by Daniel Hathaway
On Tuesday, October 18, London’s Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble will return to the Cleveland Chamber Music Series at Plymouth Church in Shaker Square to play works by Purcell, Brahms, and Enesco.
Not many musical groups are so closely associated in spirit and substance with a building as is the Academy of St. Martin with the grand parish church built to the plans of architect James Gibbs in 1720.
Only the second church to occupy its central London site on Trafalgar Square, St. Martin’s, inspired by Greek and Roman temples, established a style that was widely applied to ecclesiastical buildings during the restoration of the City churches after the Great Fire of 1666 by such architects as Christopher Wren. And made its mark on American Protestant church buildings like Plymouth UCC in Shaker Heights (below).
St. Martin’s has shared its real estate with the monument to Admiral Horatio Nelson after the Battle of Trafalgar in 1808, with the National Gallery of Art, completed in 1838, and until their eviction at the turn of the 21st century, with a flock of 35,000 feral pigeons, not to mention protesters demonstrating en masse for multiple causes (like the 100,000 Pakistanis who poured into Trafalgar Square one Sunday in the 1970s when I decided to visit St. Martin’s for the first time).
Determined to serve as a cultural center as well as an organization dedicated to religious, societal, and justice issues, St. Martin’s became a thoroughly modern Anglican organization in the mid-20th century. As its website notes, “ From London’s first free lending library to the first religious broadcast, St. Martin’s has broken new ground in defining what it means to be a church.” [Read more…]
Since joining The Cleveland Orchestra as principal cello in 2010, Mark Kosower has thrilled audiences with his performances of concertos by Ginastera, Haydn, Dvořák, Barber, and Tchaikovsky.
Tonight at 7:30 pm at Severance Music Center, Carlos Kalmar will lead the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra in an eclectic program featuring
We all know that the pandemic forced many performing arts organizations to put their plans on hold. Case in point, the collaboration between BlueWater Chamber Orchestra and the Cleveland Chamber Choir that was scheduled for May of 2020. 
For nearly 150 years, Oberlin College and Conservatory’s Artist Recital Series has been a centerpiece in the musical offerings of Northeast Ohio. Now, after a two-year absence, the series returns with a noon performance in Finney Chapel on Tuesday, October 4 featuring musical trailblazer Rhiannon Giddens. The Grammy Award winner, MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, and Oberlin alum will be joined by multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi. Click 
It’s no secret that many young people have had their professional careers sidelined because of the pandemic. Take, for example, the Balourdet String Quartet, which was formed as a student ensemble at Rice University in 2018.
There is no one path that a person follows to become a conductor. Raffaele Ponti’s early musical training came via the piano, violin, and later trumpet. That instrument led Ponti to the Cleveland Institute of Music where he was a student of Bernard Adelstein, the legendary principal of The Cleveland Orchestra — Ponti was also fortunate enough to play with that orchestra on numerous occasions. After graduating from CIM, he went to Italy to study conducting first in Siena, and later in Rome with Giuseppe Sinopoli.
It was around 8:20 pm on October 10, 2001. I was sitting in Baldwin Auditorium at Duke University listening to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat, K. 271, Le Jeunehomme. My teacher of six years, Olga Radosavljevich, known as “Ms. Olga,” was performing with the Duke Symphony Orchestra led by her longtime friend, conductor Harry Davidson. As a Cleveland Institute of Music Artist Diploma candidate, I understudied the piece and traveled to Durham, NC with Ms. Olga. She was having health issues that fall and was not sure if she could perform.
When you’ve been booking visiting chamber ensembles for seven decades, you develop some special relationships that regularly bring audience favorites back to town.
In March of 2010, we interviewed each of the musicians prior to their performance of Schubert trios on the CCMS series at Fairmount Temple Auditorium. We reached David Finckel in Vienna, Wu Han in New York between rehearsals, and spoke with Philip Setzer soon after he returned from Europe.