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Imani Winds embrace modernity in season opener for the Cleveland Chamber Music Society

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by Stephanie Manning

This season, even more than usual, Imani Winds is booked and busy. Rescheduled concerts from last year, combined with new additions to their schedule, promise a season full of travel and performances. “It’s a lot of making up for lost time,” bassoonist Monica Ellis said in a recent interview. “We’re just grateful that we’re able to be back and have live performances again, in one way or another.”

One performance relocated from 2020 is the Imani’s visit to the Cleveland Chamber Music Society on Tuesday, October 5 in CIM’s Mixon Hall. The 7:30 pm performance will be preceded by a 6:30 lecture by Chris Jenkins. Click here for tickets.

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Rocky River Chamber Music Society:
after 40 years, the Auryn did what they wished

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by Jarrett Hoffman

It bears explaining when headlines have announced the disbanding of a storied ensemble, their Wikipedia entry reads in the past tense, and yet the group appears on the calendar for an important upcoming occasion.

That event in this case is the opening of the Rocky River Chamber Music Society’s 63rd season on Monday, October 4 at 7:30 pm at Lakewood Congregational Church, with an audience both in-person (masks required) and remote, in both cases with free admission.

And that ensemble, performing in Cleveland for the first time, is the German-based Auryn Quartet — founded in 1981, winners of both the London International Competition and ARD Munich Competition a year later — who after four decades have not undergone a single change of personnel.

So, are the Auryn back from the dead? Not exactly. “Corona changed everything,” violist Stewart Eaton explained in a telephone conversation. “We had to delay the final implementation of the ending of the quartet.”

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Cleveland Classical Guitar Society: the Showcase Concert and into the fall

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by Jarrett Hoffman

As per tradition, the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society will kick off its 2021-22 series with the free Showcase Concert highlighting musicians from around the region. This year’s event, which you can attend in person at the Maltz Performing Arts Center on Saturday, September 18 at 7:30 pm, or via livestream, might aptly be described as a Cincinnati sandwich on Cleveland bread.

There will be three sets, with Cleveland-based musicians on either end. Guitar Society educator Andy Poxon will open the concert with Mauro Giuliani’s Grande Ouverture before moving to his own arrangement of Handel’s D-Major Violin Sonata, where he’ll be joined by violinist Jeanelle Brierley.

Occupying the middle portion of the program is guitarist and composer Jeremy Collins, representing his hometown and homebase of Cincinnati, though he also studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music as an undergraduate (Cleveland-bred in addition to the Cleveland bread). He’ll perform two of his own pieces, The Starry Night and Reverie, followed by José Luis Merlin’s Suite del Recuerdo.

At the finish, bringing an impressive variety of flavors to the table is the guitar-and-flute Gruca White Ensemble. They’ll open with three miniatures by Stephen Goss (part of his From Honey to Ashes) influenced by music from around the world. They’ll continue with Masamitsu Takahashi’s Homage to the Harvest Moon, in which they’ll imitate the Japanese traditional instruments shinobue and koto. And they’ll finish with two movements from Marshall Griffith’s Jazz Impressions of Cleveland.

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Les Délices’ SalonEra is back and better than ever for second season

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by Stephanie Manning

Last year, Cleveland’s period ensemble Les Délices dared to be different with their contribution to the world of online concerts: SalonEra. Billed as a “variety show for early music,” the web series’ unique format made it a hit among audience members, director Debra Nagy said in a recent interview.

“One thing we heard over and over again was, ‘regardless of the state of the pandemic, please continue SalonEra.’” The series’ second season, which premieres on September 13, aims to be even more ambitious and exciting than what came before it.

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Peter Takács announces reissue of complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas

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by Daniel Hathaway

Oberlin piano professor Peter Takács celebrated the completion of a huge project in 2011 when his recordings of the complete Beethoven Sonatas were issued on the Cambria label in a handsome boxed set (read our review here).

“It was a labor of love,” Takács said in a recent Zoom interview, “as well as a kind of global enterprise.” The elaborate project included eleven discs in SACD Surround Sound produced by Sony Austria, with some elements printed in Hong Kong and designs done in Los Angeles.

The original edition of 2,000 copies had sold out by 2016, which raised the question of a reissue. Happily — albeit mysteriously — more than 500 sets of the CDs were discovered sitting in a Cambria warehouse. That inspired a reissue with several alterations in design.

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Cavani Quartet to embark on eight-concert “Beyond Beethoven” cycle September 19

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by Daniel Hathaway

COVID-19 may have interrupted the celebration of Beethoven’s 250th Birthday in December 2020, but the Cavani String Quartet has made that event a moveable feast.

On Sunday, September 19, the ensemble will play the first of eight concerts featuring all sixteen of LvB’s quartets. The “Beyond Beethoven” performances, to take place in eight different venues, will match pairs of his quartets with contemporary works, culminating in a grand finale in Severance Hall on December 7.

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42nd Tri-C JazzFest Cleveland: live, in-person, outdoors

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Last year, viewers had to stay home while they took in the talents of Tri-C JazzFest Cleveland in a virtual, largely pre-recorded format.

