by Daniel Hathaway
Blossom Music Center will celebrate its 50th anniversary in the summer of 2018 with concerts by The Cleveland Orchestra, Blossom Festival Band, and Kent/Blossom Chamber Orchestra; special guests including cellist Yo Yo Ma, Broadway legend Audra McDonald, and Roger Daltrey of The Who; and screenings of Singing in the Rain, The Little Mermaid, and Star Wars: A New Hope with live scores performed by the Orchestra.
For selected events, Image Magnification (IMAG) on LED screens in the Pavilion will display live footage from concerts, giving audience members throughout the Pavilion the opportunity to clearly see the musicians onstage. IMAG is provided in partnership with ideastream.
Since its opening in 1968, Blossom has drawn over 400,000 visitors each summer, a total of over 20 million guests during its first half-century. [Read more…]
Suites from Stravinsky’s ballets are popular choices for orchestral programs, but it’s not often the works are actually presented as ballets. It’s even more rare for performances to feature modern, reimagined choreography.
A Native Canadian boy in the Nipigon country of Ontario dreams of a journey he knows he can’t make. But a figure carved out of cedar, with a strip of lead to keep it upright in the water, and a message inscribed on the bottom to please return it to the water? That might just make it all the way through the Great Lakes, down Niagara Falls, past Quebec City, to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and beyond — despite encounters with a snake, a forest fire, passing ships, pollution, and people along the way.
On Monday, February 12 at 7:30 pm, the 
Since winning the grand prize and three special prizes at the 2013 Banff International String Quartet Competition, the Dover Quartet — Joel Link and Bryan Lee, violins, Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, viola, and Camden Shaw, cello — have quickly risen to the forefront of young, internationally touring string quartets. Following that 2013 breakthrough, the ensemble has added to their resume a Cleveland Quartet Award, a Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, and most recently an Avery Fisher Career Grant.
Life is good for classical guitarist 
For his New Music Ensemble’s biannual concerts, director Keith Fitch often builds programs around guest composers coming to the Cleveland Institute of Music. This year, the addition of a concert in February — one without a visiting artist — gives Clevelanders a further opportunity to hear new music, and provided Fitch extra programmatic flexibility.
It’s hard to say what’s most interesting about the new opera