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Tuesday Musical: a conversation with saxophonists Timothy McAllister and Branford Marsalis – Part 1

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By Mike Telin

“We’re all excited about what this combination brings forward,” saxophonist Timothy McAllister said during a Zoom conversation. “I think there’s a mutual love and the three of us are providing a safe space for each of us to be who we are. It’s just a celebration of music and friendship.”

On Tuesday, March 3 at 7:30 pm at Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall, Tuesday Musical continues its season with the Marsalis-McAllister-Ames Trio. Branford Marsalis and Timothy McAllister, saxophones, and Liz Ames, piano. Tickets are available online.

Mike Telin: How did you and Liz and Branford come together as a trio?

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Leonkoro Quartet to bring lion-hearted strength to its CCMS debut on March

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By Mike Telin

Founded in Berlin in 2019, the Leonkoro Quartet adopted its brave-sounding name from the Esperanto words for “lion” and “heart” and from Astrid Lindgren’s children’s book, The Brothers Lionheart. Two brothers, Jonathan and Lukas Schwarz, man the first violin and cello positions. Second violinist Emiri Kakiuchi and violist Mayu Konoe fill out the roster of a relatively new ensemble that impressed the chamber music demimonde in April of 2022 by winning a total of ten prizes at London’s Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition.

On Tuesday evening, March 3 at 7:30, the Leonkoro Quartet will make its Cleveland debut on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series at Disciples Church, performing standard repertoire by Joseph Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Felix Mendelssohn.

I spoke with violist Mayu Konce in Columbus before the quartet’s recent engagement there, and posed questions about their repertory choices and some of the issues they’ve addressed as a new ensemble on the international concert circuit.

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Pittsburgh’s Chatham Baroque to visit Rocky River Chamber Music Society

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by Mike Telin

Chatham Baroque, Pittsburgh’s long-standing period instrument ensemble, will be featured on the Rocky River Chamber Music Society series on Monday, March 2 at 7:30 pm at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church. Violinist Andrew Fouts, violist da gamba Patricia Halverson, and theorboist and Baroque guitarist Scott Pauley will offer a program that Fouts said might be titled “Bach and Before.”

I recently caught up with Andrew Fouts for a telephone conversation about the group and their program.

Mike Telin: Is this going to be the group’s Cleveland debut?

Andrew Fouts: I’m in my eighteenth year with Chatham Baroque, and this will be the first time we’ve played in the Cleveland area.

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Arts Renaissance Tremont celebrates “The Art of Influence”

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By Mike Telin

On Sunday, March 1 at 3:00 pm, Arts Renaissance Tremont continues its season with The ART of Influence. The program features four dynamic pairs of musicians — once teachers and students, now artistic peers — who will take the stage for an engaging afternoon of music and stories. The free concert will be held at Pilgrim Congregational UCC in Tremont.

“Rich King joined the Cleveland Orchestra horn section in 1988 and he’s taught at CIM all these years,” ART artistic director Feza Zweifel said during an interview. “One of his students, Megan Guegold, is now a member of the horn section.”

King and Guegold will join pianist Joanna Huang in Johannes Brahms’ So Lass uns Wandern, Es Rauschet Das Wasser, and Walpurgisnacht, as well as playing Gunther Schuller’s Duet #1 for Unaccompanied Horns and Chanson (Homage a Darius Milhaud).

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Music@Main presents pianist Theron Brown

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by Max Newman

Pianist Theron Brown wants you to be able to hear his own personality in his music. “I try not to think about it too much. My music is part of me, and I try to be authentic and true to myself within it. I want people to listen and be like, ‘Oh, that’s Theron.’ It’s real, it’s honest.”

This heart-on-sleeve philosophy will come to the fore on Saturday, February 28 at 1:00 pm as Brown’s jazz trio performs at the downtown Cleveland Public Library. The show, organized in celebration of Black History Month, is part of the CPL’s “Music at Main” series, a genre-bending concert series held in the Library’s third flood lobby.

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Soprano Estelí Gomez and composer Gilda Lyons collaborate on Les Délices’ “La Diosa”

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by Stephanie Manning

The Venn diagram of performers who love early music and those who love new music is closer to a circle than one might think. Take soprano Estelí Gomez, who is as likely to appear on a Baroque program as she is on a contemporary one.

“One of the reasons people love doing both is that the composer has a lot of excitement for and trust in the performer,” Gomez said in a recent interview.

