ClevelandClassical.com Header
Ad
Ad
Ad

Pre•Views

Oberlin Opera to return to Britten’s only comic title (or is it really?)

by

by Daniel Hathaway

Oberlin Opera Theater produced memorable performances of Benjamin Britten’s only comic opera in March of 2014 (pictured). Albert Herring returns to the stage of Hall Auditorium this week for performances from Thursday evening, November 2 through Sunday afternoon, November 5 with a new stage director, a new conductor, and — thanks to the regular turnover of student populations — a pair of new casts. (Click here for tickets.)

Populated with stock British characters who might have stepped right out of an Agatha Christie novel, Britten’s three-acter was adapted by librettist Eric Crozier from Madame Husson’s Rosier, a story by Guy de Maupassant, and relocated from France to Suffolk. The opera debuted in 1947 at Glyndebourne in front of audiences who were grateful for some comic relief after the long slog of World War II.

Here’s what happens.

As the curtain rises, the fictional village of Loxford is in a tizzy because none of the candidates for May Queen measure up to the formidable Lady Billow’s exacting moral standards. As a compromise, the village committee decides to switch to a May King and nominates Albert Herring, son of a widowed greengrocer whose apron strings have kept him so tightly bound that he’s oblivious to temptation. [Read more…]

Rocky River Chamber Music Society: a conversation with cellist Keith Robinson

by

by Mike Telin

While it is common to discover that a trio of musicians all attended the same conservatory or university, it is not so common to discover that the trio all attended the same high school. “Hyunsoon and I were in high school together at the North Carolina School of the Arts,” cellist Keith Robinson said during a recent phone call. “In fact, Dan went there too.”

On Monday, November 6 at 7:30 pm at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church, Robinson will be joined by pianist Hyunsoon Whang and clarinetist Daniel McKelway in a concert that includes Samuel Barber’s Cello Sonata in c, Sergei Prokofiev’s Cello Sonata in C, and Johannes Brahms’ Intermezzo in A, Op. 118, No. 2 as well as his Clarinet Trio. The free concert is part of the Rocky River Chamber Music Society series. Click here for the livestream.

Robinson, who is a founding member of the Miami String Quartet, noted that Monday’s concert will be his debut performance of the Prokofiev Sonata. “Hyunsoon and I have played the Barber and Rachmaninoff sonatas together and we were thinking about doing the same. Then we said, ‘Wait, let’s learn a new piece’ — it just makes it interesting for us.”

The cellist said that he has found the Prokofiev to be “really enchanting,” and that it complements Barber quite well. “They’re pretty close in age — Barber wrote his in 1932 and Prokofiev was in the late ‘40s. The Barber is dark and brooding, and the Prokofiev can be pretty funny at times. You can tell the Barber is heavily influenced by Brahms, and because it’s in the key of c-minor, it is dark.”

[Read more…]

Organist Monica Berney to play solo recital at Trinity Cathedral November 6

by

by Daniel Hathaway

“I try to design programs for non-organists,” Monica Berney said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C. earlier this week. “The idea that everyone wants to hear the old warhorses they learned in college is just not that interesting to me. I want to play programs for people.”

At Trinity Cathedral on Monday, November 6 at 7:30 pm, Berney will make use of both the Cathedral’s 1977 Flentrop organ and its 2022 Skinner / Aeolian-Skinner / Mueller instrument in a program largely devoted to transcriptions of works originally written for other musical media.

I caught up with the Curtis Institute and Rice University graduate on her cell phone during a busy week at her job at St. Paul’s, K Street that included a music gala and extra services for All Saints and All Souls Days. I led off with some questions about her Cleveland program.

Daniel Hathaway: You’ve put together a very entertaining program for Cleveland. It includes three of Brahms’ Opus 118 Sechs Stücke für Klavier, which are originally piano works. Organists who lament that the composer didn’t leave us more works for their instrument should be very interested to hear these pieces. [Read more…]

Akropolis Reed Quintet 
visits Tuesday Musical series

by

by Jarrett Hoffman

If the reed quintet were a person, it would be a millennial.

A variation on the wind quintet, with flute and horn jettisoned in favor of saxophone and bass clarinet — reed-brethren of oboe, clarinet, and bassoon — the instrumentation was born as recently as 1985, when five high schoolers in Amsterdam came together to form Calefax. The group gradually amassed a body of repertoire where there was none, and began to spread their musical seed.

One of the groups they inspired to spring up is the Detroit-based Akropolis Reed Quintet — oboist Tim Gocklin, clarinetist Kari Landry, saxophonist Matt Landry, bassoonist Ryan Reynolds, and bass clarinetist Andrew Koeppe — winners of the Gold Medal at the 2014 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, among several national prizes.

Now celebrating their 15th-anniversary season, Akropolis will visit Northeast Ohio next week for a recital on the Tuesday Musical series on November 7 at 7:30 pm at E.J. Thomas Hall.

Their program includes Marc Mellits’s Splinter, Willem Jeths’s Maktub, George Gershwin’s An American in Paris (arranged by none other than Calefax saxophonist Raaf Hekkema), and a recent commission of theirs: Omar Thomas’s Moods and Attitudes, a classical work fueled by the composer’s background in jazz, its movements visiting the genres of blues, ballad, and bebop. Tickets are available here.

[Read more…]

The Making of a World Premiere: Paul Desenne’s double flute concerto has its day in Oberlin

by

The performance will take place at 7:30 p.m. on November 1 in Finney Chapel and it will be streamed live.

