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Oberlin Opera on tour:
Jack and the Beanstalk

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by Kate MacKenzie

This January, the Oberlin Opera Theater hit the road, staging eleven performances of Jack & the Beanstalk across seven venues. While such tours are uncommon, it was the audiences of elementary school students that made the show truly special.

A Winter Term education tour was the joint vision of professors Stephanie Havey and Kyung-Eun Na, who served as Stage and Music Directors. Both had extensive experience organizing similar outreach programs, and felt a call for Oberlin Conservatory to be more active in the wider community. Equipped with an enthusiastic student cast and crew, the show began rehearsal on January 9th, a mere ten days before its preview performance in Warner Concert Hall.

The thirty-minute children’s opera was adapted from the music of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas by Johan Davies, who rearranged the simple but catchy melodies and authored a playful libretto to match. [Read more…]

Obituary: Mary Ann Griebling, 87

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Mary Ann (Rimmel) Griebling, 87, of Akron, Ohio passed away peacefully on Tuesday, November 14, 2023. She was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to Mendell Eugene Rimmel and Marthena W. (née Diver) Rimmel, on April 29, 1936. She is survived by daughters Karen Griebling (Robin Brown) and Margi Griebling-Haigh (Scott Haigh), and granddaughter Gabrielle Haigh (Mark Nelson). She was a curious, clever, and creative woman who was deeply ambitious on behalf of her family.

As the daughter of a Methodist circuit minister who would later become a professor of Calculus at Kent State University, Mary Ann moved many times throughout Northeast Ohio and western Pennsylvania during her childhood. Her fondest memories from this time were of riding her tricycle in the attic of a church rectory in Greentree, Pennsylvania. She inherited her gift for music from her much adored paternal grandfather, Alfred Rimmel, who had worked as a child coal miner, but loved music, had absolute pitch, and reportedly built his own violin. Read the complete obituary here.

Remembering Stephen Rubin

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by Daniel Hathaway

It was with great sadness that we learned of the passing of Stephen Rubin on October 13.

Well-known as the successful publisher of a stream of best-selling books, Rubin was also deeply committed to the preservation and advancement of classical music journalism, and ClevelandClassical.com has been a direct recipient of his largesse.

Appalled by the gradual disappearance of critical writing from the pages of mainstream newspapers, he launched the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism at the Oberlin Conservatory in 2011 in cooperation with Dean David Stull.

The first Institute was held at Oberlin in January, 2012, when ten students (pictured below) wrote overnight reviews of Finney Chapel performances to be evaluated by a panel of leading critics.

[Read more…]

Remembering Ms. Olga:
a personal reflection 

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by Cicilia Yudha

It was around 8:20 pm on October 10, 2001. I was sitting in Baldwin Auditorium at Duke University listening to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat, K. 271, Le Jeunehomme. My teacher of six years, Olga Radosavljevich, known as “Ms. Olga,” was performing with the Duke Symphony Orchestra led by her longtime friend, conductor Harry Davidson. As a Cleveland Institute of Music Artist Diploma candidate, I understudied the piece and traveled to Durham, NC with Ms. Olga. She was having health issues that fall and was not sure if she could perform.

After the first movement was splendidly done, Ms. Olga stood up. There was an audible gasp from the audience. She stood up, hunched down at the piano looking as if she had lost an earring. Maestro Davidson spoke to her and after a few minutes, she sat down at the keyboard again. The orchestra began the heart-wrenching introduction of the slow movement in c minor. Ms. Olga joined in with the piano’s melody. However, after a few bars, she stopped. Something was clearly wrong. Was she having a memory slip?

[Read more…]

The Chopin Whisperer

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Oberlin professor Dang Thai Son conquered one of the world’s most prestigious piano competitions. Now his students are doing the same.

by Erich Burnett, Special to ClevelandClassical.com

Oberlin piano professor Dang Thai Son (left) is a legend at the Chopin Competition. Dang’s students, including second-year piano major JJ Bui, are establishing legends of their own.

People who know about piano tend to know about Dang Thai Son.

Widely acclaimed for his interpretations of Chopin, the Oberlin Conservatory professor saw his illustrious career take flight in 1980 when he won first prize at the 10th Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, Poland—one of the world’s most revered and most rigorous musical competitions. He has devoted the four decades since to performing and teaching around the world, earning accolades everywhere he goes.

Today, Dang’s students are following in the master’s footsteps in almost unbelievable ways. [Read more…]

Peter Takács announces reissue of complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas

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by Daniel Hathaway

Oberlin piano professor Peter Takács celebrated the completion of a huge project in 2011 when his recordings of the complete Beethoven Sonatas were issued on the Cambria label in a handsome boxed set (read our review here).

“It was a labor of love,” Takács said in a recent Zoom interview, “as well as a kind of global enterprise.” The elaborate project included eleven discs in SACD Surround Sound produced by Sony Austria, with some elements printed in Hong Kong and designs done in Los Angeles.

