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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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ChamberFest Cleveland: Summer Music (June 20)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

ChamberFest Cleveland’s Saturday, June 20 program at Federated Church, “Summer Music,” brought together works by Karen Ouzounian, Samuel Barber, Benjamin Yusupov, and Franz Schubert. The title suggested ease and warmth, but the music had other plans, ranging from restless rhythms and shifting colors to high virtuosity and broad lyricism.

Ouzounian’s Songs of the Sap opened the program, with the composer herself as solo cellist. A Toronto-born musician of Lebanese-Armenian heritage, Ouzounian draws on folk material not as a tourist, but through personal inheritance. The music uses Anatolian dance rhythms, though the performance never treated them as mere display.

“Tamzara” moved with restraint and concentration. Left-hand pizzicato made one cello sound like two. Fossnes’s entrance from the balcony gave the viola a smaller, fainter sound, answering the cello from a distance as if from long ago. “Curcuna” was quicker and more physical. Ouzounian gave its symmetrically divided 10/8 rhythm a clear, driving pulse while leaving room for freer, more rhapsodic passages. The result was tightly controlled but never dry.

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Ohio Light Opera: My Fair Lady (June 17)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Ohio Light Opera’s production of Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady seems tailor-made for the company’s knack for giving familiar repertory fresh legs.

Half Edwardian social experiment, half hit parade, Jacob Allen’s staging treats its manners and melodies as pleasures rather than relics, while keeping the show’s questions about social class, gender stereotypes, and women’s independence unresolved. The show runs in rep through August 2 at The College of Wooster’s Freedlander Theatre. I saw the performance on June 17.

The plot, based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, remains familiar. Phonetics professor Henry Higgins wagers with a colleague that he can take Eliza Doolittle, a Covent Garden flower seller whose accent he finds intolerable and whose intelligence he badly underestimates, and pass her off as a duchess. Through drills, bullying, coaxing, and one miraculous breakthrough involving ‘The Rain in Spain,’ he succeeds. The trouble is that Eliza turns out not to be clay in Higgins’s hands, but a person with an acute self-awareness.

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ChamberFest Cleveland: Finding Resonance (June 12)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

“Finding Resonance,” ChamberFest Cleveland’s program on June 12 at Harkness Chapel began ferociously, grew wilder, then deepened into passion.

The connection between the concerts in this summer’s series, Continental Drifts, is sometimes contrived, but a group of exciting and well-made pieces provided much to write home about. And Kevin McBrien’s pre-concert remarks provided useful bearings for the evening.

Jörg Widmann’s 180 beats per minute made for a bracing opener. The music has a Rite of Spring-like brutality with its stamping pulse, sudden shocks, and disciplined convulsion. Violinists Kerson Leong and Diana Cohen, violists Njord Fossnes and Pearl de la Motte, and cellists Raman Ramakrishnan and Bryan Cheng, played with fierce precision. They made the tempo feel dangerous rather than merely fast.

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Studio Espressivo: Masquerading Melodies (June 7)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Strange thing about masks: they sometimes reveal more than they conceal.

In “Masquerading Melodies,” Studio Espressivo’s latest program, pianists Allison Hillier and Chris Neiner, violinist Zachary Brandon, and tenor Timothy Culver turned to the world of commedia dell’arte with its clowns and lovers, disguises and reversals, and found in it a way of letting characters speak plainly from behind their disguises.

The program, presented on June 7 at the Studio’s gallery in Little Italy, was cleverly assembled. The characters wandered in from different countries and across two centuries, but all belonged to the same unruly comedy troupe.

Neiner and Hillier’s four-hand account of Gabriel Fauré’s Overture from Masques et bergamasques opened the program with style and dispatch. Written late in Fauré’s life for a Monaco entertainment with roots in commedia, the piece looks backward without sounding ancient. The pianists brought out its clean lines and elegance — French wit without caricature, charm without sucre.

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ENCORE: Fantasies of Aino Sibelius at Federated Church (June 6)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

At a charged turning point in Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, the arrival of D major brings release: upper strings turn glassy and weightless, a sound like snowfall. It was a memorable sonority, one of several that lingered in “Fantasies of Aino Sibelius,” the second concert of ENCORE’s Music & Ideas Festival, presented on Saturday, June 6, at Federated Church in Chagrin Falls.

The program centered on Ainola, the house in Finland where Jean Sibelius and his wife Aino lived for half a century. Artistic Director and violinist Jinjoo Cho reminded us in her welcoming remarks that home is “not simply an address, but a set of conditions — rooms, landscapes, and people that make belonging possible.” [Read more…]

Music by Cara Haxo roars at The Bop Stop (May 31)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

“She ROARS!,” a series celebrating living female composers, devoted its program at the Bop Stop on Sunday afternoon, May 31, to nine works by Cara Haxo performed by violinists Diana Pepelea Vardi and Callista Koh, violist Lauren Kuennen Poper, cellist Linda Atherton, flutist Linda White, and clarinetist Amitai Vardi.

Haxo’s use of varied instrumental combinations offered a glimpse into her creative process and Emily Laurance’s spoken introductions helped listeners understand the composer’s train of thought.

The opening work for string quartet, says the almanac (2024), inspired by Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Sestina,” showed Haxo’s gift for turning literary structure into musical form. [Read more…]

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