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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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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Rocky River Chamber Music Society to feature cimbalom player Alexander Fedoriouk

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by Jarrett Hoffman

The Rocky River Chamber Music Society will explore “Chamber Music of Hungary” to begin its 61st season on Monday, October 14 at 7:30 pm at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church.

Four Cleveland Orchestra members — violinists Katherine Bormann and Emma Shook, violist Stanley Konopka, and cellist Martha Baldwin — will open the program with Bartók’s String Quartet No. 2.

The second half is all trios: Shook will join another Orchestra colleague, bassist Henry Peyrebrune, and cimbalom player Alexander Fedoriouk in traditional folk music from Hungary and Romania, and in works by Brahms and Vittorio Monti. A freewill offering will be taken.

The largest instrument in the hammered dulcimer family, as Fedoriouk expalined in an interview, the cimbalom is struck with wooden hammers to create sound. One feature that distinguishes the instrument from other dulcimers is its damper pedals, an innovation of József Schunda in the 1870s.

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Season 14 of Close Encounters, Year 20 of Heights Arts

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Close Encounters Chamber Music and artistic director Isabel Trautwein have two reasons to celebrate: the series’ 14th season, and the 20th year of its parent organization, Heights Arts.

The minds behind the scheduling have kept things simple for concertgoers to store away in their brains (and for writers to explain): the four concerts take place on Sundays at 3:00 pm, which does seem like a particularly nice time for “up close and personal” chamber music, just as the series likes it. Single and season tickets are available online.

Up first is the Omni Quartet on October 13 at a Carriage House on Herrick Mews Lane in Cleveland Heights. Cleveland Orchestra musicians Amy Lee and Alicia Koelz, violins, Wesley Collins, viola, and Tanya Ell, cello, will bring along Haydn’s Trio in C, Hob V:G1, Mozart’s Quartet No. 22 in B-flat, and Robert Schumann’s Quartet No. 3 in A — written during his exuberant, love-filled first year of marriage to Clara Wieck.

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Tuesday Musical to celebrate “Akron Legends of Jazz and Dance”

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by Jarrett Hoffman

To begin this season’s FUZE Series on Thursday, October 10 at 7:30 pm at E.J. Thomas Hall, Tuesday Musical will honor the memory of two local arts icons: jazz pianist and composer Pat Pace, and Ohio Ballet founder and choreographer Heinz Poll, who both passed away in 2006.

“Akron Legends of Jazz and Dance” will feature Verb Ballets and players from the Chamber Music Society of Ohio. Leading the group is flutist George Pope, who became familiar with Pace and Poll as far back as 1978, when he began teaching at the University of Akron and performing as principal flute of the Akron Symphony.

“I knew quite a lot about Pat and his amazing musicianship from the beginning,” Pope said during a telephone interview. “We did performances with him in the Akron Symphony and the University orchestra, and I had friends who studied and performed with him. He was teaching a lot of the young jazz artists of his time — pianists as well as other musicians performing with him. He was inspiring the next generation.”

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