by Jarrett Hoffman
It was disappointing in January when The Cleveland Orchestra’s Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Concert had to be postponed due to a surge in COVID. But there’s good news, and it’s two-fold.
First, time has passed, and the rescheduled date is not far away: early next month. Second, the concert’s companion program, “Honoring Black Composers,” has found a new setting of its own, or rather three new settings. A very good thing, because the first date, an hour-long program on May 24 at Karamu House, has already sold out.
That still leaves you with two options. On Friday, May 27 at 6:30 pm and Saturday, May 28 at 7:00 pm, the program will move to Reinberger Chamber Hall at Severance, albeit in a slightly different form: a half-hour concert of music by Brian R. Nabors, Dolores White, George Walker, Melika Fitzhugh, H. Leslie Adams, and William Grant Still.
Have you ever walked into a Cathedral and heard music coming from some place and you needed to find out where? While your ear told you to proceed down the left side of the building, as you got closer you discovered that the sound was actually originating from the other side of the space.
“I’ve always thought of the guitar as a universal instrument,” William Kanengiser said during a recent interview. “Every musical culture has some relative of the guitar, so it’s well-suited for evoking those different cultures.”
Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra, Apollo’s Fire, will celebrate its 30th anniversary this weekend with three concerts: one in the 1930s splendor of Mandel Hall at Severance Music Center on Saturday, May 7 at 7:30 pm, flanked by programs in Akron and Bay Village on Friday and Sunday.
Flutist Jessica Sindell has the distinction of being one of the few members of The Cleveland Orchestra who are native Clevelanders. A graduate of Western Reserve Academy, she was a member of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra from 2005 to 2007. Since 2018 Sindell has served as the Orchestra’s assistant principal flute, a position she calls “her dream job.”
When Moonhee Kim’s violin teacher said he wanted her to learn the Prokofiev Violin Concerto, she was hoping he would say the second one. Of the composer’s two concerti for the instrument, No. 2 is more commonly performed, and it was the one Kim was most familiar with. But Concerto No. 1 was what he had in mind — and as it turns out, that was the perfect choice.
Concluding this season’s Family Concert Series, The Cleveland Orchestra will use both theater and music to shine a spotlight on the singular figure of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges — composer, violinist, conductor, fencer, colonel, and abolitionist.
May 4, 2020 marked the 50th anniversary of the tragic shooting of Kent State students by Ohio National Guard members during protests around the Vietnam War, but COVID-19 upstaged KSU’s plans for a memorial.
“Music is something that throughout time has developed different flavors around the world,” violinist Edwin Huizinga said during a Sunday morning telephone conversation.