At its sold-out concert honoring the life and legacy of the late civil rights leader on Sunday evening, January 14 in Severance Hall, The Cleveland Orchestra announced the 2018 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Community Service Awards, which were divided into three categories. [Read more…]
Les Délices intoxicates with rare 14th-century music (Jan. 14)
by Daniel Hathaway
The Cleveland-based period instrument ensemble Les Délices generally traffics in French Baroque music. That national repertoire overlays special mannerisms onto forms and harmonic progressions that are otherwise relatively familiar to our ears. But when Debra Nagy takes her colleagues and audiences back another three or four hundred years on an excursion into the French 14th century, we enter a musical world that operates under very different rules. [Read more…]
Preparing to hear a new work: Staud’s Stromab at Severance Hall
by Daniel Hathaway
This weekend, music director Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra will precede their Thursday and Saturday performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 with the Cleveland premieres of Austrian composer Johannes Maria Staud’s Stromab. The 15-minute work was co-commissioned by The Cleveland Orchestra, who will take it to New York’s Stern Auditorium at Carnegie Hall on January 23. Staud was named by Welser-Möst as the Orchestra’s Daniel R. Lewis Young Composer Fellow for the 2007-08 and 2008-09 seasons.
Thanks to the resources of the internet, it’s possible to do a bit of prepping to hear such a new work before taking your seat in Severance Hall — when many patrons will have their first opportunity to read the notes in the program book. Here’s your opportunity to do a little homework before the downbeat.
Staud’s work, which translates as “Downstream,” is based on The Willows, a 1907 horror tale by the British author Algernon Blackwood. [Read more…]
Save the dates for some January concert highlights
by Daniel Hathaway
Classical music begins stirring from its long holiday nap during the first two weeks of January, revving up from adagio to allegro by mid-month.
The Westminster Choir — the flagship ensemble of Westminster Choir College, now part of New Jersey’s Rider University, will make a stop at the Church of the Covenant in University Circle on Saturday, January 6 at 7:30 pm during its winter tour. Joe Miller will conduct the ensemble in Frank Martin’s Mass for Double Choir (1926), György Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna (1966), and music by Joel Phillips, Tim Brent, Edward C. Bairstow, Ailo Alcala and Randall Thompson.
Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra will make a big splash the weekend of January 11 with Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 and a new work by Austrian composer Johannes Maria Staud. Stromab (“Downstream”) is inspired by what Staud calls “one of the finest horror stories of all time,” Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows, a tale of two young people who canoe down the Danube and discover a lonely island where weird things swirl around them. Mahler 9, the composer’s last symphony, has been described by Herbert von Karajan as “music coming from another world, from eternity.” There are performances on Thursday the 11th at 7:30 pm and on Friday and Saturday the 12th and 13th at 8:00 pm.
Another major work will be featured the following week when soprano Golda Schultz, tenor Maximilian Schmidt, and baritone Thomas Hampson join Welser-Möst, The Cleveland Orchestra, and the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus in Haydn’s The Seasons. Performances are scheduled for Thursday, January 18 at 7:30 and Saturday, January 20 at 8:00 pm. In between, Welser-Möst and the Orchestra will play all-Beethoven on Friday, January 19 at 8:00 pm — Symphonies 1 and 3 and the Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus. [Read more…]
Countertenor Jay White appointed artistic director of Quire Cleveland
by Daniel Hathaway
The board of Quire Cleveland has announced that countertenor Jay White will succeed founder Ross W. Duffin as artistic director of the professional choir at the end of Quire’s tenth anniversary season in July 2018.
Duffin, who is Distinguished University Professor of Musicology at Case Western Reserve University, and Beverly Simmons, Quire’s executive director, will move on “to pursue new artistic and familial adventures in California and Washington, D.C.,” according to a December 19 press release.
White, who joined Quire Cleveland in 2012, serves as professor of voice at Kent State University, where he is also music director of Kent State Opera. He sang for eight seasons with Chanticleer, and during his more than 35-year career has performed with the Men and Boys Choir of Washington Cathedral, Grace Cathedral San Francisco, the Folger Consort, the Carmel Bach Festival, and Apollo’s Fire Singers. [Read more…]
A Bouquet of CDs: 18 recommendations for the holidays by our correspondents
To guide your last-minute shopping, the staff of ClevelandClassical.com has compiled a list of 18 CDs by artists who work or have a regular presence in the classical music scene in Northeast Ohio. Support your local musicians by gifting their music to family and friends!
CD ReviewNikita Mndoyants: Davidsbündlertänze (Steinway & Sons 30075)
by Daniel Hathaway
Russian pianist Nikita Mndoyants chose 29 short works — the longest just over four minutes — for his debut recording on the Steinway & Sons label, proving that sublimity can be achieved in very small stretches of time. The composers would agree. Beethoven’s Op. 126 Bagatelles, Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze, and Prokofiev’s Sarcasms were highly thought of by their creators, even though their formats left little room for the development of ideas. [Read more…]
CD ReviewQuire Cleveland — Richard Davy: St. Matthew Passion (QC 107)
by Daniel Hathaway
Recorded live at performances in April of 2017, Ross W. Duffin’s reconstruction of Richard Davy’s St. Matthew Passion was three decades in the making. The original work, the earliest polyphonic passion setting by a known composer, is uniquely but only partially preserved at the end of the early 15th-century Eton Choirbook. Duffin supplied music for eleven missing movements at the beginning of the work, as well as the missing voices for the next dozen movements for which only alto and bass parts survive. [Read more…]
Apollo’s Fire: “Christmas on Sugarloaf Mountain” (Dec. 9)
by Daniel Hathaway
The five sold-out performances of “Christmas on Sugarloaf Mountain” this month attest to the popularity of Apollo’s Fire’s crossover shows. Heard on Saturday, December 9 at First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights, the holiday sequel to “Sugarloaf Mountain: an Appalachian Gathering” was just as alluring and infectious as its predecessor, even if some of its elements were still in the process of settling in. [Read more…]
TCO with Richard Goode and Mikko Franck (Dec. 7)
by Daniel Hathaway
The last regular Cleveland Orchestra concert before Severance Hall was to be decked out for its Christmas Concerts featured a new work by Julian Anderson, a Mozart concerto with pianist Richard Goode, and Brahms’ First Symphony led by Finnish guest conductor Mikko Franck. [Read more…]