by Stephanie Manning
It’s early days, but the 2025 music festival season is starting to kick into gear. A harbinger of that trend here in Northeast Ohio is the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival, which just celebrated its 94th year.
The second and final day of the event swapped J.S. Bach for George Frideric Handel, presenting the composer’s Messiah for the first time in festival history. But the previous evening’s presentation tread more familiar ground. On April 11, Dirk Garner led BWV: Cleveland’s Bach Choir in a spirited concert of Bach suites and motets. [Read more…]
Sea shanties might make you think of the ocean, not Lake Erie. But the freshwater ships that sailed the Great Lakes in the 19th century held a rich musical tradition of their own. So when Les Délices artistic director Debra Nagy found a song that mentioned Cleveland in the book Windjammers: Songs of the Great Lakes Sailors, she knew the group had to perform it.
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Composer and conductor Peter Boyer has a lot on his plate. But when recording producer Elaine Martone called him two years ago with an offer from Tuesday Musical, he just couldn’t say no.
Of the many orchestra performances held at Severance Music Center in a given year, only one of them features a musician roster made up entirely of women. This brief break from the status quo comes courtesy of the Cleveland Women’s Orchestra, which has been performing in the space now known as Mandel Concert Hall for 90 years.
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When Amer Hasan introduced himself to the Akron Symphony in 2019, he did so with the opening movement of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. “ It was the first piece that I played for Maestro Wilkins in my audition, behind the screen,” Hasan recalled in a recent interview. “So the first three minutes of the concerto is not only the first music I associate with auditions, but also with the Akron Symphony.”