by Daniel Hathaway
When Chanticleer sings a concert on the Tuesday Musical series at E.J. Thomas Hall in Akron on July 27, it won’t just be business as usual for the twelve male singers of San Francisco’s “orchestra of voices.”
The ensemble, which normally spends much of the year on the road, has been becalmed by the pandemic for more than a year. Akron will be the next-to-last stop on its current, eight-concert tour, the first since the shutdown.
“We’ve had to reinvent everything for each venue,” Music Director Tim Keeler said in a telephone call from Chicago. “We’re grateful to each presenter for helping us figure everything out. There’s no rulebook for how to sing choral music at the end of a pandemic.”
It’s fascinating how many people can recall the event that planted a career bug inside of them. For Rafael Payare, that event occurred while on tour in Italy as a member of the horn section of the National Children’s Orchestra of Venezuela. “This Italian maestro, Giuseppe Sinopoli, came. He spoke no Spanish and communicated only with his energy,” Payare recalled during a recent telephone conversation. “But he changed the sound of the orchestra in the first minute of rehearsal and that really impressed me. I thought, wow, when I am old and my hair is all white, I would love to be a conductor. So that is how the conducting bug got into me.”
“They are iconic,” Capathia Jenkins says of the pop and jazz standards that make up the 
“The first thing I do is find music that I love, that I’m emotionally connected to, and that I believe the listener will enjoy,” flutist Demarre McGill said by telephone last week, explaining how he put together his upcoming program for the Kent Blossom Music Festival.
Almost a decade after violinist Paul Huang and pianist Helen Huang first performed together, their collaborative spirit is still going strong. The two acclaimed artists are eager to perform as a duo again this year, starting with their upcoming appearance as Kulas Visiting Artists on the Kent Blossom Music Festival’s Faculty Concert Series.
Provided that everything clicks in today’s complicated puzzle of international travel, British conductor Dame Jane Glover will make her Blossom debut with The Cleveland Orchestra in an all-Mozart program on Sunday evening, July 11. And if no visa or transportation difficulties intervene for him as well, she’ll be joined by British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor in the composer’s d-minor concerto. The evening will begin with the K. 136 Divertimento for strings, and conclude with Symphony No. 40 [see update below].
Now that in-person concerts are becoming the rule rather than the exception, Apollo’s Fire is scheduling three local performances of “Bach, Vivaldi, and Friends!” from July 10-14, and taking shows on the road to four summer festivals: Tanglewood, Chautauqua, Caramoor, and Ravinia.
When programming concerts like her July 9th performance for ENCORE, guitarist Jiji Kim aims to show the evolution of music while also highlighting the throughlines that connect music across the ages. She tends to start her performances with Baroque material, then moves through the 1800s to the modern era and her own compositions, demonstrating “how music has changed, transitioned throughout the centuries — but also has the same feeling of connection, or emotional relevance.”