by Stephanie Manning
Many musicians will remember exactly what they were rehearsing in March of 2020, when the music suddenly stopped. For The Cleveland Orchestra, that unlucky piece was Schubert’s Symphony No. 9, which at the time was only heard by a private audience of staff members. More than two years later, the Orchestra finally gave the work the live performance it deserved on May 12 — and the seats at Severance Music Center were plenty full.
Conducted by Franz Welser-Möst, the Orchestra was in their element for the popular symphony, also known as “The Great” — a nickname born not out of a value designation, but to differentiate it from a shorter work of Schubert’s also in C Major. Clocking in at just under an hour in total, the four demanding movements are a test of endurance, which prompted the woodwind section to enlist some assistant players.
An immigrant mother, struggling with her sense of identity, makes a plea to her new homeland in the hopes that her newborn daughter will have an easier time navigating it. This sentiment, presented in musical form, was especially fitting for a concert on Mother’s Day — not to mention one with a high percentage of mothers in the audience.
An audio recording does not do Fire & Grace & Ash justice. In their 2019 album, Partita Americana, the trio — Edwin Huizinga, violin, William Coulter, guitar, and Ashley Hoyer, mandolin — brought first-rate musicianship to a melting pot of classical, bluegrass, and folk music. It’s a record that’s impressive enough on its own, but it paled in comparison to the trio’s live, in-person concert on April 30 at St. Malachi Church.
When Moonhee Kim’s violin teacher said he wanted her to learn the Prokofiev Violin Concerto, she was hoping he would say the second one. Of the composer’s two concerti for the instrument, No. 2 is more commonly performed, and it was the one Kim was most familiar with. But Concerto No. 1 was what he had in mind — and as it turns out, that was the perfect choice.
After observing so many concerts from The Cleveland Orchestra — an ensemble that has long been lagging in its representation of women — it was refreshing to see their usual stage occupied by a group that reverses that gender discrepancy.
No matter how many times certain symphonic staples are performed, the music always invites the opportunity to dig deeper — and on Friday, April 22 at Severance Music Center, The Cleveland Orchestra did just that. Under the baton of rising star Klaus Mäkelä, the ensemble took two masterworks in the classical canon to a new level with a performance that plumbed the emotional depths of both Sibelius and Shostakovich.
Guitarist Berta Rojas’ in-person appearance at the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society, a two-year journey which finally came to fruition on April 2, has not been without some major setbacks. First before her travels, when the pandemic forced Rojas to cancel her trip in March 2020, and second — and most heartbreaking — after her arrival, when her beloved guitar was stolen on April 1st.
For Mark Padmore and Mitsuko Uchida, the idea to perform a recital together came about naturally — starting with making music together simply for the pleasure of it. That natural transition from practice to performance was evident on March 6, when The Cleveland Orchestra presented the tenor and pianist in an afternoon of earnest music making.
Time and time again, Les Délices has imbued a sense of creativity into the concert experience — particularly over the past two years, when pandemic restrictions called for some out-of-the-box thinking. On February 25 in Shaker Heights, their first in-person event since 2020 proved to be no exception, blending poetry and music for an engaging evening of storytelling.
What do you get when you combine the sounds of an organ, accordion, guitar, violin, and piano? A creative soundtrack to Les Vampires, of course.