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Les Délices: The White Cat, a new Baroque opera at the Breen (Apr. 2)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Ailurophiles rejoice! There’s a new opera in town, created as many French Baroque titles were back in the day, out of bits and pieces of existing material, and the principal character is a large feline. (It’s actually a princess seeking to be rehumanized through the traditional heroic means of fulfilling a series of impossible challenges or quests.)

The creative team behind The White Cat begins with Les Délices artistic director Debra Nagy, who has had Larry Rosenwald adapt Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy’s story La Chatte Blanche into a five-act (or five-quest) libretto that recasts the manipulative Puss in Boots, who gets ahead almost entirely through trickery, into a kinder, gentler feline. Each quest is linked with a French version of one of Aesop’s Fables coupled with a divertissement, and joined together by well-known tunes like Couperin’s Les Barricades Mysterieuses. [Read more…]

DIARY: Wednesday, April 13, 2022

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by Daniel Hathaway

 TODAY’S EVENTS:

Tonight at 7, Carlos Kalmar leads the CIM Orchestra in Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 9 and works by Anna Clyne and Haydn in Kulas Hall, and at 7:30, the Oberlin College Choir under visiting professor Ben Johns serves up a menu of part songs and madrigals in Finney Chapel (you can watch via live stream).

NEWS BRIEFS:

The Boston Symphony has canceled an upcoming four-city European tour due to a resurgence of COVID-29 that has affected 31 of its onstage musicians. The tour was to be a partnership between the BSO and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, which share an artistic conductor in Andris Nelsons. Read more here. [Read more…]

DIARY: Monday, April 11, 2022

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by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S EVENTS:

Eric Charnofsky’s WRUW radio slot today from 2-4 pm observes Alberto Ginastera’s 106th birthday (in absentia), and pulls some obscure works by Anron Arensky, David Maslanka, Adolphus Hailstork, Robert Schumann, and Janice Giteck off the shelf for a listen here.

The Cavani Quartet work with CSU student composers today at 4 in Drinko Recital Hall, at 7 pm, Les Délices proposes to reconcile early Romantic Lieder with the history of science (fairies meet microbes) in the next online episode of Salonera, and Youngstown State faculty Misook Yun, soprano, Sean Yancer, horn, and Caroline Oltmanns, piano (pictured) take on the diversity problem in German Lieder repertoire in a free 7:30 pm concert in Guzzetta Recital Hall at the University of Akron (also available online). [Read more…]

WEEKEND DIARY: April 8-10, 2022

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by Daniel Hathaway with Mike Telin

FEATURED THIS WEEKEND: BW Bach Festival

Back for its 90th iteration after a two-year hiatus imposed by the pandemic, the Baldwin Wallace University Bach Festival packs nine concerts, recitals, master classes and lectures into two days this weekend on its campus in Berea, and spills over into the rest of the year with other Bach-related happenings.

“It’s pretty exciting, with all the artists coming back together from all over the place,” Festival artistic director Dirk Garner said in a telephone conversation earlier this week. “We’re really all so relieved to be performing live again instead of doing it virtually or not doing it at all.”

With the help this year of a generous grant from the Kulas Foundation, Garner has invited two Boston-based ensembles to perform individual concerts as well as to join Garner’s BWV Bach Choir on Friday evening, and BW faculty and student singers and instrumentalists on Saturday evening in four of the six cantatas that make up Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. [Read more…]

Diary: Wednesday, April 6, 2022

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by Daniel Hathaway

ON TODAY:

Trinity Cathedral’s Brownbag Concert at high noon today will feature the Amethyst String Quartet – Mary Beth Ions and Carol Ruzicka, violins, Laura Kuennen-Poper, viola, an Kent Collier, cello in a “spring bouquet” of Classical favorites by Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Dvořák & Mozart. The hybrid concert will also be livestreamed and archived for later, on-demand viewing.

NEWS BRIEFS:

On Wednesday, the New York Times announced the appointment of Zachary Woolfe, a freelancer at the paper since 2011, as its classical music critic. In an article in Editor and Publisher, his Times colleagues Gilbert Cruz and Sia Michel wrote

Zack often engages with the major issues confronting the field — editing and writing pieces about the continuing obstacles female conductors face; the lack of diversity in major orchestras and on podiums; the ways classical music should change in an era of racial reckoning; and the field’s complex, fraught relationship with Asian and Asian American musicians. [Read more…]

After two years online, the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival goes live again from April 8-10

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by Daniel Hathaway

Nine decades ago when it was still a college, the grand plan for Baldwin Wallace University’s annual Bach Festival was based on a repeating cycle of four of the Leipzig cantor’s major vocal works, giving students the opportunity to sing and play the two Passions, the B-minor Mass, and the Christmas Oratorio during their undergraduate days in Berea.

