by Mike Telin and Daniel Hathaway
There are a lot of things to consider when choosing an opera that will fit the voices of undergraduate singers. Oberlin Opera Theater director Jonathon Field had both practical and philosophical considerations in mind when he decided to produce Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, which opens for a four-performance run in Hall Auditorium on the Oberlin College campus on Wednesday, November 11.
“If you look at the makeup of any college vocal studies program, most likely 80% of the students are female,” Field said in a telephone conversation. “Lucretia offers a lot of roles and opportunities for female singers. And singing Britten always makes students better performers. I think it’s the way that the words fit the musical lines so completely. It’s quasi-melodic, yet the singers have to get the pitches absolutely right for it to make emotional sense. The music is rhythmically complex, but not impossibly dense. And like a lot of his operas, Lucretia is lightly scored, so that’s perfect for young voices.” [Read more…]
Like many of us, Benjamin Bagby first encountered the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf during junior high school. A few years later, Bagby became fixated with the sound of medieval music. And as he writes on his website, “The Anglo-Saxons would say that this was simply my wyrd (personal destiny).” This weekend,
Crossover artist Gabriel Bolkosky, who studied classical violin at the Cleveland Institute of Music, then jazz violin at the University of Michigan, was introduced to the music of Argentine nuevo tango composer Astor Piazzolla by friend and cellist Derek Snyder. “He got me interested in Piazzolla a little over a decade ago,” Bolkosky said in a telephone conversation. “Pretty much from the moment I first heard it, I realized it was music I’d been wanting to play my whole life. His music and its history are so rich, and his musical journey is one that I relate to and admire. Something in the music speaks very deeply to my heart, and because it opens itself up to jazz, it’s the perfect crossover style for classical players.”
“We’re an ensemble that usually forgoes performing in churches in favor of the less traditional warehouse settings,” FiveOne Experimental Orchestra executive director Jeremy Allen told us during a recent telephone conversation. “When we’re looking for a reverberant Cathedral, we usually look for a post-industrial one like the Screw Factory. But when the opportunity came about to perform this concert, it was a no brainer.” On Friday, November 13 at 8:00 pm at Disciples Christian Church in Cleveland Heights, FiveOne Experimental Orchestra (51XO) will present Sacrum Silentium.
The Akron Symphony Orchestra will continue its Classic Series on Saturday, November 14 at 8:00 pm in E.J. Thomas Hall. The concert, under the direction of celebrated guest conductor JoAnn Falletta, will include works by Roussel, Copland, and Brahms.
Hailed as “…one of America’s most satisfying — and most enterprising — quartets,” by the Los Angeles Times, the Calder Quartet, Benjamin Jacobson and Andrew Bulbrook, violins, Jonathan Moerschel, viola, and Eric Byers, cello, is an ensemble of distinction. The Quartet returns to the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Performing Arts Series on Monday, November 16 at 7:30 pm with a performance at Transformer Station. The program will include works by Bjarnason, Britten, and Beethoven.
Anyone who’s a fan of the long-running television sitcom Cheers will undoubtedly remember the show’s catchy theme song which includes the “philosophical” line, ‘sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.’ Since the
Just back from their European tour, The Cleveland Orchestra returns to Severance Hall this weekend for three performances under the direction of guest conductor Gianandrea Noseda. The program will feature Goffredo Petrassi’s Partita (1932) and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances. The concerts also mark the long-anticipated return of violinist Leonidas Kavakos. See our
The celebrated collaboration between Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte yielded three of the most popular operas in the repertoire. This week, CIM Opera Theater will present The Marriage of Figaro, the first of those operas, beginning on Wednesday, November 4 at 7:30 in the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Kulas Hall. Performances run through Saturday. The opera will be sung in Italian with English subtitles.
The story of how flutist Kimberly Zaleski and cellist Trevor Kazarian came to form the duo In2ative is fit for the big screen. After graduating from the Cleveland Institute of Music they both worked in restaurants, until one day they found themselves out of work. It was at that moment that they decided to take the risk.