by Daniel Hathaway
Nine decades ago when it was still a college, the grand plan for Baldwin Wallace University’s annual Bach Festival was based on a repeating cycle of four of the Leipzig cantor’s major vocal works, giving students the opportunity to sing and play the two Passions, the B-minor Mass, and the Christmas Oratorio during their undergraduate days in Berea.
Back on track after a two-year online exile, the 2022 Festival, enhanced by a $100,000 gift from the Kulas Foundation, will comprise 15 in-person events, including a performance of four of the six cantatas that make up Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.
The weekend will also continue the 50th anniversary celebration of the founding of BW’s Riemenschneider Bach Institute, named for scholar and festival founder Albert Riemenschneider, a party that was interrupted by the pandemic in 2020.
Part of the Kulas funding will support the appearances of two period ensembles now based in Boston that were formed largely by students who met at Oberlin and at the Juilliard School. [Read more…]
As the ongoing climate crisis continues to grow in severity, artists across all disciplines have turned to their work to bring about a call to action for members of society to do better — or perhaps, to remind them that this issue isn’t going to just go away. Brooklyn-based Unheard-of//Ensemble’s artistry takes this idea to a new level, inviting their audiences to fully engage with the music, space, and of course, nature that surrounds them during the evening.
Although Paraguayan guitarist Berta Rojas was set to make her Cleveland debut on March 14, 2020, the coronavirus had other plans.
For centuries the fairy tale of Puss in Boots, the wily cat who stops at nothing to gain power and wealth for his penniless master, has been a source of inspiration for composers and choreographers.
Examining the mailing lists of an arts organization can reveal a lot. First and foremost that list tells you who is attending the events. And when comparing the mailing lists of two like-minded organizations, for example ones devoted to chamber music, one would expect to find more than a fair amount of overlap.
Contrapunctus Early Music, a vocal project launched in Cleveland by British countertenor David Acres, has been absent from the local musical scene for four years now.
It’s difficult to believe that it was in April of 2014 that the inimitable British pianist Imogen Cooper last appeared with The Cleveland Orchestra. Interestingly, it was Dame Jane Glover who was on the podium for that engagement. 
Inna Faliks has always found it natural to mix and match the arts.
Although it is often said that you cannot put new wine in old bottles — or wineskins, on Friday, March 25 at 7:30 pm in Kulas Music Hall at Baldwin Wallace University, the 
A mainstay of the opera repertoire, The Marriage of Figaro is the first of Mozart’s collaborations with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. The plot is filled with mistaken identity, surprise paternity, and intrigue, as the servants Figaro and Susanna triumph in marriage while comically thwarting the attempts of the philandering Count Almaviva to seduce Susanna.