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Contemporary Youth Orchestra: a new piano concerto, without the pianist

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by Jarrett Hoffman

When the Contemporary Youth Orchestra opens its 25th season this weekend, those in the audience will see players playing, conductor conducting, and a piano whose pedals and keys depress and release, letting out the most artful of sounds, but without anyone laying a finger on it.

A talented ghost? Not exactly. Steinway & Sons has developed a high-resolution player piano known as the Spirio. By measuring hammer velocity and pedaling, it can reproduce a performance that, according to the company, is “utterly indistinguishable” from the original.

Using a Spirio, Antonio Pompa-Baldi has already recorded the solo part to Roberto Piana’s new Concerto Fantastique. That instrument will be onstage in front of the Contemporary Youth Orchestra and music director Liza Grossman, playing back Pompa-Baldi’s performance during the work’s premiere on Saturday, November 16 at 7:00 pm at Mandel Theatre on the Eastern Campus of Cuyahoga Community College. The program also includes Gustav Holst’s The Planets. [Read more…]

Akron Symphony to feature Brunfelt & Guegold in Vivaldi & Strauss

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by Jarrett Hoffman

This weekend, the Akron Symphony will spotlight two of its own. Concertmaster Tallie Brunfelt will take on the quadruple challenge of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, and principal horn Meghan Guegold will play Richard Strauss’s early Concerto No. 1 on Saturday, November 16 at 8:00 pm at E.J. Thomas Hall.

When Guegold was an 18-year-old student at the University of Akron, she was determined not only to learn the Strauss, but to play it memorized on that uncommon and ambitious event: the freshman recital.

“I thought, you know, I want to perform for a living, so I might as well jump right on in,” the hornist said during an interview.

That work, a pillar of the horn repertoire, wasn’t a surprising choice. “It’s definitely one of the best concertos we have,” Guegold said, adding that it might be the best from the Romantic era. The lyricism and the heroic quality of the writing attracted her. “I think it was the start of my real love of Strauss’s music.”

[Read more…]

Brunfelt, Guegold, and Wilkins on Akron Symphony’s “Stand Beside Her”

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by Jarrett Hoffman

The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in August of 1920, and leading up to the 100th anniversary of that event, the Akron Symphony is highlighting six women composers through a project called “Stand Beside Her.”

I spoke to concertmaster Tallie Brunfelt and principal horn Meghan Guegold — who will both be featured as soloists in the Orchestra’s November 16 concert — and asked what this programming initiative means to them.

“I’m just so thrilled that the ASO is doing this, especially in light of the centennial,” Brunfelt said by telephone. Being a woman at her position in the Orchestra makes this project all the more exciting for her. “There aren’t many female concertmasters, and I think representation and visibility are extraordinarily important,” she said.

[Read more…]

Pianist Till Fellner to return to Cleveland Chamber Music Society

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Till Fellner last came to town in 2011 at the invitation of the Cleveland Chamber Music Society. The Austrian pianist returns to the series for a recital next Tuesday, November 12 at 7:30 pm in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Roger Klein will give a pre-concert lecture at 6:30 pm. Tickets are available online.

Fellner’s international career was launched when he won first prize at the Clara Haskil International Piano Competition in 1993. Since then, he has been a guest at major orchestras and music centers of Europe, the U.S., and Japan. Last season brought his debut with the London Symphony, and this season includes his second appearance with the Boston Symphony. He teaches at the Zurich Hochschule der Künste.

The pianist’s Chamber Music Society program is one part Schoenberg and two parts Schubert — who is among the composers Fellner admires most. As he told Kyle MacMillan last year in an interview for the Chicago Symphony’s CSO Sounds and Stories, “…it seems to me that Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert and Bach are so important, and it’s the most interesting music for me.”

[Read more…]

CIM Opera Theater to begin The Juniper Tree on Halloween

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Murder, cannibalism, a return from the dead, and revenge — basically everything you could want from an evening out. You get all of that in Philip Glass’ and Robert Moran’s The Juniper Tree, presented by CIM Opera Theater beginning on Halloween night, October 31.

Arthur Yorinks’ libretto is based on the Brothers Grimm story, which begins where else but with a stepmother. She worries that her stepson reminds her husband of his own late wife. Her solution? We might call it unique. She kills the kid — gruesomely — then feeds him to her unsuspecting husband in the form of a stew. The boy later returns as a bird, seeking vengeance.

In a phone call, director Dean Southern (above) said he’s long been drawn to the realms of fantasy and horror. “As a kid, I was probably a vampire for Halloween more than anything else.”

