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Cleveland Orchestra at Severance with Yo-Yo Ma delights (Nov. 6)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Yo-Yo Ma was the picture of cello perfection on Thursday evening, Nov. 6 at Severance Music Center, performing with The Cleveland Orchestra as if for the thousandth time — or the first.

Relaxed, head tilted in his familiar way, he seemed tuned to some private channel of truth and beauty. When not playing, he listened with delight, urging on the musicians around him.

Ma offered Dvořák’s Cello Concerto at the end of “An Evening with Yo-Yo-Ma,” beautifully wrapped like an early holiday gift. He strode onstage with purpose, revealing a heart as large as the hall, making his entrance not as a soloist demanding attention, but as a voice rising from within. He answered the horn heroics with warmth, then crooned the second theme like a benediction.

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Cleveland Orchestra with pianist Garrick Ohlsson at Severance (Oct. 30)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Frequent guest pianist Garrick Ohlsson returned to Severance Music Center on Thursday, Oct. 30, 50 years after his first appearance with The Cleveland Orchestra.

The concert, conducted by Franz Welser-Möst, reminded us why we cherish these performances year after year: consistent excellence, both familiar and new music, and the company of an artist whose quiet dignity and calm brilliance have become a reliable part of the city’s musical life.

The program opened with “Permissions,” a ten-minute churn by Tyler Taylor, the Orchestra’s new Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow. The Louisville, Kentucky-born composer and horn player brings a performer’s instinct for timbre and ensemble dynamics to his writing.

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Cleveland Chamber Choir shines with music to mark the hours and seasons (Oct. 25)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Often called The Vespers, Sergei Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil reaches for something beyond an evening service. Its fifteen movements, rooted in Russian Orthodox chant, rise and surround like incense — not to display magnificence, but to deepen the mystery. Rachmaninoff was so fond of the work that he requested the fifth movement, the Nunc dimittis, be sung at his funeral.

On Friday evening, October 25, the Cleveland Chamber Choir, directed by Gregory Ristow, presented this monumental work in Trinity Cathedral — a resonant space of tradition and calm, where the beauty of the setting matched the beauty of the sound.

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Tuesday Musical opens season with epic works from pianist Marc-André Hamelin (Oct. 21)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

On Tuesday evening, October 21, pianist Marc-André Hamelin opened Tuesday Musical’s 2025–26 season in Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall with a program of unusual range and scale. He mapped the human mind and heart across an often-epic landscape — Beethoven’s granite Hammerklavier, Robert Schumann’s not merely scenic Waldszenen, and Ravel’s hallucinatory Gaspard de la nuit.

Composed between 1817 and 1818, the Hammerklavier marks Beethoven’s turn toward the monumental and visionary. Deaf by this time, he wrote for some idealized instrument and listener — music indifferent to ordinary technical or emotional limits. Deemed nearly unplayable at its premiere, it later found champions, Liszt foremost among them, who revealed its vast scope.

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Miró Quartet at Finney Chapel (Oct. 10)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

At Oberlin’s Finney Chapel on Friday evening, October 10, the Miró Quartet continued its complete Beethoven cycle and marked its thirty-year homecoming with the three “Razumovsky” quartets of Op. 59. Founded at Oberlin in 1995 by violinist Daniel Ching and cellist Joshua Gindele, the group later took its enduring form with the arrivals of second violinist William Fedkenheuer and violist John Largess.

After winning a competition hat-trick at Fischoff, Banff, and Naumburg, as well as an Avery Fisher Career Grant, the Miró found a home as Quartet-in-Residence at the University of Texas at Austin. Returning to Oberlin for this six-concert Beethoven marathon gave the evening an air that was both valedictory and self-renewing.

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Apollo’s Fire: Dido and Aeneas (Oct. 3)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Some operas overwhelm us with spectacle, others with sheer length. Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, first performed in the late 1680s, does neither. Barely an hour long, it holds a world of feeling — new love, dark magic, and nobility in death.