Back on track after a two-year online exile, the 2022 Festival, enhanced by a $100,000 gift from the Kulas Foundation, will comprise 15 in-person events, including a performance of four of the six cantatas that make up Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.

The weekend will also continue the 50th anniversary celebration of the founding of BW’s Riemenschneider Bach Institute, named for scholar and festival founder Albert Riemenschneider, a party that was interrupted by the pandemic in 2020.

Part of the Kulas funding will support the appearances of two period ensembles now based in Boston that were formed largely by students who met at Oberlin and at the Juilliard School. [Read more…]

DIARY: Monday, April 4, 2022

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by Daniel Hathaway

ON TODAY:

Today from 2 to 4 pm on WRUW from Case Western Reserve University, Eric Charnofsky continues to explore highways and byways of classical music with a  program that includes Dmitry Kabalevsky’s Symphonic Poem “Spring,” “Poem of April” for baritone and piano by Jules Massenet, the first symphony of Arvo Pärt, plus a Sonata for violin and piano by Lejaren Hiller and music by Theresa Wong and Louis Couperin. Click here to listen to the internet feed.

And tonight at 7:30 pm, the Rocky River Chamber Music Society ventures into jazz with Bob Sneider & Friends, a five-member jazz ensemble led by Sneider, who is associate professor of jazz studies and contemporary media at the Eastman School of Music. It’s a hybrid event that you can either attend in person at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church, 20401 Hilliard Blvd. in Rocky  River, or watch via live stream. [Read more…]

Diary: Weekend, April 2-3, 2022

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by Daniel Hathaway

ON THIS WEEKEND:

Les Délices continues its live, premiere run of the Baroque opera The White Cat on Saturday at 3 and 7:30 and Sunday at 3 at the Breen Center, and CIM Opera Theater and New Music Ensemble repeat their Pocket Operas program on Sunday at 4 in Mixon Hall.

Orchestra concerts this weekend include the Akron Symphony with the flamenco dance Alice Blumenfeld and the Korean Three Drum Dancers (E. J. Thomas Hall Saturday at 8), and Lauren Berry and Connor Bogart solo in Broadway favorites with Carl Topilow and Cleveland Pops at Severance.

Visiting musicians will be hosted by the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society (Berta Rojas, pictured, Saturday at 7:30 at Plymouth Church) and No Exit (The Unheard-of Ensemble exploring climate change with composer Christopher Stark and video artist Zlatko Ćosić at Spaces Gallery  Saturday at 8).

On Sunday at 1 at the Cleveland History Center, the Cleveland Arts Prize will celebrate African American History and Culture and its own 60th anniversary with pianist Dianna White-Gould, violist Christopher Jenkins, cellist Kahri Joyner, poet Raja Belle Freeman, and tenor Cornelius Johnson. The weekend concludes Sunday at 4 with Stars in the Classics’ spring cabaret at the Church of the Western Reserve. [Read more…]

Oberlin Opera Theater: Secret Marriage, Public Hilarity (Mar. 26)

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by Daniel Hathaway

It’s been said that six is the magic number of guests to invite to a dinner party. Fewer than that reduces the likelihood of witty repartée, and more than that risks having the party break up into multiple conversations. That principle also applies to casts of comic operas that depend on scintillating conversations and wild misperceptions to fuel the plot.

Saturday evening’s Oberlin Opera Theatre performance of Cimarosa’s Il Matrimonio Segreto at Hall Auditorium brought exactly half a dozen talented singer-actors together in a tightly-woven plot that left its characters and relationships in a quandary right before intermission. [Read more…]

Diary: Friday, April 1, 2022

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by Daniel Hathaway

ON TODAY:

Five operas will receive their premieres in Northeast Ohio today, four of them composed by students at the Cleveland Institute of Music, the fifth marking the return of the Baroque ensemble Les Délices to live performances.

CIM’s Opera Theater and New Music Ensemble are up first tonight at 7 with “A Pocketful of Operas,” four short chamber works in Mixon Hall. A Storm We Call Progress by Emma Cardon features an original libretto by Kirsten Barker and Laurana Wheeler Roderer. Ruth by Daniel DiMarino, with libretto by the composer, is based on the eponymous story in the Hebrew bible. Arseniy Gusev’s The Blind has been adapted by Tikhon Antonov from the Maurice Maeterlinck play. And Yoav Sadeh’s Loneliness is based on a short story by Bruno Shulz.

At 7:30 this evening at the Akron Public Library, Les Délices will present the first of four performances of The White Cat, a Baroque opera pastiche with puppets and projected imagery based on Catherine D’Aulnoy’s 17th century feminist retelling of Puss in Boots. [Read more…]

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