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Cleveland Chamber Music Society: Isidore String Quartet with Jeremy Denk (May 19)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Presented by the Cleveland Chamber Music Society at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium on May 19, the Isidore String Quartet — violinists Adrian Steele & Phoenix Avalon, violist Devin Moore, and cellist Joshua McClendon — offered a program that moved from Haydn through Ligeti to Brahms with the addition of pianist Jeremy Denk.

Haydn’s Op. 76, No. 4 (“Sunrise”) begins with a first-violin line unfurling over softly lit inner voices as the quartet waited for daylight. But when Haydn quickly broadened the texture into something fuller and more forceful, the quartet’s delicacy came at the expense of expressive weight.

The second movement opened almost inaudibly, the players hardly breathing, as if afraid of being discovered. By the Menuetto, the ensemble had loosened up, swaying with Haydn’s unexpectedly intricate rhythms, not waiting to be asked to dance. In the finale’s fugue, lines passed so smoothly from one player to the next that the seams disappeared, leaving only music. [Read more…]

ART honors its late founder with Haff-Paluck legacy concert (May 17)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Feza Zweifel, artistic director of Arts Renaissance Tremont, called it “a concert built on relationships.” “A Legacy of ART — Honoring Chris Haff-Paluck” at Pilgrim Congregational Church on Sunday, May 17, felt less like a formal memorial and more like a gathering of musicians bound by years of performances, collaborations, and friendships — many initiated by Haff-Paluck herself.

Founder of Arts Renaissance Tremont and later director of performance and community programs at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Chris Haff-Paluck spent decades creating opportunities for musicians in Cleveland before her passing in 2020. Throughout the afternoon, performer after performer recalled concerts she organized, introductions she made, and collaborations she encouraged.

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Jeannette Sorrell and CityMusic shed new light on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (May 14)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Audiences often associate Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with orchestral mass — huge string sections, blazing brass, and symphonic muscle.

On May 14 at Fairmount Presbyterian Church, conductor Jeannette Sorrell and CityMusic Chamber Orchestra offered another approach, a leaner fate-knocker that surrendered none of its dramatic power.

From the podium, Director of Development Em Laudeman Ezell acknowledged Sorrell’s connection to CityMusic during the ensemble’s founding years. With Apollo’s Fire, Sorrell had already shown that a smaller professional ensemble in Cleveland could thrive outside the major-orchestra model. Her appearance for this series felt less like a guest engagement than a return.

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Cleveland Chamber Choir: “La Fleur de la Renaissance” (May 9)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Before the Cleveland Chamber Choir sang a note on Saturday evening in First Lutheran Church in Lorain, the audience had choir practice.

With gentle guidance and help from the chorus, Gregory Ristow got them singing the anonymous L’homme armé melody, antique French pronunciation and all. The tune, now internalized, became a recognizable thread connecting two centuries of Renaissance music.

Under Ristow’s direction, “La fleur de la Renaissance” moved through Mass movements, laments, psalms, battle pieces, and spring chansons, using the L’homme armé melody as both connective thread and point of departure. The evening spanned nearly 200 years, but never felt like a history lesson. Ristow organized the concert as a sequence of changing scenes, moods, and colors, each piece leading naturally into the next.

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BlueWater Chamber Orchestra celebrates the great outdoors (May 2)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Early May is when things begin again — the ground softens, and routines return.

Under the direction of Daniel Meyer, BlueWater Chamber Orchestra’s program on Saturday, May 2, “Rustic Reverie,” traced that process in works by Douglas Moore, Joseph Canteloube, and Joseph Haydn.

The concert’s high point was American-Canadian soprano Midori Marsh’s return to Cleveland and Covenant Church. A native of Cleveland Heights who attended the church in her youth, Marsh has spent recent months touring as Carlotta in The Phantom of the Opera, including a stop at Playhouse Square.

Marsh offered a poised account of several of Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne. A young singer still finding her ease onstage, she brings a springlike quality to her voice — bright highs alongside a honeyed middle, and a quiet inwardness that lends the melodies and texts a settled, almost conspiratorial depth.