Reposted with the permission of Oberlin Conservatory

by Cathy Partlow Strauss

“I’ve been trying to get this concerto to see the light of day for years,” says Oberlin flute professor Alexa Still about Paul Desenne’s Concerto for Two Flutes and Orchestra. The acclaimed cellist and composer started writing the piece in 2012, completing the commission in 2013. It has now been a 10-year-long route to the debut, and on Wednesday, November 1, Still’s championship of this piece will be realized in a performance with conductor Raphael Jiménez leading the Oberlin Orchestra, and with her student Dylan Masariego as co-soloist.

It’s a 30-minute, three-movement work scored for a relatively large orchestra, and it explores the notion of the meta-instrument—a compositional technique born from the idea of merging timbres into an autonomous entity that acts beyond the sum of its parts and produces an acoustic illusion in listening. The composer’s note describes, “This two-headed, versatile, and sometimes dizzying soloist undertakes a great musical journey through diverse panoramas imagined within a modern Latin American, Caribbean, and Venezuelan Baroque.”

Click here to read the rest of the article.

 

Published on ClevelandClassical.com November 1, 2023.   

Click here for a printable copy of this article

Return to the Front Page.

Dana Jessen receives Cleveland Arts Prize

by

by Mike Telin

Tonight, October 26, the Cleveland Arts Prize will hold its 63rd annual awards ceremony at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The CAP promotes creativity in Northeast Ohio by honoring artists for artistic excellence and recognizing community leaders who help arts flourish in the region.

Among the list of distinguished recipients is Dana Jessen, who will receive a mid-career artist prize for music. Jessen is a trailblazer in the world of new and improvised music. Hailed as a “bassoon virtuoso” (Chicago Reader), she is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a Huygens Fellowship. In addition to her active solo career, her resume includes world premiere performances with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Dal Niente, Anthony Braxton’s Tri-Centric Orchestra, S.E.M. Ensemble, and the Amsterdam Contemporary Ensemble. As an educator she serves as Associate Professor of Contemporary Music and Improvisation at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.

I caught up with Dana Jessen by phone and began our conversation by congratulating her.

Dana Jessen: Thank you. I am incredibly honored. I was telling somebody that it felt like the Cleveland Arts Prize was actually looking at all of the things that I do. It’s not just that I’m a bassoonist, but that I also write my own pieces, I play with electronics, and I improvise. I also interpret pieces that I’ve commissioned. And I teach. So it’s very humbling to be seen for the entirety of what I do as opposed to one thing or the other.

[Read more…]

Remembering Stephen Rubin

by

by Daniel Hathaway

It was with great sadness that we learned of the passing of Stephen Rubin on October 13.

Well-known as the successful publisher of a stream of best-selling books, Rubin was also deeply committed to the preservation and advancement of classical music journalism, and ClevelandClassical.com has been a direct recipient of his largesse.

Appalled by the gradual disappearance of critical writing from the pages of mainstream newspapers, he launched the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism at the Oberlin Conservatory in 2011 in cooperation with Dean David Stull.

The first Institute was held at Oberlin in January, 2012, when ten students (pictured below) wrote overnight reviews of Finney Chapel performances to be evaluated by a panel of leading critics.

[Read more…]

Andrew Sords plays Vivaldi with Snowbelt Symphony

by

by Mike Telin

It is easy to assume that a violin concerto by Antonio Vivaldi was written during his tenure at the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, however, that’s not always the case. In fact, the origins of a few of his concertos for the instrument have and continue to baffle musicologists. One example is the Violin Concerto in e, RV 278 which is not part of any collection published during the composer’s lifetime.

On Sunday October 22 at 4:00 pm at the New Promise Church in Kirtland, Andrew Sords will perform that concerto with the Snowbelt Symphony under the direction of Greg Hillis. The program, Brilliant Baroque, will also include music by J.S. Bach, Handel, and Boyce. Tickets are available online.

“Not a lot is known about the concerto,” Sords said during a telephone conversation. [Read more…]

CUSP to host Jaap Blonk

by

by Mike Telin

The self-taught Dutch composer, vocalist, poet, and visual artist Jaap Blonk will present a unique program on the Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project series at Convivium 33 Gallery on Friday, October 20 at 8pm.

I reached the sound poet by Skype at his home in Arnhem, Netherlands and began by asking him what the audience can expect to hear on Friday.

Jaap Blonk: I’ll do two sets. The first will be me interpreting some poetry from the history of Dada. And the second will be my own work for voice with some electronics. [Read more…]

Cleveland Chamber Choir: Considering Matthew Shepard

by

by Mike Telin

Statement from President Joe Biden on the 25th Anniversary of the Tragic Death of Matthew Shepard:

October 12, 2023

Twenty-five years ago today, Matthew Shepard lost his life to a brutal act of hate and violence that shocked our nation and the world. The week prior, Matthew had been viciously attacked in a horrific anti-gay hate crime and left to die – simply for being himself.

Matthew’s tragic and senseless murder shook the conscience of the American people. And his courageous parents, Judy and Dennis Shepard, turned Matthew’s memory into a movement, galvanizing millions of people to combat the scourge of anti-LGBTQI+ hate and violence in America.

On October 6, 1998 Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming, accepted a ride home from two men at the Fireside Lounge in Laramie. Instead, Shepard was driven to a remote area where he was pistol-whipped, tortured, tied to a fence, and left for dead. Shepard died six days later from brain damage.

Shepard’s murder would later become the inspiration for Craig Hella Johnson’s fusion oratorio Considering Matthew Shepard.

[Read more…]

Follow ClevelandClassical.com

Contact us