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Opera Circle Cleveland: a conversation With Il trovatore conductor Joel Smirnoff

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by Mike Telin

SMIRNOFF-JoelFor its season finale, Opera Circle Cleveland will present Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore on Saturday, June 11 at 7:30 pm at the Ohio Theatre in Playhouse Square. Based on a Spanish play by Antonio Garcia Gutierrez adapted by Verdi’s librettist Salvatore Cammarano, the opera is the middle child in the trio of popular titles Verdi produced in the early 1850s, preceded by Rigoletto and followed by La traviata.

Joel Smirnoff will conduct the Opera Circle Orchestra and a cast including tenor Jorge Pita Carreras as Manrico, baritone  Kevin Wetzel as Il Conte di Luna, mezzo-soprano Christina Carr as Azucena, soprano Dorota Sobieska as Leonora, bass Nathan Resika as Ferrando, tenor Brian Skoog as Ruiz, and soprano Lauren Wright as Inez.   [Read more…]

Make Music Day comes to Cleveland on summer solstice, June 21

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by Daniel Hathaway

r3_09_instagramSince the first Fête De La Musique was launched by Jack Lange and the French Ministry of Culture in 1982, some 5 million people — 8% of the population of France — have played or sung in public on June 21, the summer solstice. During the last 34 years, the idea of sponsoring a free day of live music of every genre in every possible location has spread to 700 cities in 120 countries. There are no auditions and no application requirements: everyone is invited to perform or to host performances.

Make Music Day is now about to debut in Cleveland on June 21 under the sponsorship of Credo Music, in partnership with the Make Music Alliance, The Cleveland Orchestra, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the Cleveland Institute of Music, and The Music Settlement.

The idea is to bring communities together through music. As Peter Slowik, Credo’s executive director said, “In our day-to-day lives, we put barriers between ourselves and our neighbors, we live very much in our own worlds. [Read more…]

McCalmont’s List 3: Mahler: Symphony No. 1 in D (“Titan”), 1888

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by Neil McCalmont

Mahler-GustavGenre: Symphony — a composition for orchestra, usually in several movements
Scoring: Large orchestra
Era: Late Romantic
Length: c. 1 hour
Will you recognize it? Maybe an eerie feeling of familiarity during the 3rd movement
Recommended Recordings: Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic, or Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Composer: Gustav Mahler (1860-1911). Mahler was known more as an opera conductor than as a composer during his lifetime, but due to a revival of his music in the 1960s, he has garnered a reputation as perhaps the greatest symphonist since Beethoven. Plagued by anti-Semitic sentiment throughout his career, he still managed to secure the directorship of the Vienna Court Opera, the most prestigious opera house in the world at the time. His turbulent yet successful career continued when he took up posts at the Metropolitan Opera and the Philharmonic Society of New York — now the New York Philharmonic — from 1908 until his death in 1911. [Read more…]

Opera Circle Cleveland’s Il trovatore: insights from Christina Carr & Jorge Pita Carreras

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by Mike Telin

CARR-CARRERASOpera Circle Cleveland will revisit Giuseppi Verdi’s Il trovatore for its season finale at the Ohio Theatre in PlayHouse Square on Saturday, June 11 at 7:30 p.m. Last produced by the company in February of 2012, the opera is the middle child in the trio of popular titles Verdi produced in the early 1850s, preceded by Rigoletto and followed by La traviata.

Based on a Spanish play by Antonio Garcia Gutierrez adapted by Verdi’s librettist Salvatore Cammarano, the opera was an immense success at its premiere at Rome’s Teatro Apollo on January 19, 1853. Although the Tiber had flooded earlier that day and the audience had to slog through water and mud to reach the theater, nothing dampened their enthusiasm that evening. Il trovatore  proved immediately appealing to the crowd. As the Gazetta Musicale reported,

The public listened to every number with religious silence and broke out with applause at every interval, the end of the third act and the whole of the fourth arousing such enthusiasm that their repetition was demanded. — David Ewen, Encyclopedia of the Opera. [Read more…]

Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival: a conversation with Colin Davin

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by Mike Telin

DAVIN-Colin“I’ve been attending these concerts at CIM since I was in middle and high school — before it was officially a festival,” Bay Village native and CIM faculty member Colin Davin recalled during a telephone interview from his home in New York. “I grew up on this Festival and it was where I learned to really love the classical guitar community.”

On Sunday, June 5 at 7:30 pm in CIM’s Mixon Hall, everything will come full circle for Colin Davin when he brings the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival to conclusion with a recital of Spanish music by de Falla, José, Mompou, Tárrega, Torroba, and  Turina.