The original edition of 2,000 copies had sold out by 2016, which raised the question of a reissue. Happily — albeit mysteriously — more than 500 sets of the CDs were discovered sitting in a Cambria warehouse. That inspired a reissue with several alterations in design.

[Read more…]

Getting inside the Crafting Change Symposium: a conversation with Abby Aresty

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by Mike Telin

When I first read about the Crafting Change Symposium, I learned that it was a series of free, virtual presentations, concerts, panel discussions, and workshops, through which teachers — kindergarten through college — and artists/makers from a variety of disciplines would share their creative approaches to exploring science, humanities, and art with an emphasis on inclusion.

When I read further I encountered such terms as Maker Movement, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), and STEAM (science, technology, engineering, the arts, and mathematics).

My initial reaction was, I know a little bit about most of this, but not a lot about any of it. But after reading session descriptions and presenter bios, I was hooked. I needed to know more.

Last week I attended two sessions. “Crafting the Hybrid Body,” led by Cindy Kao from Cornell’s Hybrid Body Lab, was a fascinating lecture about wearable technology, and the four presenters in the “Lightning Lunchtime Panel” all had inspirational stories to share. Hearing Sara Trail talk about how she uses sewing and quilting to engage young people though the Social Justice Sewing Academy was enlightening. Crafting Change continues through June 19. [Read more…]

Life lessons learned through Chamber Music with the Cavani

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by Mike Telin

While the pandemic is still causing major disruptions in our nation’s educational system, there are countless stories of how teachers, students, and parents have come together and met their unique challenges head-on.

Programs that have faced extreme obstacles are the junior high, high school, and city youth orchestras — how do you keep students engaged in performance-focused programs when their reasons for existing have been put on hold?

During the recently completed academic year, the Lakewood High School Orchestra program and the Cavani String Quartet partnered for the inspired, interdisciplinary Visiting Artist Project. Using chamber music — Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 8 and Daniel Bernard Roumain’s Kompa Variations — as a catalyst for expression and team-building, the Project also provided an opportunity to talk in general about the impact of the pandemic on high school age students. Although an in-person performance was not a certainty for the duration of the project, ultimately one did take place in front of a live audience in April.

During a Zoom conversation in the fall, Lakewood High School orchestra director Dr. Elizabeth Hankins explained that the gestation of the project began when the Ohio Music Education Association asked the Lakewood music teachers to create a plan for learning during the pandemic. One person Hankins turned to for advice was Annie Fullard of the Cavani String Quartet. [Read more…]

Memorial Fund to be established to honor the late Christine Haff-Paluck

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We have received the following letter from Gerry Paluck.

On April 25, 2020, my wife Chris Haff-Paluck passed away due to health complications related to breast cancer, lupus, and diabetes. For more than forty years, Chris had been a freelance double bassist, educator, mentor to young musicians, concert presenter, and arts manager at the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra, Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the Cleveland Institute of Music, and the founder and moving spirit of Arts Renaissance Tremont (ART).

Through her crowning achievement, Arts Renaissance Tremont, the non-profit organization Chris created 29 years ago, she established a yearly program of free classical music concerts. Through ART she has not only given established musicians, but also aspiring young artists an additional venue to showcase their talents. Chris has been dedicated to providing great music at no cost to audiences of all ages throughout Northeast Ohio, and she has done all this and more without the benefit of a large supporting organization and without the slightest thought of personal remuneration or recognition.

I’m creating this memorial fund to honor her memory and carry on her work. The investment income from the fund will go to help young, aspiring musicians attend the Encore Chamber Music Institute, started by Chris’s dear friend Jinjoo Cho. [Read more…]

Skinner organ transplants are well underway at Trinity

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by Daniel Hathaway

When three trucks from Croton, Ohio’s Muller Organ Company pulled up to Trinity Cathedral in downtown Cleveland on January 11, the Cathedral’s history of distinguished pipe organs opened a new chapter.

Those vehicles were delivering renovated parts of several E.M. Skinner organs, to be installed in chambers above the Cathedral chancel, where Trinity’s first instrument had been located when the building was consecrated in 1907.

“We’re very close to hearing some sounds,” Trinity music director Todd Wilson (left, among the pipes) said today in a Zoom conversation. “They’ll be doing rough tuning for several days, then start real voicing.”

That 1907 organ, Skinner’s Opus 140, served the Cathedral and its organist-choirmaster, Edwin Arthur Kraft (right), until the 1970s, when its outdated mechanism had deteriorated beyond the point of renovation.

After a long process, contracts were signed with Flentrop Orgelbouw in Zaandam, the Netherlands, for two mechanical action instruments in the Dutch 18th-century style — a moveable, two-manual Choir Organ (delivered in 1976 but later sold) and a three-manual Great Organ at the rear of the nave (pictured below, dedicated in December 1977).

The remains of the Skinner were finally removed in advance of the construction of Trinity Commons in 2002, and salvageable pipework was donated to other organ projects. [Read more…]

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