by Daniel Hathaway
The new music ensemble No Exit continues its longstanding collaboration with Zeitgeist, their counterparts from Minnesota’s Twin Cities, with “New Sound Worlds,” a free online concert that debuts on Friday, May 21 at 7:00 pm.
No Exit founder and artistic director Timothy Beyer said in a recent phone conversation that the mostly solo works on the program “get outside the traditional mold and deal with sound more than formal structure. They’re immersive, but cerebral, and they also force more active listening.”
The exception is Frederic Rzewski’s Down by the Riverside, the piano work that Nicholas Underhill will play at the beginning of the program. “He presents the tune in kind of a literal way, then he goes nuts,” Beyer said. [Read more…]
From the time he moved to Northeast Ohio to attend the Cleveland Institute of Music, 
Since its debut season in 2012, ChamberFest Cleveland has been guided by a single idea — to create a family of musicians and audiences who come together to share their love of chamber music. And like so many families who were separated due to the pandemic, so was the ChamberFest family. 
Lately, wind players have only been sighted here and there on the calendar, and have mostly performed all on their lonesome. That makes the finale to the Rocky River Chamber Music Society’s 62nd season an extra special occasion for anyone with a fondness for music of the lungs.
Blissfully unaware of what was to come, on September 10, 2019, I wrote:
When you hear the word madrigal, for many what first comes to mind are those dinners where the performers and guests dress in Renaissance costumes. While those events continue to flourish, especially during the Yuletide season, on Saturday, May 15 at 7:30 pm the Cleveland Chamber Choir will remind us that the writing of these part-songs has never stopped.
When you think of famous, old-school musicians, a certain invincibility comes to mind, but also a distance. So it’s refreshing when today’s virtuosos not only match or exceed the abilities of their predecessors, but also reveal without any hint of pretense that they’re human.
When The Cleveland Orchestra released the initial information about its forthcoming, in-person summer season at Blossom, only the conductors and main works on the eleven concerts were listed. Now, the all-important side dishes for the Orchestra’s al fresco musical picnic have been added to the menu.
Having made its debut earlier this season with a program of jazz arrangements by Dave Morgan featuring vocalist Helen Welch, Youngstown State University’s modular Dana Ensemble will turn to a different type of arrangements for its second outing at the Ford Family Theater at the DeYor Center on Sunday, May 2 at 3:00 pm.