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Verona Quartet: American dialects at Federated Church (Oct. 3)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

In a program titled “American,” the Verona Quartet — Jonathan Ong and Dorothy Ro, violins, Abigail Rojansky, viola, and Jonathan Dormand, cello — spent much of their concert at Federated Church in Chagrin Falls on Saturday, October 3 moving among American musical dialects: Philip Glass’s minimalism, Samuel Barber’s lyricism, along with early jazz and popular song.

Antonín Dvořák was the outlier, though his American years supplied a plausible connection, and his final quartet gave each member of the ensemble (who are quartet-in-residence at the Oberlin Conservatory) more room to speak.

Philip Glass’s Company began as four musical interludes for a stage adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s prose work. Glass later wrote that he chose the string quartet for its ability to be both “introspective and passionate.” The Verona treated repetition as something active rather than static. [Read more…]

Pianist Lang Lang brings boyish exuberance, introspection to Severance recital (Sept. 12)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Lang Lang returned to Severance Music Center on Saturday, September 12 to open the fourth season of The Cleveland Orchestra’s Recital Series, two years after playing Saint-Saëns’s Second Piano Concerto with the Orchestra. This time he had Mandel Concert Hall all to himself, with a program of Mozart, Beethoven, Albéniz, Granados, and Liszt.

At 44, the pianist has lost little of his boyish exuberance. He can still amaze with bursts of extraordinary velocity and smile while doing it. But some of the evening’s best playing came when virtuosity meant something quieter and more reflective. The program itself encouraged such contrast, moving from early Mozart and late-Beethoven introspection toward Spanish color and Lisztian display.

[Read more…]

Trio of local musicians launch Chamber Music Society’s season 77 (Sept. 9)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

The Cleveland Chamber Music Society opened its 77th season on Wednesday, September 9, to a large and lively house at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium.

The headliners were three distinguished Cleveland musicians — Cleveland Orchestra concertmaster Joel Link, principal horn Nathaniel Silberschlag, and pianist Dawoon Chung — and a program of works by Reinhold Glière, Gabriel Fauré, and Johannes Brahms.

Silberschlag and Chung began with four selections from Ukrainian-born Glière’s Op. 35. Written in 1908, they appear curiously older, with little obvious Russian color. At times they sound as though they belong to an earlier Central European salon tradition — especially the old-world sway of the Valse triste and the broad, songful lines of the Nocturne and Intermezzo. The latter were written for horn, while the Romance and Valse triste began as clarinet pieces.

[Read more…]

Franz Welser-Möst returns to Blossom with “Summer in Vienna” (Aug. 29)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Franz Welser-Möst began saying farewell to Cleveland audiences on Saturday with music from his other home.

“Summer in Vienna” marked his final Blossom Music Center appearance as music director of The Cleveland Orchestra, in the 25th and final season of a tenure that began in 2002. Richard Strauss and Mozart brought Vienna’s drama and grace to the party. After intermission came the champagne.

Welser-Möst flipped our wigs with the emphatic opening to Mozart’s Symphony No. 34, letting the four horns and four trumpets play with Handelian abandon while strings and winds kept the music transparent and nimble. Mozart’s abrupt shifts and odd phrase lengths came off as witty, not fussy. The finale was like a fleet horse ride, all carefree bliss at summer’s end.

[Read more…]

Jon Batiste brings his musical magic to Blossom (Aug. 20)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Jon Batiste is an eager traveler across musical borders. At Blossom Music Center on Thursday, August 20, the pianist, singer, and composer demonstrated his broad musical fluency, moving among jazz, gospel, blues, pop, and classical music in a Cleveland Orchestra program that was both exhilaratingly loose and more coherent than its variety suggested.

Drawing on Batiste’s albums Hollywood Africans, WE ARE, World Music Radio, Beethoven Blues, and BIG MONEY, the program ranged from Batiste originals to classical staples, and jazz standards, with detours into gospel and dance breaks.

Batiste arrived onstage to a standing ovation, dressed in a white suit and carrying a white coffee mug. He was joined by a trio — guitar, drums, and voice — whose precision and easy rapport anchored the performance.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra spends a night at the opera (Aug. 13)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — For the August 13 Summers at Severance concert — A Night at the Opera —  The Cleveland Orchestra, under the direction of John Fiore, treated the audience to a well-crafted mix of favorites and rarities.

Soprano Latonia Moore, whose winning stage presence could change the minds of more than a few listeners who swear they don’t like opera, drew the audience in with elegant and remarkably communicative singing coupled with direct smiles and knowing glances. Increasingly a Cleveland favorite, she sang the title role in Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa here in May of 2025 and returned this past January for the Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Concert.

[Read more…]

Ohio Light Opera presents splendid Yeomen of the Guard (July 16)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Ohio Light Opera opened its tenth production of The Yeomen of the Guard, on Thursday afternoon, July 16, at The College of Wooster’s Freedlander Theatre. Director Steven Daigle’s staging kept the action buoyant and funny without pretending that every character emerges happily from the plot.

Arthur Sullivan sets it all to one of his richest scores: grand, intimate, and often joyous. Renée Surprenant Fitzgerald’s setting placed the action at the imposing doorstep of the Tower of London, while Charlene Gross’s costumes, in yellows, reds, and pinks, were bright and reassuringly ridiculous — not just British, but Gilbert & Sullivanian.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra draws standing ovations at Blossom for Itzhak Perlman’s return (July 9)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — A standing ovation greeted violinist and conductor Itzhak Perlman as he entered the Blossom Music Center Stage stage in a motorized wheelchair, the first of three accolades he would receive on Thursday evening, July 9. Wearing his familiar smile, he went not to the podium but to a position beside concertmaster Joel Link, where he would both play and conduct the first two works in this all-Beethoven program.

The Cleveland Orchestra has presented eminent soloists in multiple roles before — but Perlman’s appearance, in his 80th year, made Thursday’s concert especially charged.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra opens Blossom Festival with ‘America at 250′ (July 3)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — There is nothing like a picnic, American music and a torrential downpour to bring a Blossom Music Center crowd closer together. On Friday, July 3, the Cleveland Orchestra’s summer season opener offered all three, plus fireworks, making this annual rite feel complete.

The occasion was “America at 250,” a broad sampler of our nation’s music led by Edwin Outwater and presented under the title “Out of Many, One: A Tapestry of American Music.” The evening also marked the loss of Limmie Pulliam, the Oberlin-trained tenor and a favorite of Cleveland Orchestra audiences, who had been scheduled to appear but unfortunately passed away earlier this year.

[Read more…]

ChamberFest Cleveland: Continental Rifts (June 26)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

A sold-out crowd gathered June 26 in the “King Cobra” room at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland for “Continental Rifts,” the next-to-last program of ChamberFest Cleveland’s 2026 season.

As artistic director Diana Cohen noted from the stage, wars in Iran and Syria were central to the evening’s design. Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” string quartet cast its shadow forward to George Crumb’s Vietnam-era Black Angels.

The evening began with the Andante from Schubert’s Quartet — a movement borrowed from the composer’s own death-haunted song. Michelle Barzel Ross and Geneva Lewis, violins, Emad Zolfaghari, viola, and Jay Campbell, cello, operated on an extraordinary scale of subtlety. We entered a miniature, almost fairy world, where pianissimos felt loud, inaudibility marked the far horizon, and feeling still registered in a thousand hues.

[Read more…]

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