Why a program of Spanish music? “In my youthful rebellion I kind of rejected the Spanish repertoire,” Davin said. “I wanted to set myself apart and I became very involved in new music as well as finding some hidden gems of 19th century repertoire.”   [Read more…]

OpEd:
Musical Genius

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by Julian Ring, special to ClevelandClassical.com

Prince-KantnerEditors’s note: this think piece was written for the Oberlin course “Practicing the Art of Musical Criticism,” team-taught by Daniel Hathaway, Donald Rosenberg, and Mike Telin.

Prince Rogers Nelson, one of the most influential artists of the 1980s and ‘90s, died April 21 at his studio in Minneapolis. When the news broke, friends and fans were in disbelief. The pop icon was only 57, seemingly healthy, and prolific as ever. In the hours and days after his passing was confirmed, an intense wave of grief rocked the music world. Suddenly an idiosyncratic, genderbending black superstar was gone. There had never been, and would probably never be, another like him.

Paul Lorin Kantner, founder of the band Jefferson Airplane, died January 28 in San Francisco. A handful of major publications, including Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Billboard, ran obituaries about him. Friends and colleagues, among them the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir and  Kantner’s bandmate Grace Slick, mourned him. His musical ideas were zany; his guitar playing was masterful and oft-imitated. Jefferson Airplane defined the San Francisco sound and the psychedelic rock era. [Read more…]

OpEd:
The Search for the Classical Beyoncé

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by Christine Jay, special to ClevelandClassical.com

BeyonceLemonadeEditors’s note: this think piece was written for the Oberlin course “Practicing the Art of Musical Criticism,” team-taught by Daniel Hathaway, Donald Rosenberg, and Mike Telin.

Beyoncé — aka Yoncé, Queen Bey, Queen B, Sasha Fierce, M. Carter — the name brings to mind a myriad of hits spanning several decades. But she is also a symbol of feminism, free speech, and downright personal freedom in general.

I will echo what many have said and no doubt will continue to say: Queen Bey slays — like no other popstar. Extreme innovation in the way she delivers her artistic product is the engine and the key to her empire, something that has yet to be unlocked in the Classical world.

Such innovation was clearly on display on Saturday, April 23, when Beyoncé’s most recent studio and visual album, Lemonade, was released via Tidal, a fledgling audio and music video streaming service, along with a one-hour film of the album that aired on HBO. Social media, especially Twitter, erupted with reactions to the film and to the music itself. [Read more…]

McCalmont’s List 2: Johann Sebastian Bach — Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 (1721)

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by Neil McCalmont

BACH-JSGenre: Concerto – a composition for one or more solo instruments and orchestra
Scoring: Chamber orchestra
Era: Baroque
Length: 10-15 min
Will you recognize it? Perhaps as what your grandmother played for background music
Recommended Recordings: John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists, or Otto Klemperer and the Philharmonia Orchestra

Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). Bach’s career was strange in that while he was well-known as a keyboardist, he received little recognition for his compositions while he was alive. [Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra in Dvořák’s Stabat Mater: a conversation with bass soloist Eric Owens

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by Mike Telin

OWENS-EricIn a promotional video, Cleveland Orchestra Music Director Franz Welser-Möst explains that Antonín Dvořák’s Stabat Mater is “the composer’s personal reflections after having just lost a child.” (Click here to watch the video: the Dvořák starts at 2:52.)

On Thursday, May 26 at 7:30 pm and Saturday, May 28 at 8:00 at Severance Hall, The Cleveland Orchestra and Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, under the direction of Welser-Möst, will conclude their 2015-2016 season with the Czech composer’s setting of an emotional medieval poem that sums up the thoughts of Mary standing at the foot of the cross when Jesus is crucified. The performances will feature vocal soloists Erin Wall, soprano, Jennifer Johnston, mezzo-soprano, Norbert Ernst, tenor, and Eric Owens, bass.

The Orchestra has extended a special $25 ticket offer for readers of ClevelandClassical.com for this week’s concerts. Purchase tickets here using promo code 26082. [Read more…]

Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival: catching up with baritone Edwin Crossley-Mercer

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by Daniel Hathaway

Crossley-Mercer-RecitalBritish baritone Edwin Crossley-Mercer sang a brilliant recital in March of 2013 as an off-year event of the biennial Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival. He returns to Berea this week to give a recital with pianist Jason Paul Peterson on Tuesday, May 24 at 8:00 pm, and to coach some of the week-long Art Song Festival’s ten singer-pianist teams in master classes on Wednesday, May 25.

Crossley-Mercer was “discovered” by Art Song Festival artistic director George Vassos through YouTube videos. The baritone spoke with us three years ago for a pre-concert interview while preparing to sing the role of Don Giovanni in Dijon. We reached him by Skype at his home in France’s Auvergne region to catch up on his recent activities and talk about his Tuesday recital. [Read more…]

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