This time around, for its 42nd annual edition, the festival will be back to live and in-person — and completely outdoors — when it returns Saturday and Sunday, September 11-12 at Cain Park in Cleveland Heights.

Ten acts representing both the roots of jazz and its forward-thinkers, and both young talent and veterans of the genre, will perform over two days in the covered Evans Amphitheater.

And there’s plenty going on in addition to the mainstage lineup. The Colonnade Stage will provide the setting for a series of student performances, the Jazz Talk Tent will feature artist interviews and discussions, and the free Kids Club will be held in the playground area on Saturday, offering live music, dancing, balloons, and music-related crafts. (See the festival’s full schedule here, and purchase Day Passes here.)

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Conductor Richard Kaufman returns to Blossom for two evenings of film music

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by Stephanie Manning

To Richard Kaufman, returning to Blossom this weekend to lead The Cleveland Orchestra in music by John Williams “is like winning the concert lottery.” The combination of a world-class orchestra, a beautiful venue, and fantastic music fills the conductor with enthusiasm for the two performances on September 4 and 5 at 7:00 pm.

“There’s something about doing a concert during the summer, especially at a place like Blossom, where everybody is just in a great mood,” Kaufman said during a recent phone interview. The program, “Salute to John Williams,” will feature that composer’s music from beloved films like Superman, Harry Potter, and Star Wars. Tickets are available online — fireworks will follow both performances.

“You know, the difficult part about putting together a John Williams concert is what not to do, because there are so many fantastic choices of music that audiences love,” Kaufman said. “So you put together the program knowing that you can’t play everything.” Nevertheless, he’s confident that there’s something for everyone, from the “Flight to Neverland” from Hook to the “Flying Theme” from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

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Cleveland Chamber Collective and Inlet Dance Theater at Cain Park 

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by Mike Telin

In her article Four Qualities of Classic Literature, MJ Booklover says that

A great writer has something specific to say, or perhaps, more typically, a big question to ask about the nature of the world as it was in the times of that writer. But a great work also observes truths about the human condition as it occurs in any age. 

Perhaps no writer has captured the timeless truths of the human condition more profoundly than William Shakespeare, and nowhere as persuasively as in The Tempest, the inspiration for Ty Alan Emerson’s new ballet, Caliban Ascendant.

“This project started about eight years ago when I was working with a friend of mine, Josh Legg,” Emerson (pictured below) said during a telephone conversation. “He’s a choreographer and a wonderful person. We wanted to collaborate on a project so we started talking about what we’d like to do. I had seen many productions of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. I saw one at Bowling Green that was really fun — they actually put a gamelan onstage and Caliban was played by a two-person puppet. So I thought, ‘I’d like to dig into that.’”

On Sunday, August 29 at 8:00 pm at Cain Park Amphitheater, the Cleveland Chamber Music Collective in partnership with Inlet Dance Theatre will present the world premiere of Caliban Ascendant. The ballet is based on a story developed by Joshua Legg and Ty Alan Emerson and features music by Emerson and choreography by Bill Wade in collaboration with Dominic Moore-Dunson, Kevin Parker, Emily Stonecipher, and Katie Wilber. [Read more…]

Jonathan Biss to perform
Caroline Shaw’s Watermark
with The Cleveland Orchestra 

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by Mike Telin

When pianist Jonathan Biss pitched the concept for his Beethoven/5 project to the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, he was certain the idea of commissioning five composers to write new concertos, each inspired by one of Beethoven’s, would be seen as too daunting. Much to his surprise, the SPCO ran with the idea. Even more of a surprise was the number of orchestras who signed on to the project as co-commissioners.

In November of 2017 Biss gave The Cleveland Orchestra premiere of Salvatore Sciarrino’s Piano Concerto: Il sogno di Stradella, (Beethoven No. 4). He’ll follow that up on Saturday, August 28 at 7:00 pm at Blossom Music Center with Caroline Shaw’s Watermark (Beethoven No. 3).

“Being with The Cleveland Orchestra is always special for me,” Biss said during a recent telephone conversation. “And given that I played the Sciarrino in Cleveland, I need to talk about how different the two pieces are and how unbelievably different the composers’ approaches to the project were.”

Biss noted that the connection between the Sciarrino and the fourth concerto is so oblique that he had to “go hunting for it.” But with Watermark, Caroline Shaw clearly uses the third concerto as its starting point.

“Caroline said something that I found very interesting. She said that she was trying to ‘write the writing process of Beethoven,’ which I think was her way of saying that she’s imagining how Beethoven might have found his way toward many of the ideas that ended up being central to the third concerto. I think it’s interesting because although I’ve spent my whole life immersed in great music, I don’t think I understand all that much about how the creative process works — how a composer gets from a blank page to a fully realized piece of music. So I find it incredibly fascinating to hear someone like Caroline, whose life’s work is being a composer, engage with the question of how someone else conceives of a piece of music.”

[Read more…]

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