On Friday evening, October 3 at Greystone Hall in Akron, Apollo’s Fire gave the work youthful resonance by returning it to Purcell’s premiere setting, a London boarding school for girls. Jeannette Sorrell’s direction added a Shakespearean pulse — brisk, lively, and human. The performance opened with the chaconne from Purcell’s King Arthur, an elegant and radiant overture that set the evening’s tone.

Sorrell’s newly written prologue replaced Purcell’s lost original and set the scene as a school play that turns suddenly real — a nod to the opera’s first performances by students and to the scale of its story. Her approach emulated the fast-moving style of seventeenth-century English theater, when audiences stood at the players’ feet and tragedy mingled with laughter. [Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra opens 108th season with heroic U.S. premiere of Deutsch’s ‘Urworte’ (Sept. 26)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND — On Friday evening, Sep. 26, before The Cleveland Orchestra opened its 108th season, Music Director Franz Welser-Möst joined President and CEO André Gremillet onstage for a conversation previewing the next ten programs. With a reenergized music director, an impressive slate of repertoire, soloists, and guest conductors, the Orchestra’s 2025-26 season looks especially bright.

Austrian composer Bernd Richard Deutsch has become a familiar figure here in Cleveland under Welser-Möst. During his tenure as the Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow from 2017 to 2020, the Orchestra introduced his organ concerto “Okeanos” and later, his large orchestra work “Intensity.” On Friday came a third U.S. premiere, “Urworte” (2024). Such partnerships nourish everyone: the composer gains a champion, the orchestra fresh music, and the repertoire welcome enrichment.

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Great Lakes Theater: Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George (Sept. 27)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Great Lakes Theater opened its fall season at the Hanna Theatre with Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George. I saw the performance on September 27. In a house of just over five hundred seats, the show feels almost purpose-built for intimacy: audiences sit close enough to hear breaths behind every phrase and to see the small adjustments of light and posture that bring French Neo-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat’s world into focus.

Winner of the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Sunday resists conventional structure. Its first act imagines the years Seurat spent creating his pointillist landmark, La Grande Jatte. Sondheim and Lapine do not present the artist as genial or approachable. He is exacting, self-absorbed, forever chasing the perfect dot of color at the expense of his personal relationships. The cost is clear: his model and lover, another Dot, leaves him, unable to compete with the canvas.

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Akron Symphony plays Mahler 1 (Sept. 20)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

The Akron Symphony opened its season Saturday night, September 20 at E.J. Thomas Hall, with a program that combined geniality, youthful cheek, and grand ambition. Under the direction of Christopher Wilkins the orchestra sounded happy to be back and playing before an excited house.

Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture is a thank-you note written to honor a university that gave him an honorary degree. As Wilkins reminded us, Brahms never went to college, but here he donned the cap and gown like a puckish undergrad, weaving together student songs more often heard in beer halls than lecture halls. Under Wilkins, the piece carried both dignity and delight. The opening had the sincerity of ceremony, then the tunes tumbled in like students fresh from hijinks on the quad. The orchestra answered with warmth, rhythmic lift, and good humor. When the final tune arrived, it rose like an alma mater — or a sudsy cheer — echoing fondly across the years. [Read more…]

Omar Sosa Trio at CMA (Sept. 10)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Omar Sosa has a way of turning concerts into ceremonies. Before sitting down to play on Wednesday, September 10 at the Cleveland Museum of Art, he invoked Elegguá, the Afro-Cuban deity of the crossroads, snapping the irukére — a Yoruba horsetail whisk — to clear the space, invite protection, and “open the way.” The gesture set a ritual tone, reminding listeners they were at a spiritual gathering as much as at a musical performance.

Sosa brought his new trio, Outside the Box, to Gartner Auditorium for its Cleveland debut. The group includes his longtime collaborator Yosvany Terry on saxophones and young drummer Julian Miltenberger, whom Sosa introduced as “a 25-year-old from Philly — the next generation.”

Terry’s early contributions on soprano saxophone were so compelling that he temporarily shifted the group’s center of gravity. [Read more…]

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