by Timothy Robson
Stephen Tharp is a brilliant performer! His recital at Immaculate Conception Church on Tuesday evening, September 27, was a pleasure from beginning to end. His imaginative program showed his virtuosity as a performer and could be enjoyed by both trained organists and the general public alike. Moreover, he has the talent to make an organ like the church’s 1953 Casavant — an instrument of modest resources — sound its best. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
“I’ve retired three or four times, but I really mean it this time. My recital at Fairmount will be my next-to-last recital,” Frederick Swann declared during a telephone conversation from his home in California.
The longtime organist of New York City’s Riverside Church and organist emeritus of the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California has decided at the age of 85 to wind down his career as one of the most celebrated recitalists in North America. This fall he will play his last two recitals: in Cleveland on October 2 and in Kilgore, Texas, on November 10.
That penultimate concert will bring Swann back to the 100-rank Schantz instrument in Fairmount Presbyterian Church in Cleveland Heights on Sunday, October 2 at 3:00 pm. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
In a thrilling and revelatory recital on September 23, Cleveland Orchestra principal cello Mark Kosower and pianist Jee-Won Oh celebrated the centenary of Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera. Drawing a large audience to Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Kosower visited all three of Ginastera’s style periods and offered his own tribute to Aurora Nátola, who inspired most of the composer’s works for the cello. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Duo-piano teams pop up with some frequency on recital series, but duo-organists not so much. The Atlanta-based husband and wife team of Raymond and Elizabeth Chenault have four-handedly (and four-footedly) set out to change that dynamic, having commissioned and performed some 60 organ duets during their four decades of sharing an organ bench. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Though the Bascom Little Fund — named after the late Cleveland architect and avocational composer — may be obscure to many music lovers, it’s quite well-known among composers and musicians. Created “for the promotion through the media of concerts, publications, and recordings of serious and semi-popular music, newly composed and performed in or near Cleveland, Ohio,” the charitable trust has funded numerous projects over the last five decades. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Think of the early Baroque Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi, and images of Venice and its highly photogenic Piazza San Marco inevitably pop up — especially if the work in question is the Vespers of 1610. But he didn’t write his most famous piece for the Most Serene Republic. Monteverdi composed the Vespers, along with the opera Orfeo, his first five books of madrigals, and the Missa in illo tempore when he was in the employ of the Gonzaga family in Mantua, until the family’s declining economic situation made him a free agent in 1612.
Ross W. Duffin and his twenty professional singers of Quire Cleveland will explore Monteverdi’s Mantuan legacy in a free concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in downtown Cleveland on Friday evening, September 30 at 7:30 pm. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The new performing arts season at the Cleveland Museum of Art begins on Wednesday, September 21 at 7:30 pm in Gartner Auditorium with a concert by Dona Onete, the septuagenarian singer-composer from the state of Pará in the Amazon, who merges indigenous rhythm and dance with African, European and Caribbean traditions in a style called carimbó chamegado*. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The new performing arts season at the Cleveland Museum of Art begins on Wednesday, September 21 at 7:30 pm in Gartner Auditorium with a concert by Dona Onete, the septuagenarian singer-composer from the state of Pará in the Amazon, who merges indigenous rhythm and dance with African, European and Caribbean traditions in a style called carimbó chamegado*. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
“Alberto Ginastera’s career was made in America and his name became famous both here and in Europe,” said cellist Mark Kosower in a recent telephone conversation. “But his music just isn’t performed enough and he’s not taken with the same seriousness as European composers. He’s rooted in tradition, but in the second part of his career he became cutting-edge, writing in new ways all the time. I think that’s a model for any modern composer.” The Cleveland Orchestra’s principal cellist will join his wife, pianist Jee-Won Oh, in a celebration of the Argentine composer’s 100th birth anniversary on Friday, September 23 at 8:00 pm in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
When cellist Clive Greensmith last visited the Cleveland Chamber Music Society in November of 2012, he appeared with the Tokyo Quartet. Soon thereafter, when that ensemble’s longtime members Kikuei Ikeda and Kazuhide Isomura decided to retire, Greensmith and violinist Martin Beaver at first decided to audition a new violinist and violist, but later resolved to let that estimable quartet fade into chamber music history. Then, a conversation with Jon Kimura Parker, the Tokyo Quartet’s frequent collaborative pianist, led to the creation of a new piano trio which eventually took on the name of the musicians’ favorite French wine, Chateau Montrose. [Read more…]