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Oberlin Opera Theater to present Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites

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by Mike Telin

Francis Poulenc’s The Dialogues of the Carmelites recounts a fictionalized version of the story of the Martyrs of Compiègne, Carmelite nuns who, during the closing days of the Reign of Terror, were guillotined in Paris for refusing to renounce their vocation.

Beginning on Wednesday, March 13 at 8:00 pm in Hall Auditorium, Oberlin Opera Theater will present the first of four performances of Poulenc’s haunting opera. Performances continue on Thursday and Friday at 8:00 and on Sunday at 2:00 pm. Tickets are available online.

“It’s a fascinating piece,” director Jonathon Field said during a telephone conversation. “Poulenc’s music is phenomenal and describes the dramatic situation quite well. I think that’s why it keeps getting produced over and over again by opera companies around the world.”

Poulenc’s libretto is based on the play of the same name by Georges Bernanos, based on Gertud von Le Fort’s novella Die Letzte am Schafott (The Last on the Scaffold). [Read more…]

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center returns to Tuesday Musical stage

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by Mike Telin

On Tuesday, March 12 at 7:30 pm, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center will return to Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall stage as part of Tuesday Musical’s Mainstage Series. The program of Russian music will feature Rachmaninoff’s Trio élégiaque in g for Piano, Violin, and Cello, Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir d’un lieu cher for Violin and Piano, Prokofiev’s Sonata in C for Two Violins, and Taneyev’s Piano Quintet in g. Tickets are available online.

“I’m so excited to be able to play this program,” pianist and CMS artistic director Wu Han said during a telephone conversation. “People know the names Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, and Prokofiev, but they may not know these pieces, and Sergei Taneyev is a name that music lovers in the United States should be more familiar with.”

Han, who will be joined by her CMS colleagues Arnaud Sussmann and Alexander Sitkovetsky, violins, Matthew Lipman, viola, and Nicholas Cannellakis, cello, said the program is built around the relationship that Taneyev had with Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, and Prokofiev.

“He was Rachmaninoff’s and Scriabin’s teacher, and he claimed that he was Prokofiev’s teacher as well. And at one point, Tchaikovsky was Taneyev’s teacher.” [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: Jeffrey Strauss returns for the funeral of Telemann’s canary

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by Daniel Hathaway

When Jeffrey Strauss sings Georg Philipp Telemann’s Funeral Cantata for an Artistically Trained Canary with Apollo’s Fire in four performances this weekend (March 7-10), the baritone will be returning to the stage for the first time following major heart surgery in the fall.

The affliction that sidelined him for six months came as a complete surprise. After singing the ensemble’s Baroque Music Barn concerts last June, Strauss took to bed for a week with a fever that persisted, eventually sending him to his doctor in Chicago for tests. “A blood culture finally identified it as a serious but not that uncommon bacterial infection,” he said in a telephone conversation. After five days in hospital, Strauss was sent home with five weeks’ worth of intravenous antibiotics and an appointment with a cardiologist — the bacteria had damaged a valve in his heart that needed to be replaced.

“I had a wonderful surgeon,” Strauss said. “When he found out I was a singer, he immediately said, ‘I’ll tell the anesthesiologist to put a smaller tube down your windpipe.’ [Read more…]

ChamberFest Cleveland launches House Concert Series: a conversation with Franklin Cohen

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by Mike Telin

It’s wonderful to hear great chamber music performances in a concert hall, but it’s an entirely different experience to hear it in someone’s home with light appetizers and your favorite beverage.

“As I get older I’m really enjoying situations where the audience is five feet away from you and you can feel everyone’s energy,” clarinetist and ChamberFest Cleveland co-artistic director Franklin Cohen said. “There’s something very special about that environment that I can’t even describe — it’s a wonderful thing.”

On Friday, March 8 at 7:30 pm, ChamberFest Cleveland will present the Cohen Candlelight House Concert, featuring Franklin Cohen and the Callisto Quartet. The program will include Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 1, “Métamorphoses nocturnes” and Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet. Light appetizers and beverages will be served after the concert. Tickets are available online, and the address will be provided upon purchase.

Cohen said that the House Concert Series provides the perfect opportunity to present “a local ensemble that has received national recognition.” [Read more…]

Choice and chance: Ensemble Mélange comes to Sandusky Concert Association

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by Jarrett Hoffman

If you’ve ever been sitting in a concert and just wanted to shout out what piece you want to hear, well here’s your chance — but just a chance.

That’s the concept behind the partly planned, partly unplanned program assembled by mixed sextet Ensemble Mélange for their performance at the State Room at Sandusky State Theatre on Thursday, March 7 at 7:30 pm.

It’s like a party game, and here are the rules: first, each member of the audience receives a printed program that looks kind of like a restaurant menu, with around twenty works or single movements divided into different categories. Those include types of classical music, like Baroque, Classical, Romantic, 20th-century, and opera, and other genres like latin, jazz, klezmer, and Broadway.

