by Mike Telin
Violinist Geneva Lewis has been hailed as “clearly one to watch” by Musical America. She is the recipient of a 2021 Avery Fisher Career Grant, and Grand Prize winner of the 2020 Concert Artists Guild Competition. Other honors include Kronberg Academy’s Prince of Hesse Prize and being named a Finalist at the 2018 Naumburg Competition, a Performance Today Young Artist in Residence, and Musical America’s New Artist of the Month.
Cellist Gabriel Martins’ accolades include the Concert Artists Guild – Young Classical Artists Trust Grand Prize, the Sphinx Competition Gold Medal, the David Popper International Cello Competition Gold Medal, and the International Tchaikovsky Competition for Young Musicians Silver Medal, to name only a few. He has performed at the Wigmore, Carnegie, and Merkin Halls, 92nd Street Y, the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, and with the Houston, Indianapolis, Memphis, Pacific, and Phoenix Symphony Orchestras. The Strad Magazine declared his New York City recital debut to be “flawlessly played” and “a deeply moving experience.”
Later this week the two “rising stars” will make their ChamberFest Cleveland debuts. We caught up with Lewis and Martins by Zoom and began by asking how the ChamberFest invitations came about. [Read more…]
Over the past few years Petra Poláčková has enthralled audiences at the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival, and on Sunday afternoon, June 5, at the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Kulas Hall, the young Czech musician demonstrated why she has become a Festival favorite.
Anyone who has been paying attention to the world of contemporary chamber music during the past twenty years will recognize the names of flutist Molly Barth and guitarist Dieter Hennings — together known as Duo Damiana. 
It feels like forever since Tri-C JazzFest was last held in its customary location. During the past two years, Festival director Terri Pontremoli and her team produced one of the best online jazz festivals around, and in September of 2021 Cain Park proved to be a terrific substitute location.
Coordinating the schedules of musicians and festivals is often a long, and at times, a complicated process. Take violinists Joseph Lin and Sarah Kapustin for example. Both have been on ChamberFest Cleveland’s list of invitees from the Festival’s beginning, but the stars have simply never aligned. Until now.
Like nearly every performing arts organization in the world — especially those reliant on vocalists — 
For over four decades Ohio Light Opera has enthralled audiences with performances of the complete Gilbert & Sullivan catalog as well as American and European operettas and titles from the Golden Age of musical theater. Performed in the intimate Freedlander Theatre located on the campus of Wooster College, 
When Cathy Lesser Mansfield was asked to write a piece for the youth theater program at the Jewish Community Center in Cleveland Heights in 1977, little did she know that her creation would mark the beginning of her journey to compose an opera.
“Everyone has a story, and we are all storytellers,” ENCORE Chamber Music founder and artistic director Jinjoo Cho noted during a telephone conversation. “Storytelling is our craft, it’s at the core of everything we do.”
Since its founding, Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project (CUSP) has engaged the Northeast Ohio community by championing the creation and performance of new music. One of the ways it does that is through its annual Re:Sound Festival of New and Experimental Music.