From the composer’s perspective, that idea of artistic freedom is “wonderfully liberating,” Gilda Lyons said in that same Zoom call. While research is important, “I’m never going to know as much as the performers do about their specific instrument. So I’m going to leave space for them to be the artists that they are.”

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Cleveland International Piano Competition (CIPC) Semi-Finalist Jonathan Mamora in residency at The University of Akron

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by Mike Telin

When the Cleveland International Piano Competition set out to plan its 50th anniversary in 2024, CIPC president Yaron Kohlberg knew that some changes needed to be made.

“A lot has changed in the classical music world during the past 50 years,” Kohlberg said in an interview prior to that year’s competition. He added that the changes that were made were designed to create more and better ways for CIPC to serve the contestants, the audience, and the community at large.

One of the many alterations that Kohlberg and his team implemented was in the Competition’s prize structure, which featured a new artist development program that was open to all contestants. The program offers mentorship opportunities with leading pianists, faculty, and innovators in the classical music world, and short courses in personal branding and social media, fundraising, artist finances, and similar topics, offered in partnership with Young Concert Artists. It also included residencies at Northeast Ohio universities.

From February 18 through 28, pianist Jonathan Mamora will serve as artist-in-residence at The University of Akron School of Performing Arts. During his residency, he will present workshops, deliver lectures, and give a free public recital. These events are made possible through a partnership with Piano Cleveland and The Kulas Foundation.

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American Brass Quintet visits Oberlin Artist Recital Series

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by Stephanie Manning

With more than 65 years as an ensemble under their belt and a commitment to commissioning new works, the American Brass Quintet has a lot of repertoire to choose from. “We’ve got such an extraordinary wealth of music,” bass trombonist John Rojak said. For at least the past 15 years, “every piece that has been coming in is one we want to keep playing.”

Several of those works appear on the group’s current program, which they are set to bring to the Oberlin Artist Recital Series on February 20. Trumpeters Brandon Ridenour and Tiago Linck, hornist Eric Reed, trombonist Hillary Simms, and Rojak will take to the Finney Chapel stage to present works by Anthony Barfield, Philip Lasser, Jennifer Higdon, Osvaldo Lacerda, and David Biedenbender. Tickets are available online.

Although the majority of the evening’s works are less than a decade old, the concert first finds its footing in the 16th century, with John Dowland’s Earl of Essex Galliard & Can She Excuse My Wrongs. Rojak described how Brandon Ridenour combined the two pieces into his own, “really cool” edition. [Read more…]

No Exit Presents: pianist Jenny Lin featured in METROPOLIS Reimagined

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by Mike Telin

This week, No Exit presents pianist Jenny Lin featured in METROPOLIS Reimagined at Heights Arts at 7:00 pm on Friday, February 13. The concert is free.

For this multimedia event, Lin will be joined by electronic artist Drake Andersen performing a new score to the 1984 restoration of Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis. This new score was created collaboratively by the ten composers of ICEBERG New Music.

This interview is reposted with the permission of the ensemble and author. 

No Exit’s Laura King spoke with the pianist and began by asking what excites her about this project.

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Johanna Wallroth sings Barber’s Knoxville with the Cleveland Orchestra

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by Mike Telin

Photo credit: Amélie Chapalain

We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child. —James Agee, in the preface to A Death in the Family

While searching for a text for the solo piece with orchestra that would become Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Samuel Barber said that Agee’s prose-poem particularly struck him because it reminded him so much of evenings when he was a child at home.

“I found out, after setting this, that Mr. Agee and I are the same age, and the year he described was 1915, when we were both 5,” Barber told James Fasset during a 1949 interview. ‘You see, it expresses a child’s feeling of loneliness, wonder, and lack of identity in that marginal world between twilight and sleep.”

Swedish soprano Johanna Wallroth said during a Zoom call that “Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is one of my absolute favorite pieces, and I’m very excited about making my Cleveland Orchestra and U.S. debut with it.”

On Thursday, February 12 at 7:30 pm at Severance Music Center, conductor Barbara Hannigan will lead The Cleveland Orchestra in an all-American program that features Barber’s haunting work along with George Crumb’s A Haunted Landscape, Charles Ruggles’ Sun-Treader, and George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture (arranged by Robert Russell Bennett). The program will be repeated on Saturday at 7:30 pm. Tickets are available online.

[Read more…]

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