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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…]

Has the Pandemic Changed the Definition of Live Music?

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by Max Shain

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the shape of the live music industry, impacting musicians, audiences, curators, managers, venue owners, festival directors, and recording engineers. Not only have revenue streams shifted, but it has caused many to rethink their definition of live music.

I spoke with six people from different sectors of the music industry to find out how their perception and experience of live music — as well as their expectations for its future — have changed over the past year. I also spoke to a few of my friends who served as proxy “Jane and Joe” audience members.

[Read more…]

Making Beethoven’s Op. 80 virtual: how Oberlin’s Tiffany Chang pulled it off

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by Daniel Hathaway

Originally, Oberlin Arts and Sciences Orchestra conductor Tiffany Chang simply planned to join in the celebration of Beethoven’s 250th birthday year with an October performance of his Choral Fantasy, featuring piano professor Peter Takács on the solo part the composer himself played at its debut in a marathon concert on December 22, 1808. But after the novel coronavirus began its inexorable progress across the country in March, shuttering live concerts for the foreseeable future, a change in plans was in order.

Why not create a virtual performance instead, using the school’s sophisticated recording technology? How complicated could that be? In a Zoom conversation from Chang’s home in Taiwan, where she has been hunkering down since the campus went on break at Thanksgiving, she confessed, “I didn’t know what I didn’t know, which is how you get into these huge projects.” [Read more…]

The Legacy of Black Musicians: Entertainer Josephine Baker 

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by Lilyana D’Amato

In the decade following the First World War, French popular culture was dominated by images of negrophilia: the disconcerting obsession with and seizure of Black — specifically African — culture. 

Introduced to African folk art through global imperialism and colonialism, the French became fascinated with racialized depictions of the “savage” Black body, fetishizing Blackness through painting, sculpture, film, and performance. In the early 1920s, avant-garde Parisian artists began appropriating Black culture as a means of exploring what they saw as the juxtaposition between the “primitive” and changing notions of modernity. 

When entertainer Jospehine Baker, the hugely influential African American expatriate, arrived in Paris in 1925, she became the face of this racialized mania. Her body and persona came to signify the exotic, used to satisfy colonialist sexual fantasies.

[Read more…]

Violinist Wendy Case joins faculty of YSU’s Dana School of Music

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by Daniel Hathaway

Although this is not an optimal moment to start a new job, violinist Wendy Case is enjoying her new position on the faculty of the Dana School of Music at Youngstown State University.

“So far it’s been fantastic. We’re doing all the classes online, and private lessons and chamber groups in person, both indoors and outside, where we have some spaces we can use.”

Case, who studied at the University of Michigan, the Cleveland Institute of Music, and SUNY Stony Brook, has recently held teaching positions in Chattanooga, Tennessee at Berry College, Covenant College, and Chattanooga State. Founding violinist of the Brahms’ Ghost Piano Trio, she has served as artistic director of the Scenic City Chamber Society and performed with the Tetris Duo, the Pitch Pipe Foundation, the Nashville Opera, and the Atlanta Symphony. Her current projects include recordings and a series of presentations on the interplay of advanced string technique and acoustical physics.

Originally a Michigander, Case says she’s excited to move back North. “I’m glad to be here. I’ve loved Northeast Ohio for a really long time.” [Read more…]

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