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Organist Todd Wilson to be featured in BW improvisation workshops & concert

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by Daniel Hathaway

Over his keys the musing organist, | Beginning doubtfully and far away, | First lets his fingers wander as they list, | And builds a bridge from Dreamland for his lay: | Then, as the touch of his loved instrument | Gives hopes and fervor, nearer draws his theme, | First guessed by faint auroral flushes sent | Along the wavering vista of his dream.

Thus begins James Russell Lowell’s The Vision of Sir Launfal (1867), a poetic description of an organist improvising at the keyboard — an act of instantaneous musical creation that had all but disappeared except from organ lofts, usually French, by the dawning of the 20th century.

Improvisation is now on the rise again, not only through the fingers of organists. “It’s now infecting other musicians as well,” Todd Wilson said in a recent telephone conversation. “Chamber music groups, orchestras, everybody’s doing it.”

Wilson, who is music director at Cleveland’s Trinity Cathedral, professor of organ at the Cleveland Institute of Music, curator of Severance Hall’s E.M. Skinner organ, and a well-known concert organist, is an enthusiastic improviser whose talents are expressed not only during church services. [Read more…]

Ramping up to Carnegie Hall: a conversation with Oberlin College Choir director Gregory Ristow

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by Daniel Hathaway

On January 19, the Oberlin College Choir and Oberlin Orchestra will share the iconic stage of Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium in New York for performances of works by Tarik O’Regan, Igor Stravinsky, Elizabeth Ogonek, and Claude Debussy led by Gregory Ristow and Raphael Jiménez. That event will be previewed in a free concert in the College’s Finney Chapel on Wednesday, January 16 at 7:30 pm.

Ristow’s choir will be spending most of this month — during Oberlin’s Winter Term, when classes give way to special projects — rehearsing for the New York engagement, but also revisiting a particularly challenging set of pieces they already presented on campus during the fall semester.

He’ll take faculty cellist Darrett Adkins, the Choir, and Sofia Gubaidulina’s Canticle of the Sun to the Cleveland Cello Society’s annual “i Cellisti” extravaganza at St. Paul’s Church in Cleveland Heights on Friday, January 11 at 7:30 pm. And he and his singers will repeat a program they gave for the Oberlin Board of Trustees on the FIRST•Music series at First Lutheran Church in Lorain on Sunday, January 13 at 3:00 pm. [Read more…]

Interesting events on tap in January: here’s a selection of ‘Save the Dates’

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by Daniel Hathaway

The first event in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Creative Fusion project — a series of commissions by the Cleveland Foundation — brings jazz composer and multi-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill and his Zooid ensemble to Gartner Auditorium on Friday, January 11 at 7:30 pm. They’ll join Timothy Weiss and the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble in the world premiere of an “expanded and improvising chamber ensemble” (click here for tickets).

Organist Todd Wilson mostly plays recitals and services in churches, but his alter ego is equally at home as a theater organist — accompanying silent movies in Severance Hall, Stambaugh Auditorium, and other venues. He’ll demonstrate those skills in Gamble Auditorium at Baldwin Wallace on Saturday, January 12 at 7:00 pm when he improvises scores to Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid and Laurel & Hardy’s Big Business as part of BW’s Kulas Keyboard Series. Want to find out how he does it? Wilson will reveal some of his secrets in two workshops. Details and tickets here. [Read more…]

Ring in 2019 with the Cleveland POPS: a conversation with special guest Erich Bergen

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by Mike Telin

For the past 22 years, Carl Topilow and the Cleveland POPS Orchestra have hosted the best New Year’s Eve party in Cleveland. That tradition will continue on Monday, December 31 beginning at 9:00 pm in Severance Hall with “The Hollywood Songbook: Songs from the Big and Small Screen,” featuring singer Erich Bergen. Then at 11:00 pm you can party and dance into 2019 with the No-Name Band and the Cleveland POPS Jazz Ensemble. Enjoy cash bars, refreshments, and desserts for purchase, and a fabulous balloon drop at midnight. Tickets are available online.

Erich Bergen is a man of many talents. He starred in the Clint Eastwood film Jersey Boys, reprising his role as Bob Gaudio in the Tony Award-winning stage production. He made his Broadway debut starring opposite Katharine McPhee in the hit musical Waitress. He performed the role of Randy Kroll in the 2018 film Humor Me, and currently stars as Blake Moran on the hit CBS television drama Madam Secretary. A critically acclaimed singer/musician, he performs in concert venues around the world.

I got in touch with Erich Bergen by phone and began by asking him if he has worked with Carl Topilow in the past.

[Read more…]

Les Délices & Quire Cleveland: a conversation with guest conductor Eric Milnes

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by Daniel Hathaway

If you stop to think about it, most of our American Christmas traditions have their roots in British and German culture. Far fewer trace their origins to France, even though colonization brought French influence to a large portion of what is now the United States. Les Délices, Cleveland’s French Baroque ensemble, will join the singers of Quire Cleveland this weekend to explore this less-familiar, Gallic side of Christmas in three concerts of music by Marc-Antoine Charpentier led by guest conductor Eric Milnes.

The concerts, at Holy Trinity Lutheran in Akron on December 21 at 7:30 pm, at Lakewood Congregational on December 22 at 8:00 pm, and Our Lady of Peace on December 23 at 4:00 pm, will be anchored by Charpentier’s unique Midnight Mass on French Noëls. “There are eleven French Noëls incorporated into the Mass either in instrumental interludes or in ingenious interpolations throughout the text,” Milnes said in a telephone conversation. “Almost every main motive is derived from a carol tune. It’s hard for us in our Anglo-German culture to imagine a mass built on Silent Night or Joy to the World.”

