York. [Read more…]