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Opera tailgating at Dunham Tavern Museum

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by Mike Telin

Whether you’re an opera aficionado, a casual listener, or opera-curious, Cleveland Opera Theater’s Free Summer Concert Series is the way to experience all that the art form has to offer. On Sunday, August 26, gather your friends and family, pack up your blankets and lawn chairs, and head to Cleveland’s MidTown area for an evening of opera favorites at the Dunham Tavern Museum.

The grounds will open at 5:00 pm, and while picnics are welcome, Scott’s Fire and Ice Food Truck will be on hand with wood-fired pizzas and gelato available for purchase. Cleveland Opera Theater will be selling wine, the proceeds of which will benefit the free summer concerts. “It’s opera tailgating at its best,” Scott Skiba, the company’s executive artistic director (no relation to the food truck), said during a recent telephone conversation. “These concerts provide a family-friendly gateway to discover and experience opera. We see that people who have come will often return for a main stage production or our Opera UpClose series.”

At 6:30 pm you can settle in for a program of arias and duets performed by soprano Marian Vogel, tenor Benjamin Werley, baritone Young Kwang Yoo, and pianist Tatiana Loisha. [Read more…]

Summers@Severance: 10 minutes with conductor Jonathan Cohen

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Québec’s chamber orchestra Les Violons du Roy got its name from France’s royal court orchestra of yore. But the group’s new leader, Jonathan Cohen, is not a Gallic king — neither in reality nor in ego.

“I come from a chamber music perspective and a chamber music world,” the Manchester-born conductor said during a recent telephone conversation from rainy London. For him, music-making should be a shared endeavor with shared responsibility. “It’s not like I’m ordering people to play and they just interpret it. We do that together, and I guide the process — that’s how I like to work.”

Cohen and pianist Kristian Bezuidenhout will make their Cleveland Orchestra debuts on Friday, August 24 at 7:00 pm in the last of the season’s Summers@Severance outings — “@” Severance Hall, with air conditioning, and without crickets. The program of Handel, Haydn, and Mozart represents Cohen’s specialty: music before late Beethoven. “That kind of music is my great passion and love. And in my opinion, most of it is chamber music.”

[Read more…]

Calling up a polymath: pianist, composer, writer, and painter Stephen Hough

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by Jarrett Hoffman

When you’re dialing the number of one of twenty living polymaths (according to The Economist), it’s easy to feel a little uneasy. As it turns out, Stephen Hough is funny, kind, and generous — in addition to having a few brain cells up there.

Our conversation eventually made its way to Mendelssohn’s First Piano Concerto, which he’ll perform at Blossom with The Cleveland Orchestra and conductor James Gaffigan on Saturday, August 18 at 8:00 pm. But first, the pianist, composer, writer, and painter tackled some complicated and personal questions about his varied artistic self.

Hough’s first novel, The Final Retreat, was published in February (read his article about it in The Tablet here). His latest CD, a collection of miniatures titled Dream Album, includes his original music and was released in June.

[Read more…]

James Gaffigan returns to Northeast Ohio to conduct Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom

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by Jarrett Hoffman

“The Cleveland Orchestra, no matter who’s conducting it, is an extraordinary instrument and an extraordinary group of human beings,” said conductor James Gaffigan during a recent telephone conversation.

Chief Conductor of the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester, Gaffigan will lead a concert at Blossom this Saturday, August 18 at 8:00 pm — a reunion from his time as the Orchestra’s Assistant Conductor from 2003 to 2006.

“The Cleveland Orchestra was the main teacher in my career,” the conductor said. “They’ve have helped mold my way of thinking about conducting an orchestra, and my concepts of sound, transparency, and what an orchestra can do. I think The Cleveland Orchestra is the definition of a great, versatile orchestra.”

[Read more…]

Time Canvas Ensemble and Archie Green to explore “Hip Hop and Minimalism”

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by Alice Koeninger

Time Canvas Ensemble will cap off their Home Not Home concert trilogy with four performances of “Hip Hop and Minimalism,” featuring hip-hop artist and mental health advocate Archie Green (left). Three house shows will take place on Thursday, August 9 and Friday the 10th at 6:30 pm, and on Sunday the 12th at 4:00 pm. RSVP through their website and get an email with the house address the day before. A fourth performance will take place at Historic St. John’s on Saturday, August 11 at 8:00 pm — buy tickets here.

In a phone interview with Time Canvas guitarist and executive director Joshua Stauffer, he described how the title Home Not Home relates to hip-hop and minimalism through the African American experience. “Many people don’t feel at home, or completely welcome in their own country,” he said. The Ensemble — which also includes violinist and artistic director Chiara Stauffer and cellist Robert Nicholson — thought that this phenomenon was important to include in their discussion of refugees and what it means to call a country home, especially in a city like Cleveland that is becoming so gentrified.

Stauffer said he thought of Green right away because of his work advocating for mental health in the African American community in Cleveland. Time Canvas is excited to collaborate with him while he raps over and in between minimalist pieces such as John Cage’s In a landscape and Philip Glass’s Mad Rush. Stauffer emphasized that since he is not black, he could not speak to the African American experience, and that Time Canvas’s goal as an ensemble is to “get out of the way” and give Green a platform to speak. “We’re just giving him a lot of paint and putting up a canvas and saying, ‘Go for it!’”