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Cleveland Chamber Symphony features works by Margaret Brouwer (Apr. 19)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Margaret Brouwer’s music has become a fixture in Northeast Ohio — distinctive, unmistakable, and not easily pinned down. She goes her own way, with stylistic diplomacy: borrowing freely, but never pledging allegiance to any one camp.

On Sunday, April 19, Steven Smith led the Cleveland Chamber Symphony in three works by Brouwer as part of NEOSonicFest, its annual spring exposition of new sounds, at Disciples Christian Church in Cleveland Heights.

First up was Donald Erb’s Harold’s Trip to the Sky (1974). Scored for viola, piano, and percussion, Erb treats the ensemble less as a traditional trio than as three independent voices. The title makes a nod to Lord Byron’s Harold but Erb’s piece doesn’t tell a story. It unfolds in episodes: the viola climbing and exploring, the piano holding its ground, the percussion commenting, like Puck, with wry asides. [Read more…]

Cleveland Pops plays Williams & Spielberg (Apr. 24)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

On Friday, April 24 at Severance Music Center, the Cleveland Pops Orchestra played to a packed house with a program devoted to John Williams and Steven Spielberg — a partnership that reliably fills seats. Williams writes themes you can recognize in seconds, sometimes in two notes.

Carl Topilow made that point before the first downbeat. “Ladies and gentlemen — the two notes that changed the course of music history,” he said, letting Jaws swim in with low strings, and a steady pulse, the interval repeating then tightening like a screw.

From there, the program moved among Williams’ familiar modes. The “March from 1941” had a buoyant snap. Close Encounters offered short, bright phrases, almost conversational. And in Jurassic Park, the orchestra leaned into the composer’s gift for breadth.

Not all of Williams’ music trades in spectacle. As the New York Times has noted, it often works by taking older materials and presenting them in technicolor. The themes of Schindler’s List are spare and direct, the emotion carried by contour and tone rather than overt passion.

[Read more…]

Baldwin Wallace BachFest: two inspired evening concerts (Apr. 17 & 18)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

From midday Friday through Saturday night, the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival presented a steady run of events in Gamble Auditorium — lectures, master classes, busking, and concerts. I heard the two evening anchors — “Concerto Countdown”  and Mass in G Minor and Magnificat — which gave a fair picture of the whole.

Friday night, April 17, offered something to look at as well as hear: an array of harpsichords drawn together for Bach’s concertos for multiple keyboards. Festival director Dirk Garner led the count — four, then three, then two — as players rotated in and out, trading bright sprays of plectral fancy-fare.

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Cleveland Chamber Collective: “Travelogue” at Disciples (Apr. 12)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

The Cleveland Chamber Collective’s “Travelogue” at Disciples Christian Church on Sunday afternoon April 12 traced a set of journeys — some literal, some inward — across a compact, varied program. What held it together was a shared interest in motion: landscapes, folk traditions, and time itself.

Director Ty Alan Emerson was an amiable emcee, introducing each piece and serving as an efficient stage crew of one. The program’s range — captivating, sometimes far-flung — reflected careful curation, and he deserves praise for bringing it together.

Robert Manno’s Three Scenes from the Mountains, written in 2012 and inspired by the view from his home in the Northern Catskills, opened the afternoon with pastoral charm. In “The Wind on the Water,” flutist Linda White, clarinetist Alix Reinhardt, and pianist Eric Charnofsky conjured the scene, the piano rippling under shifting breezes of flute and clarinet. [Read more…]

David Russell performs wonders for Cleveland Classical Guitar Society (Apr. 11)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

On Saturday evening, April 11, David Russell — the renowned Scotsman who makes his home in Spain — walked onto the stage of the Maltz Performing Arts Center, and with a shy smile and wave, set about performing wonders on his instrument for the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society.

He began with Mauro Giuliani’s Grand Overture, a piece from the era when the guitar was still trying to elbow its way into the drawing rooms of Europe, hoping to be taken as seriously as the piano or the violin. Giuliani, who left Italy for Vienna in 1806, was among those tireless advocates. Though he once played the cello in the first performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, it was the guitar that preserves his name in amber.

The Giuliani, with its bold chords and quicksilver runs, made a fitting opener. Russell shaped the music wisely, giving each fast passage a clean edge and guiding the piece forward with a sure hand.

[Read more…]

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