If you get lucky, the group’s random-number generator will match up with the number listed in the corner of your program — and you’ll have your pick of piece, so long as it’s on tap. (In other words, no shouting for Freebird.)

[Read more…]

Contemporary Youth Orchestra says happy 80th birthday to Joan Tower

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by Mike Telin

On September 6 of 2018, Joan Tower celebrated her 80th birthday. On Saturday, March 9 at 7:00 pm, in Cuyahoga Community College’s Metro Auditorium, the Contemporary Youth Orchestra, under the direction of Liza Grossman, will honor that occasion with a concert dedicated to the eminent composer’s music. The program will include the Ohio premieres of Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 6, Stroke, and In Memory (For String Orchestra), as well as Tambor. Tickets are available online.

Among her numerous accolades — Tower has just been named the recipient of the League of American Orchestra’s 2019 Gold Baton Award — she was the first woman to win the Grawemeyer Award for Music in 1990. The New Yorker called her “one of the most successful woman composers of all time,” and she has served as a source of inspiration to Grossman dating back to CYO’s fourth season in 1998. “I was researching women composers and Joan was one of the first to come up,” Grossman said during a telephone conversation.

The conductor said that she quickly became “fascinated” with Tower’s music and history. “The way she was carving a path for women composers and inspiring them to write really was inspirational to me.” Still, it was not until August of 2000 that Grossman decided that the orchestra was ready to play one of Tower’s works. [Read more…]

CityMusic: violinist Sayaka Shoji to premiere concerto by Avner Dorman

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Local listeners might know that CityMusic Cleveland’s music director, Avner Dorman, is also a composer. His separate but related talents of the baton and of the pen will be on display when he leads the orchestra in the world premiere of Still, his third violin concerto, in five free concerts from March 13-17.

The soloist is a familiar face. Sayaka Shoji — first prize winner at the 1999 Paganini Competition — has in recent years joined CityMusic for the Brahms and Tchaikovsky concertos.

We last spoke to her in 2015 in a wide-ranging conversation that touched on her Japanese, Italian, and German upbringing (she now lives in Paris), her interest in jazz, the beginning of her solo career, her early dream of singing opera, and her previous work with Dorman — including commissioning a violin sonata from him.

I caught up with Shoji over email, and began by asking about the first time she heard Dorman’s music — in Verbier, Switzerland, where they met.

[Read more…]

Charles McGuire on Cleveland Chamber Choir’s “March Choral Madness”

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by Daniel Hathaway

Cleveland Chamber Choir’s “March Choral Madness” concerts this weekend won’t feature dueling madrigals vying for slots on basketball-like brackets as they did in 2018. Instead, artistic director Scott MacPherson has chosen an interesting program of works by Johannes Brahms, Andrew Rindfleisch, and Benjamin Britten for the Choir’s mid-season programs on Saturday, March 9 at 7:30 pm at Brecksville Methodist Church and Sunday, March 10 at 3:00 pm at First Baptist in Shaker Heights.

I chatted on the phone recently with Oberlin Conservatory musicology professor Charles Edward McGuire, who will be giving pre-concert lectures 45 minutes before each of this weekend’s performances. What does he plan to tell the audience?

“I’ll be talking about my love for all three of these fantastic composers,” he said, adding that he’s trying to decide how interactive he wants to make the presentations. “You don’t have all the audiovisual aids in a concert venue that you would in a classroom. You have to rely on people’s imagination, slip in the occasional joke, and hope that the handheld microphone works.”

[Read more…]

Cuarteto Casals returns to the Cleveland Chamber Music Society

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by Mike Telin

“To live with this piece is to imagine a genius at the absolute height of his powers, yet virtually isolated from the world,” Cuarteto Casals violist Jonathan Brown said. “Beethoven was deaf in his disorderly room in Vienna where few people wanted to be associated with him. There he was struggling with his artistic demons. He wrote, and rewrote this quartet extensively, but he was working with his own criteria — there’s no other model, there’s no other work like this.”  

On Tuesday, March 5 at 7:30 pm at Plymouth Church, Jonathan Brown will join his Cuarteto Casals colleagues (Abel Tomàs and Vera Martínez, violins, and Arnau Tomàs, cello) for a performance of Beethoven’s monumental Quartet in c-sharp, Op. 131.

[Read more…]

Rambling House: fifteen minutes with violinist Edwin Huizinga

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by Daniel Hathaway

One of the most flexible and prolific violinists on the concert circuit, Edwin Huizinga will bring one of his multiple musical personalities to Medina and Cleveland this weekend, when he joins the musicians and dancers of Rambling House for an early-bird St. Patrick’s Day celebration.

The Celtic show, which will also feature soprano Amanda Powell, guitarist William Coulter, uilleann piper and flutist Brian Bigley, violinist Kristen Bigley, storyteller Tomàseen Foley, and dancers Brandon Asazawa and Alyssa Reichert, will be performed on Saturday, March 2 at 7:30 at the Medina Performing Arts Center (tickets here), and on Sunday, March 3 at 7:00 pm at the Bop Stop (tickets here). [Read more…]

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