Will all those tunes be as familiar to the audience as the carols he mentioned? “Maybe one or two of them have made their way into our holiday traditions, maybe not,” Milnes said. “I have the benefit of working a lot in Québec, so I get to experience more directly how that population relates to the tradition. But these carols are still far less known, far less performed, and far less familiar than their German or English counterparts, even in the Baroque community.” [Read more…]

A Bouquet of CDs & a Book: 18 recommendations for the holidays by our correspondents

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To guide your last-minute shopping, the staff of ClevelandClassical.com has compiled a list of 17 CDs by artists who work or have a regular presence in the classical music scene in Northeast Ohio, and a book about New York City Opera that will interest local opera fans. Support your local musicians by gifting their music to family and friends!

Some of the following recordings are being reviewed here for the first time, while reviews of others are reposted from editions of ClevelandClassical.com since our last CD roundup in December of 2017.

[Read more…]

CityMusic Cleveland to feature Frank Rosenwein in Strauss’ Oboe Concerto

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Having served in the U.S. army during World War II, oboist John de Lancie had the opportunity to meet Richard Strauss at his home in a Bavarian resort town following the war. He asked the composer if he had ever thought about writing an oboe concerto — Strauss said that he hadn’t.

And then, suddenly, the composer had. His Oboe Concerto would be premiered just months later in Zürich. And what a concerto it was — and is. As Cleveland Orchestra principal oboe Frank Rosenwein (above) told me during a recent phone call, “it stands at the pinnacle of oboe writing in terms of its beauty, but also its difficulty.”

Rosenwein will play the Strauss Concerto with CityMusic Cleveland and principal guest conductor Stefan Willich in five free performances this week. As is the orchestra’s custom, the concerts will jump from venue to venue each day from Wednesday, December 12 through Sunday, December 16 (details below).

[Read more…]

Composer Stephen Hartke takes us inside Da Pacem, concerto for cello and orchestra

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by Mike Telin

When Stephen Hartke composed his piano concerto Ship of State in 2017, he purposely wrote a piece that would send a S.O.S. to listeners that all was not going well for civilization. “The process of undergoing the emotional journey of writing a piece changes who you are,” Hartke said during an interview in his studio at the Oberlin Conservatory where he is chair of the Composition Department.

But having recently completed Da Pacem, his new concerto for cello and orchestra, the Grammy-winning composer said he feels “a little more serene” than when he began the work. “I had a lot of fun writing the piano concerto, but that was more of a violent roller coaster, while this piece seeks closure.”

On Wednesday, December 12 at 8:00 pm in Finney Chapel, cellist Darrett Adkins will perform the world premiere of Da Pacem with the Oberlin Orchestra under the direction of Robert Spano. The program will also include Jennifer Higdon’s Concerto for Orchestra. (Da Pacem was commissioned by Oberlin College and Conservatory, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Aspen Music Festival, and the American Composers Orchestra.) [Read more…]

Essay:
Calder & Cage

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by Parker Ramsay

On a recent trip to Los Angeles, the author visited an Alexander Calder retrospective and saw productions of John Cage’s Europeras 1 & 2 by Yuval Sharon and Industry Opera, inspiring him to consider what vivifies or stagnates art. (Sharon has directed productions of Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande for The Cleveland Orchestra.)

On East 3rd Street in Los Angeles, the showrooms at Hauser & Wirth break away from the typical post-industrial chic of the surrounding Arts District. Solid white walls and polished concrete floors bear a sheen of sterility, defiant against trends to hang art on brick walls. There is light everywhere, eliminating the possibility of shadows. Windows and ventilation grates are absent, prohibiting the passage of moving air. And so, Alexander Calder’s mobiles sit frozen, restricted from displaying the anti-gravitational nuance for which they are known. Rotational joints appear locked in place, constraining metal ligaments from separating or conjoining in motion. Touching is strictly not allowed. Attempts by children to blow air are met with reprimands from security, loaded five or six guards deep in a showroom containing only twelve pieces.

The viewer can physically move around the art, imagining the possibility of various spirals and spins, but any permutation of the sculptures’ various elements is limited by the human mind. [Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra: Jane Glover celebrates her 100th Messiah performance

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by Daniel Hathaway

Although she didn’t set out to make her appearance with The Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus this week one for the record books, British conductor Jane Glover will reach her century mark of Messiah performances on Thursday evening, December 6 at Severance Hall, the first of four presentations of Handel’s oratorio through Sunday, December 9.

I reached Glover by telephone in London late last week during her quick trip home between engagements. “I was in Chicago doing the Christmas Oratorio until Tuesday,” she said. “I got back here on Wednesday morning and have had four days to turn around, and I’ll be coming back on Sunday. I’m so looking forward to Messiah in Cleveland. It’s going to be a high point of the year.”

I wanted to chat with the conductor about her personal approach to George Frideric Handel’s most famous oratorio, but I began by asking whether these concerts were to be her third or fourth engagements with the Orchestra.

Jane Glover: It will be my third appearance with The Cleveland Orchestra. I’m thrilled because it’s my favorite orchestra on the planet.

Daniel Hathaway: I believe I read an interview in which you said you’d already led 100 performances of Messiah.

JG: Actually, the first performance with Cleveland will be number 100. Last year I had a couple in the book that I had to cancel because something clashed with them. [Read more…]

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