by Robert Rollin
Last Saturday, April 14, the Youngstown Symphony presented “Side by Side,” the fourth and last Classics Series concert under the baton of Randall Craig Fleischer. The evening’s highlight was the performance of movements from Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony with teenage Youth Symphony musicians sitting in tandem with regular orchestra members.
by Daniel Hathaway
In their most recent appearance at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Peter Phillips’ renowned British vocal ensemble, Tallis Scholars, dedicated a program of sacred Renaissance music — with a couple of modern insertions — to those who lost their lives in the First World War from 1914 to 1918.
by Daniel Hathaway
The final event in the Cleveland Chamber Symphony’s 2018 NEOSonicFest gave eight young composers the opportunity to hear their creations played by a professional orchestra led by Steven Smith — himself a composer. The pieces were performed in Gamble Auditorium at Baldwin Wallace University on Wednesday, April 11.
by Mike Telin
A co-founder of Splinter Reeds, a San Francisco-based reed quintet, improviser and educator Dana Jessen has also performed with San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Dal Niente, Calefax Reed Quintet, and Anthony Braxton’s Tri-Centric Orchestra.
On Saturday, April 21 at 8:00 pm at Historic St. John’s Episcopal Church in Ohio City, the bassoonist will join bassist Jaribu Shahid and pianist Josh Harlow for a performance of free improvisations. Presented by the Syndicate for the New Arts in cooperation with New Ghosts, the free concert will also feature improvisation by the newly-formed trio of saxophonist Bob Bucko Jr., violinist Alex Cunningham, and drummer Alexander Adams.
What can listeners expect to hear? “Probably a lot of sounds that are new to their ears,” Jessen said during a recent telephone conversation. “I’ve never played with Jaribu and I’m really excited about it. He’s a phenomenal bass player who is associated with the Chicago-based AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians). He’s played with all the heavy hitters of that organization like Roscoe Mitchell and Anthony Braxton, so I’m excited to get to work with him.”
by Jarrett Hoffman
“If we were back in Europe where the band members’ families are from, we could fairly readily drive to each other’s houses,” Harmonia founder and accordionist Walt Mahovlich said in a recent conversation. “But we would never have met being from those different backgrounds — different worlds.”
This Friday, April 20 at 7:00 pm at John Knox Presbyterian Church in North Olmsted, the Church’s Performance Series will present the six-piece, Cleveland-based ensemble Harmonia. The program includes traditional Hungarian, Slovak, Ukrainian, Romanian, Croatian, and Gypsy folk music — the sounds of the players’ ancestry.
“Some of our musicians would never have been permitted to leave Europe prior to 1991, except possibly as refugees,” Mahovlich said. “But with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it became possible for people to leave. That certainly provided great opportunities for the West to hear some extraordinary players.”
by Daniel Hathaway
Michigan-based cellist Deborah Pae was the featured soloist with David Ellis’ Earth and Air: String Orchestra at a concert in the nave of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights on Friday evening, April 6. The main piece of business that brought her to Cleveland was a performance of Jeffrey Mumford’s two rhapsodies for cello and strings, but she was front and center in Tchaikovsky’s Andante Cantabile as well.
by Nicholas Stevens
Éliane Radigue creates works that often suit the gallery better than the concert hall. Best known for drone compositions of almost cosmic proportions — OMNHT, her current installation at MOCA Cleveland, runs for several decades before looping — her works tend to defy conventional notions of performance. But last week, Northeast Ohio concertgoers took in a rare experience: hearing some of Radigue’s recent acoustic works for live performers, while seated inside the installation.
by Daniel Hathaway
Two big works more than filled The Cleveland Orchestra’s Thursday evening program on April 5, one of them a standard concerto that crosses all international boundaries, the other a Czech symphony receiving only its third performance by the Orchestra, all three of those led by Czech conductors.
by Jarrett Hoffman
It’s an epic feeling when three superheroes, from separate stories and with their own distinct powers, team up. The real-life, artsy, and Cleveland-related parallel to that? A collaboration next week among three prominent local institutions from three different disciplines.
Next Wednesday, April 18 at 7:00 pm and 7:45 pm, the Cleveland Institutes of Music and Art will join the Museum of Natural History for the fourth edition of 360° of Sight + Sound: The Planetarium Project. Five-minute films by students of CIA, scored with electronic music by student composers of CIM, will be given their world premiere screenings inside the dome of Shafran Planetarium at the Museum.
by Jarrett Hoffman
“The war to end all wars” — if only that were true. Known as simply the World War up until the late 1930s, the international disaster we now call WWI came to an armistice a century ago, after claiming over 16 million lives.
A concert this week at the Cleveland Museum of Art will commemorate those lost in that conflict. Embarking on their 71st tour to North America, director Peter Phillips and the Tallis Scholars — the British vocal ensemble whose specialty is sacred music of the Renaissance — will bring “War and Peace” to Gartner Auditorium on Friday, April 13 at 7:30 pm, as part of the Museum’s Performing Arts Series.
L’Homme Armé (“The Armed Man”), a secular song that was popular in Renaissance France, will open Friday’s concert. “It’s a real battle cry,” Peter Phillips said in a phone call from London. “We all go for it — even I sing in it. That’s a pretty noisy start.”