by Timothy Robson
There were all manner and ages of intergalactic creatures at the Blossom Music Festival for Friday evening’s Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back live music performance by The Cleveland Orchestra, conducted by Sarah Hicks, who entered the stage brandishing a red light saber. I left my own saber at home and didn’t wear my Star Wars jammies, but lots of folks in attendance visibly showed their appreciation for this movie classic through fan attire. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
South Pacific, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s legendary 1949 musical about American military personnel and their interaction with Polynesian natives during World War II, proved to be a hit at the Blossom Music Festival on Saturday evening, August 24. The lawn was packed and the pavilion was mostly sold out. The semi-staged production was a collaboration between The Cleveland Orchestra and Baldwin Wallace University’s Music Theatre Program. BW’s Victoria Bussert directed the staging, in which the singing actors performed in front of The Cleveland Orchestra (in slightly reduced size, although generous for a Broadway pit band). [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
The crowd was out in force at Blossom Music Center on Saturday evening, August 3, likely due to more moderate temperatures than in recent weeks, lower humidity, and a cloudless sky. The Cleveland Orchestra’s attractive program was added incentive, with Andrey Boreyko as guest conductor, and Swiss-Italian pianist Francesco Piemontesi as soloist in Beethoven’s Concerto No. 5 in E-flat. After that, Boreyko, music director of the Warsaw Philharmonic, led a beautifully judged performance of Alexander Zemlinsky’s unduly neglected Die Seejungfrau (“The Mermaid”). Both works fit into the category of “big music for a big space,” and they filled the Blossom pavilion with richly varied musical textures.
by Timothy Robson
There were unexpected changes in July 19th’s Summers@Severance concert due to the illness of previously announced conductor Pablo Heras-Casado and the substitution of Swiss conductor Thierry Fischer, who is currently music director of the Utah Symphony. This necessitated a change in program as well: Debussy’s La Mer was played instead of the same composer’s Iberia. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt played a recital sponsored by the Cleveland International Piano Competition on Saturday evening, May 18 in Gamble Auditorium at Baldwin Wallace University. I do not remember another concert in which every aspect of the performance had the level of technical virtuosity and surpassing taste and musicianship of this program.
by Timothy Robson
The third and final house concert of ChamberFest Cleveland’s spring season took place on May 16 at the home of Mark and Sue Hollingsworth in Shaker Heights. The central “great room,” with its two-story ceiling, surrounding mezzanine, and grand staircase, was a perfect venue for the several dozen people in attendance, who flanked the performers on three sides. The ambiance was intimate but not oppressive. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
The Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival concert on the afternoon of April 12 carried the title “Suites and Motets.” Fynette Kulas Music Hall, a former church worship space repurposed as a concert venue, was set up with the audience surrounding the orchestra and choir on three sides. Cellist René Schiffer, who performed three movements from Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites as “ear cleansers” between the motets, sat on what is normally the room’s stage platform. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
The duo piano team of Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe combined virtuosity and entertainment at their afternoon concert on April 13 in Baldwin Wallace’s Gamble Auditorium, as part of the 2019 BW Bach Festival. Johann Sebastian Bach’s works were filtered through the lens of composers as diverse as Heitor Villa-Lobos and György Kurtág, and through the duo’s own arrangements.
by Timothy Robson
Sounding Light is a professional-level mixed choir based in the Metro Detroit area, founded in 2003 by Northeast Ohio native Tom Trenney. Trenney is a musical polymath: concert organist, church musician at First-Plymouth Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, conductor, and preacher. He and Sounding Light, along with two fine soloists, soprano Lindsay Kesselman and tenor Brian Giebler, and the Stony Creek High School Choir from Rochester Hills, Michigan, visited Cleveland’s Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist on Friday evening, March 15, to give the local premiere of John Muehleisen’s Pietà. The composer was in attendance.
by Timothy Robson
In his spoken introduction before the Cleveland Chamber Choir concert on Sunday afternoon, March 10, Charles Edward McGuire characterized the program as very difficult. The statement was true, but director Scott MacPherson and the Choir gave extraordinary and virtuosic performances of unaccompanied music by three masters of choral music — Johannes Brahms, Andrew Rindfleisch, and Benjamin Britten. First Baptist Church of Greater Cleveland was an ideal location, with resonant but not overly reverberent acoustics that flattered the group’s well-blended sound but didn’t muddy the musical textures. [Read more…]