by Mike Telin
2016 has been a good year at the office for the young Calidore String Quartet. In February they won England’s Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship, becoming the first North American ensemble to receive the £20,000 award in the foundation’s history. During May, violinists Jeffrey Myers and Ryan Meehan, violist Jeremy Berry, and cellist Estelle Choi made their Carnegie Hall debut, and won the $100,000 grand prize at the inaugural M-Prize Chamber Music Competition.
On Saturday, June 25 at 8:00 pm at Our Lady Chapel on the campus of Gilmour Academy, the Calidore String Quartet will make their Cleveland area debut as part of ENCORE Chamber Music’s “Virtuoso Series.” Their program titled “Forbidden Voices: Censorship and Propaganda of WWII” will include music by Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Felix Mendelssohn. [Read more…]
“The first time I improvised to a silent film I was frightened because I didn’t know if I could,” pianist-composer Matan Porat recalled during a Skype conversation from his home in Berlin. “And I picked the hardest movie there is, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis from 1927 — which is quite long.”
The third in a series of articles highlighting ChamberFest artists
When Robert Walters performs the world premiere of Bernard Rands’ Concerto for English Horn with The Cleveland Orchestra on Friday, November 27 in Severance Hall, it will bring to fruition a composer-performer collaboration whose roots go back more than two decades.
“His personality is a tremendous contrast, because he seems so serious and intellectual, and of course he’s probably the person with the highest IQ that I ever met. Yet, he has this whimsical and humorous personality behind it.”
Cleveland based violinist Jinjoo Cho has been named one of six contestants to be advanced to the final round of the 9th Quadrennial International Violin Competition of Indianapolis. 
“As a child, I loved classic fairy tales as collected and told by the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and others,” American composer Gabriela Lena Frank writes about her new work, Will-o’-the-Wisp: Tone Poem for Piccolo and Orchestra. “As a composer, I’ve often enjoyed using some my childish and fancifully personalized re-interpretations of myths to inspire pieces, with varying degrees of overt Latin American musical (especially indigenous Indian) influences. [And this] is one such piece.” On Thursday, May 1 beginning at 7:30 pm in Severance Hall, Cleveland Orchestra Principal Piccolo Mary Kay Fink performs the world premiere of Frank’s new concerto under the direction of David Robertson.