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ChamberFest Cleveland: “Carnival of the Animals” (June 24)

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by Peter Feher

Camille Saint-Saëns forbade public performances of The Carnival of the Animals during his lifetime, but he might have made an exception for ChamberFest Cleveland this summer.

On June 24 at the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Kulas Hall, ChamberFest conjured some of the informal spirit of Saint-Saëns’ lighthearted work as it would have been heard in 1886 among the composer’s circle of intimates. It was in keeping with ChamberFest’s theme this season — “Lightness of Being” — even when the evening seemed elaborate and embellished and the music-making sounded seriously first-rate. [Read more…]

Many sides of Mozart with Labadie and The Cleveland Orchestra (Apr. 20)

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by Peter Feher

Mozart was the main event at Severance Music Center on April 20, but The Cleveland Orchestra gave only a teaser of what it can do with this great composer.

Chalk it up to the small and generally intimate scale of the performance. Guest conductor Bernard Labadie, a specialist in 18th-century repertoire, led the Orchestra — pared down to period-ensemble numbers — in half a dozen Mozart pieces, many of them excerpts from longer works. You could think of the program as a preview for next season here in Cleveland, which opens with a soundtrack of the composer’s greatest hits (accompanying the film Amadeus live in concert) and closes with a production of The Magic Flute.

On Thursday, everything was building to Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 (“Jupiter”). [Read more…]

The Cleveland Orchestra: Rafael Payare excites with Shostakovich & Bernstein (Apr. 6)

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by Peter Feher

The Russians won the Cold War, judging by The Cleveland Orchestra’s stirring and subversive program at Severance Music Center earlier this month.

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 and Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2 (“The Age of Anxiety”) went head-to-head in an exciting evening shot through with creative uncertainty. The fact that both pieces could have coexisted on a concert 60 years ago — specifically, the sort of concert Bernstein would have conducted with the New York Philharmonic during their 1959 tour of the Soviet Union — didn’t ease the tension.

Still, The Cleveland Orchestra made an admirable effort at diplomacy, giving stellar performances of both works on Thursday, April 6. Guest conductor Rafael Payare whipped up the conflict, however, creating a sense of real stakes with a program that could have ended predictably.

Every interpretation of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony has made a point of hammering home the finale. Following the piece’s 1937 premiere, the official Soviet line was that those repetitive final measures represented tragedy over triumph, effectively dispelling the darkness that had come in the movements before. The dissenting view, which has become the standard today, is to read the ending as brutal and coercive, and conductors typically communicate this by slowing the tempo to an unbearable degree, leaving little room to doubt what the composer “really meant.”

[Read more…]

McGill, Huang & Perroni sing at Cleveland Chamber Music Society (March 28)

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by Peter Feher

Clarinetist Anthony McGill brought star power to the Cleveland Chamber Music Society on March 28. In a concert that was all about singing — that, in fact, included two pieces with soprano — McGill stood out as the most prominent voice.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the clarinetist, who, since taking the principal chair with the New York Philharmonic in 2014, has cultivated the kind of celebrity career more often reserved for singers, string players, and pianists. McGill’s penchant for vocal music is no secret either. He previously served as principal clarinet of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and the style and sound he picked up in the pit are still present in his playing today.

[Read more…]

The Cleveland Orchestra:
Blomstedt & Ax (Feb. 16)

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by Peter Feher

There are few music directors who know Beethoven better than Herbert Blomstedt. Now 95 years old, the Swedish-American conductor has a lifetime of serious study and performing experience to draw on, but this isn’t to say his interpretations are set in stone.

The mix of curiosity and thoroughness that’s sustained Blomstedt throughout his career was just as apparent in his program with The Cleveland Orchestra on February 16. If he’s slowed down somewhat since his last appearance here — the biggest change is that he now conducts seated at the podium — there was nonetheless a sense of coming full circle as he led Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

[Read more…]

Alan Choo & Apollo’s Fire:  “Muse of Fire” (Feb. 3)

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by Peter Feher

Longtime fans of Apollo’s Fire might think they’ve heard everything possible from Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra, but they should have another listen. A fresh lineup of musicians and a largely unfamiliar set of composers were featured in the group’s concerts this month, making for an exciting evening with just a hint of trial and error.

Spearheading the experiment was violinist Alan Choo, a regular standout performer with Apollo’s Fire and, as of this season, the ensemble’s Assistant Artistic Director. With “Muse of Fire,” the first program he’s led here entirely solo, Choo played up the idea of coming to the fore. He chose a handful of small-scale works by lesser-known composers of the 17th century and then let much of this music speak brilliantly for itself.

Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s Rosary Sonatas are the perfect vehicle for a violinist looking to make a splash. Choo has been putting all his energy into polishing these pieces, recording the complete set for an album he’s headlining with Apollo’s Fire (due out next year) and highlighting two of the fifteen sonatas here. The mastery and deliberation that come from knowing a score so well shone through in his performance on Friday, February 3 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights. [Read more…]

Víkingur Ólafsson brings
“Mozart & Contemporaries” to Severance (Nov. 30)

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by Peter Feher

Mozart got top billing on pianist Víkingur Ólafsson’s November 30 recital in Reinberger Chamber Hall, but another composer should have had the honor. Haydn’s musical sensibility was the key to understanding the bold claims and idiosyncratic style of the evening’s program, “Mozart and Contemporaries.”

Happily, both composers — along with several lesser-known figures of the Classical era — featured in Ólafsson’s performance, the first in a series of high-profile piano recitals that The Cleveland Orchestra will present at Severance Music Center this season. It was an up-close look at one of classical music’s more thought-provoking soloists in recent years — and at one of his signature projects.

[Read more…]

The Cleveland Orchestra: Stravinsky and Britten (Nov. 25)

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by Peter Feher

The Cleveland Orchestra started settling into their holiday routine over the weekend. Blockbuster pieces are always on the schedule at Severance Music Center after Thanksgiving, and the crowd-pleasing program on Friday, November 25 was no exception.

What was different — and all the more intriguing — was the package the music came in. The highlight of the evening was the complete score for Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird, a work with plenty of familiar moments but not often performed in full.

[Read more…]

The Cleveland Orchestra: Dvořák, Schumann, Benjamin (Oct. 27)

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by Peter Feher

From his first moments on the podium, Edward Gardner seemed entirely at home in Severance Music Center. The English conductor made his debut with The Cleveland Orchestra the other Thursday, but you wouldn’t have known it from his ease with the ensemble and the general calm of the program.

Not that the performance on October 27 lacked drama. In fact, the evening’s repertoire had plenty of fervor, from the turbulence of Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7, to the passion of Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto, to a contemporary work literally inspired by a storm.

[Read more…]

The Cleveland Orchestra: Strauss and Widmann (Oct. 20)

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by Peter Feher

It was a good thing that preparations for last weekend’s Cleveland Orchestra concerts started seasons ago. The ambitious and challenging program wouldn’t have been possible without some serious planning, and that meant thinking well ahead of the first performance on October 20. A huge ensemble of more than 100 players, including a couple of unusual instruments, came together at Severance Music Center on Thursday — and this was an expert group.

The musicians’ skill and experience went beyond a simple mastery of the evening’s two works, Jörg Widmann’s Viola Concerto and Richard Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony. Pulling off both pieces — each a production in itself — required an instinctive grasp of the composers’ overall styles, and the players had that knowledge in spades.

[Read more…]

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