[Read more…]

Goddard bids farewell to Master Singers with all-Brahms concert on August 12

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by Daniel Hathaway

For his final performance with Master Singers Inc., the Akron-based chorus he founded 17 years ago, conductor J.D. Goddard will lead two of his all-time favorite works by Johannes Brahms — the Fourth Symphony and A German Requiem. The free concert, featuring some 70 singers and full orchestra, will take place on Sunday, August 12 at 3:00 pm in SS. Cosmas and Damian Church in Twinsburg.

Goddard and his singers have logged some impressive statistics over the years, having performed 61 major works, 71 world premieres, and 22 American premieres. “That’s what I set out to do,” the 73-year-old conductor said in a telephone conversation. “All I wanted to perform was classical choral literature and world premieres. There are many very good choral organizations out there that do pops and barbershop — far more than sing classical music— but I tell people up front that our motto is ‘preserve the past and premiere the future of classical choral literature.’ Come sing with us and see if that’s for you.”

The conductor’s invitation to ‘come sing with us’ is one of Goddard’s guiding principles. “We have an open-door policy and there are virtually no auditions,” he said. “Some conductors want to audition people out, but we audition to include, not exclude.” That system seems to have worked for nearly two decades, and to some extent, his singers self-select themselves. “The majority of people who come and sit in on a rehearsal don’t come back because they realize it really is just classical music.”

[Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra: a conversation with Simon Trpčeski

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by Mike Telin

The sounds of Russian music will fill Blossom Music Center on Saturday, August 11 at 8:00 pm when Vasily Petrenko leads The Cleveland Orchestra in Liadov’s Baba-Yaga, Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5. Tickets are available online.

The concert also marks the return visit to the Blossom stage by pianist Simon Trpčeski. “I made my Cleveland Orchestra debut at Blossom playing Rachmaninoff’s second concerto and it was an honor to be asked to perform that same piece the following year on the subscription series at Severance Hall,” the pianist said by telephone from California, where he was premiering a new concerto at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music.

“It’s not just my opinion, but Cleveland is one of the top orchestras in the world, and Blossom is such a beautiful venue. This time I am playing a different concerto, but it is by the same composer,” the Macedonian pianist said. “And to play it with my good friend Vasily — we’ve played and recorded all of the Rachmaninoff concertos — is going to be a fantastic musical journey.”

[Read more…]

Conductor Michael Francis returns to Blossom on August 5

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by Mike Telin

When Michael Francis made his Cleveland Orchestra debut last summer, the British-born conductor brought along a program that featured music by Elgar and Vaughan Williams. When he returns to the Blossom Music Center stage on Sunday, August 5 at 7:00 pm, he will lead the Orchestra in a program featuring the music of Bedřich Smetana, Leoš Janáček, and Antonín Dvořák. Tickets are available online.

“I’m thrilled to be asked back,” Francis said during a telephone conversation from his home in Tampa, Florida. “The Cleveland Orchestra is a truly exceptional orchestra and the Blossom Festival is a real beacon of cultural life in America. To have a chance to do these three pieces that I love is a great honor.” [Read more…]

Blossom Festival 50th Anniversary: Reasons to celebrate (Part III)

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by Alice Koeninger

As we celebrate its 50th anniversary, it’s fun to look back on highlights from Blossom Music Center’s illustrious list of performances. In its inaugural season in 1968, Vladimir Ashkenazy made his first appearance with The Cleveland Orchestra as a pianist. The newly-formed Blossom Festival Chorus performed Carmina Burana on August 25, to great acclaim. This year, they will perform that same work on the same date, exactly 50 years later.

Blossom’s second year brought performances by such artists as Alicia de Larrocha, Victor Borge, José Feliciano, Duke Ellington, Maria Alba, Hank Thompson, Dionne Warwick, André Kostelanetz with Marian Anderson, and Peter Nero. The first Fourth of July concert also took place in 1969, conducted by Meredith Willson, composer of The Music Man. That same year saw the official record for the largest crowd ever at Blossom: 24,364 people came out to hear Blood, Sweat & Tears. That record was “unofficially” broken in 1973 when Pink Floyd attracted an estimated 32,000 people to Blossom’s green slopes.

Leonard Bernstein conducted Mahler’s Second Symphony –– his only appearance with The Cleveland Orchestra –– in 1970. While governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter visited Blossom in 1974 as the guest of Ohio governor John Gilligan. In 1984, Big Bird made a guest appearance, and in 1985, Christoph von Dohnányi presented a fully-staged production of The Magic Flute. [Read more…]

Sony Classical to release 106-CD set of Szell’s complete Columbia Recordings

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by Daniel Hathaway

Are you a big George Szell fan? Do you have 88 hours you’d like to devote to binge listening? Do you have room on your shelf for over a hundred CDs weighing 12.4 pounds? Are you interested in exploring monophonic recordings that have never appeared in digital form? If so, you’ll be delighted to know that a boxed set of the complete recordings George Szell made for Columbia Masterworks will be released by Sony Classical on August 10.

The 106 discs preserve 92 recordings remastered from original analogue tapes, including Szell’s performances with The Cleveland Orchestra from 1946 through 1969, as well as his collaborations with the New York Philharmonic and the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. Among the featured soloists are Robert Casadesus, Rudolf Firkušný, Leon Fleisher, Gary Graffman, Vladimir Horowitz, Rudolf Serkin, Zino Francescatti, Isaac Stern, Joseph Szigeti, Pierre Fournier, Leonard Rose and Judith Raskin. [Read more…]

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