by Mike Telin

One Tuesday, May 7 at 7:30 pm at Disciples Christian Church, Ohlsson will revisit the Cleveland Chamber Music Society with a program that features the music of Beethoven, Schubert, and Chopin. Tickets are available online.
by Mike Telin
by Mike Telin

One Tuesday, May 7 at 7:30 pm at Disciples Christian Church, Ohlsson will revisit the Cleveland Chamber Music Society with a program that features the music of Beethoven, Schubert, and Chopin. Tickets are available online.
by Mike Telin
by Mike Telin

On Monday, May 6 at 7:30 pm at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church, Rocky River Chamber Music Society will host Cleveland Orchestra principals, clarinetist Afendi Yusuf and violist Wesley Collins, with pianist Dawoon Chung, in a program that will feature trios by Bruch, Mozart, and Robert Schumann. The concert is free. Click here to watch the livestream.
by Mike Telin
by Mike Telin

On Saturday, May 4 at 7:30 pm at the Church of the Covenant, Vieaux will join the BlueWater Chamber Orchestra in performances of Vivaldi’s Concerto in D, RV 93 and Avner Dorman’s How to Love. Under the direction of Daniel Meyer, the program also includes Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. The concert is presented in partnership with the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society. Pay-what-you-wish tickets are available online. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
by Mike Telin

On Friday, May 3 at 8:00 pm at Severance Music Center, Ziegler will perform Lalo’s Cello Concerto with the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra. Under the direction of Daniel Reith, the program also includes Valerie Coleman’s Umoja and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4. Tickets are available online.
I reached the Copley High School junior by telephone and began our conversation by congratulating her on winning the competition and asking how she came to choose the Lalo.
by Daniel Hathaway

Take the example of Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, who will make his Apollo’s Fire debut this weekend in a pair of Johann Sebastian Bach’s rarely performed Easter works.
Cohen, who graduated from Princeton in 2015, will come to Cleveland immediately after returning to his alma mater to sing the role of the Angel in Edward Elgar’s mystical Roman Catholic oratorio The Dream of Gerontius.
And with Apollo’s Fire, the countertenor, who grew up in a Jewish household, sang in synagogue, and studied cantorial music, will sing the allegorical role of Fear (Furcht) in Bach’s Cantata 66, then take on the persona of Mary Magdalene in the composer’s Easter Oratorio — two Pietist Lutheran works.
“My two alter egos,” Cohen quipped in a recent telephone interview. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
by Mike Telin

On Friday, April 26 at 7:30 pm, Afkham will make his Severance Music Center debut with a concert that features Unsuk Chin’s subito con forza, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with Beatrice Rana, and Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. The program will be repeated on Saturday at 8:00 pm and Sunday at 3:00 pm. Tickets are available online.
Regarding this week’s concerts, Afkham, who serves as Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Orquestra y Coro Nacional de España, said, “When I was asked to fill in for my friend Lahav Shani back in March, I looked at the program and thought — I like it a lot, I don’t want to change a thing.”
by Max Newman
by Max Newman

What Don Verkuijlen is referring to is the “Game On!” program that the Singers’ Club of Cleveland will present on Friday, April 26 at 7:00 pm at First Baptist Church of Greater Cleveland. Tickets are available here.
The brainchild of Verkuijlen, the program is “essentially going to be played like a game of Jeopardy,” he said during a telephone conversation. “When you walk in, there will be a big screen showing various categories. The audience will raise their hands and call out a category, and instead of video clues, the choir will actually be singing a piece of music for each category.”
by Daniel Hathaway

Marking its 50th year, the competition got underway in February, when 55 contestants selected for its first round played in Cleveland and Paris.
The semifinalists will come to Cleveland this summer for three weeks of free public performances and ticketed competition events between July 28 and August 10, culminating in concerto performances with The Cleveland Orchestra and the bestowing of awards including the $75,000 Mixon First Prize.
This time around, the competition has revised its guidelines to allow contestants to play a broader range of repertoire. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
by Mike Telin

On Saturday, April 20 at 7:30 pm at Disciples Christian Church, the Cleveland Chamber Collective will present the premiere of Emerson’s OATH BREAKER, a Requiem for chamber ensemble and digital playback. The work aims to take the audience on a 60-minute journey of anger, grief, and hope, while striving to come to grips with the events of January 6 and the subsequent fallout. The program will be repeated on Sunday, April 28 at 3:30 pm at the Pivot Center. Both performances are free.
Emerson said that he chose the frame of a requiem because the work is about emotional and spiritual processes, and writing it helped him work through the events and manage their emotional impact.
by Stephanie Manning

“I play anything that makes noise,” the percussionist says. “Anything that I can make music with—including pure water, to ceramic rice bowls, to anything.”
A specialist in contemporary music, Fujii says she focuses on working with living composers to “innovate and invent the boundary of what the percussionist can do.” Since 2010, she’s been doing just that as a member of the Silkroad Ensemble, a musical collective dedicated to cross-cultural collaboration.
On April 26, she’ll be coming to Oberlin for the first time, as part of the group performing Silkroad’s program “Uplifted Voices.” Tickets are available online.