by Mike Telin
“Joshua Rosner has been very gracious and programmed a piece or two of mine on Syndicate concerts,” composer Jonathan Sokol said during a recent telephone conversation. “So I was extremely grateful when he told me that he wanted to present a concert that featured my music.”
On Monday, June 20 at 7:00 pm at Historic St. John’s in Ohio City, the Syndicate for The New Arts will present Sokol’s For the Harp (2011), Gradient : Linear (2010), (…also) (2011), and Resident Songs (2013). Performers will include harpist Caitlin Mehrtens, violinist Henry Jenkins, violist Faith Roberts, mezzo-soprano Katy Early, and pianist Jonathan Sokol, who will discuss each work and take questions from the audience. [Read more…]
On Saturday, June 11, four years after Opera Circle Cleveland first took on Il trovatore at Bohemian National Hall, the company revisited the opera — one of Verdi’s most popular titles — at the Ohio Theatre in PlayHouse Square. A strong cast of singers and a fine professional orchestra led by Joel Smirnoff lifted the production well above some shortcomings of staging. 
The audience in the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Hall witnessed a beautiful solo classical guitar recital on Sunday afternoon, June 4 by renowned Spanish virtuoso Ricardo Gallén, as part of the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival. Gallén’s audience, an appreciative mix of professional guitarists, students, and the public, heard a program of Classical works played on a small-but-penetrating Bernhard Kresse copy of a Johann Georg Stauffer romantic guitar, and music by living composers played on a larger modern guitar by Paco Santiago Marin of Spain. 