[Read more…]

English clarinetist Colin Lawson to join Les Délices in Mozart and Beethoven

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by Jarrett Hoffman

You might expect that someone who’s a leader in their field was hooked from their initial encounter with it. Colin Lawson, described as “the doyen of period clarinettists” by BBC Magazine, had a different first impression of early music performance.

“I was rather put off because some of the musical results were not that fantastic,” Lawson said by telephone from the Royal College of Music in London, where he directs the school, chairs its historical performance program, and teaches classical clarinet. “I was very interested in the academic side of early music, but it took me a bit of time to get ‘round to playing it.”

Audiences are certainly happy that he did get around to it. His credentials as a player include performances with Britain’s leading period orchestras, solo appearances in Wigmore and Carnegie Halls, and recordings of an array of concertos and chamber music.

Lawson’s latest project falls in the category of things that are always exciting and often challenging: meeting new musicians — some from another continent, no less — and playing chamber music with them. Next weekend, under the umbrella of Les Délices, he will join oboist Debra Nagy, bassoonist Wouter Verschuren, hornist Todd Williams, and fortepianist Sylvia Berry in three concerts of music by Mozart and Beethoven.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project to present Alia Musica Pittsburgh

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Composer and conductor Federico Garcia-De Castro was 12, living in his native Colombia, when a left-leaning politician named Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa was shot and killed at an airport in Bogotá.

“He was part of a whole political party that was exterminated one by one,” Castro said during a recent interview. “Estimates range from 3,000 to 5,000 people.”

Among all the killings, that one in March of 1990 left the biggest mark on Castro. “He was a very charismatic leader who was picking up more and more steam,” the musician said of Jaramillo. “I remember that I was very shocked and disturbed.” Years later, after seeing a documentary, he decided to write a piece in homage to that leader.

The new music ensemble Alia Musica Pittsburgh, which Castro directs and conducts, will perform his Memoria for soprano, violin, cello, guitar, and percussion this Sunday, October 27 at 7:00 pm at the Bop Stop. The free program also includes works by John Arrigo-Nelson, James Ogburn, Kerrith Livengood, and Bowling Green faculty composer Marilyn Shrude, and will serve as the season opener and kickstarter launch for the Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project.

[Read more…]

Akron Symphony:
“Symphonic Shakespeare”

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Akron Symphony music director Christopher Wilkins has long had an interest in theater. “I’ve kept my eye out for theater-related projects for years and years and years,” he said during an interview.

One of those projects was Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream interleaved with a significant chunk of Shakespeare’s play, a production ClevelandClassical.com reviewed in 2014. “I’ve also done The Tempest with the complete incidental music by Sibelius,” Wilkins said. “But these next two pieces are knockouts.”

Those would be Shostakovich’s Hamlet Film Suite and William Walton’s Henry V: A Shakespeare Scenario, which make up two-thirds of “Symphonic Shakespeare,” the Orchestra’s program this Saturday, October 19 at 8:00 pm at E.J. Thomas Hall.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Museum of Art:
Fretwork and Michelangelo

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Fretwork, the famous England-based viol consort, will return to Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art next week for a program inspired by the Museum’s current exhibit “Michelangelo: Mind of the Master.”

On Wednesday, October 23 at 7:30 pm, Fretwork will play “Music from the Age of Michelangelo,” a program based on musical developments that occurred during that artist’s life. One was the emergence of the violas da gamba, and the trend of homogeneous ensembles.

Another was a book of music published in 1501 by Ottaviano Petrucci that represented a major technological breakthrough in the field of printing. The Harmonice Musices Odhecaton (“One Hundred Harmonic Pieces of Music”) was the first music book to be printed using movable type, and contained works for three to six parts — mostly vocal pieces, but without text — by major composers of the time.

[Read more…]

CityMusic Cleveland:
a conversation with the
new music director, Amit Peled

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by Jarrett Hoffman 

All it took was one visit.

“Last time I was in Cleveland, what was really special for me was the deep connection I had with the orchestra right away,” cellist and conductor Amit Peled said during a telephone interview.

On that trip this past May, he joined CityMusic Cleveland as soloist in Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto No. 1, and the relationship he felt wasn’t that of soloist and accompanists. “It was really music-making in an equal way,” he said. “That’s what I liked about the orchestra from the time we spent together, and that’s what I want to preserve. I think we both felt a connection, and that’s why it resulted in this relationship.”

In July, it was announced that Peled would be the next music director of CityMusic, while his predecessor Avner Dorman has stepped into the role of music director emeritus. Peled will begin his first season — the ensemble’s 16th — by leading the orchestra in free performances October 17-20 in Beachwood, Willoughby Hills, Slavic Village, and Lakewood (details below).

[Read more…]

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