by Peter Feher
Many conductors are happy to travel from orchestra to orchestra with the same set of pieces. Not Michael Tilson Thomas, who brought a unique but instantly recognizable program to Severance Music Center over the weekend.
A visit from the San Francisco Symphony’s music director laureate usually means interesting repertoire, stylish interpretations, and the prospect that he’ll return next season.
If that workload and those artistic commitments would be exceptional from anyone else on the podium, this year they have to count as remarkable for Tilson Thomas, too. The conductor announced his semi-retirement two months ago, going public with the details of a brain-cancer diagnosis but promising to keep making music all the same. [Read more…]
Lawrence Brownlee was still in master-class mode when he visited the Cleveland Chamber Music Society on April 26. The star tenor, born and raised in Youngstown, brought an educational element to his recital at the Maltz Performing Arts Center.
A recital by Evgeny Kissin isn’t over when it ends. Anyone who’s kept up with the Russian pianist’s career — he was last in Cleveland 25 years ago — knew what to expect on Sunday, April 24 at Severance Music Center. After the final billed piece, Kissin returned to the stage four more times, playing a set of encores that made for a third act to the evening.
The Cleveland Orchestra could have partnered with the Cleveland Museum of Art for last weekend’s concerts. The give-and-take between composers and visual artists — and the historical movements that emerged in the process — inspired the program on Thursday, April 7 at Severance Music Center.
The Akron Symphony set last weekend’s program moving — spinning, scurrying, and leaping across the stage, even if the musicians stayed in their seats. The April 2 concert at E.J. Thomas Hall brought out the dance element in a range of orchestral works, sometimes literally. Choreography, from ballet to flamenco to traditional Korean dance, accompanied two of the evening’s pieces.
The Cleveland Museum of Art showed off a new piece last week, though one that didn’t hang on a wall. The musical work in question — Stacy Garrop’s In a House Besieged — had its world premiere at Gartner Auditorium on Friday, March 25.
If you were assembling an all-star chamber group, you couldn’t do much better than the Rosamunde String Quartet. The ensemble — a passion project for its members, who play in the string sections of some of the world’s top orchestras most of the year — visited the Cleveland Chamber Music Society on March 15.
Wu Wei is one of the world’s best players of an instrument you’ve likely never heard. The Chinese sheng virtuoso took advantage of this fact from the start of his dazzling program at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium on March 11.
The Cleveland Orchestra kept the music-making all in the family last week. Franz Welser-Möst conducted, a favorite composer stopped by, and first associate concertmaster Peter Otto played soloist, taking on a piece with its own history at Severance.
Ever since the pandemic upended concert schedules, the Akron Symphony has used the opportunity to expand its community offerings. The orchestra played a summer series in 2021, “Outside Voices,” the name alluding both to the changed setting — parks across the city — and to new programming — music outside the standard repertoire.