ClevelandClassical.com Header
Ad
Ad

Pre•Views

Urban Troubadour: Akros Percussion and the peculiar mind of Stockhausen

by

by Jarrett Hoffman

Akros Percussion Collective will bring what must be one of the most bizarre works in classical music to Weathervane Playhouse in Akron on Sunday, February 9.

The piece is Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 1975 sextet Musik im Bauch (“Music in the Belly”), which requires the performers to move about the stage like automatons, strike a seven-foot doll — his name is Miron, and he has a bird’s head and a human body — and eventually open up the doll’s belly with giant scissors. No guts inside: instead, music boxes, whose melodies have been informing the complex music all along.

It’s part of a presentation by Urban Troubadour, an organization that fittingly aims to put on non-traditional concert experiences.

[Read more…]

CIM hosts Music For Food at First Baptist February 18

by

by Daniel Hathaway

One of the iterations of Music for Food, a musician-led initiative to fight hunger in local communities, is an annual concert to benefit the Greater Cleveland Food Bank. This year’s event will take place at First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights on Tuesday, February 18 at 8:00 pm. Sponsored by the Student Government Association of the Cleveland Institute of Music, the performance will bring CIM faculty and students together for music by Camille Saint-Saëns, Charles Gounod, and Felix Mendelssohn.

Faculty musicians include Jeanelle Brierley, Olga Dubossarskaya Kaler, and Jaime Laredo, violins, Sharon Robinson, cello, Mary Kay Fink, flute, Frank Rosenwein, oboe, Afendi Yusuf, clarinet, Barrick Stees, bassoon, and Richard King, horn. [Read more…]

Welcoming the Apollon Musagète Quartet to the Cleveland Chamber Music Society

by

by Daniel Hathaway

Founded in Vienna in 2006 by four young Polish musicians, the Apollon Musagète Quartet will visit the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights on Tuesday, February 4 at 7:30 pm.

Violinists Paweł Zalejski and Bartosz Zachłod, violist Piotr Szumieł, and cellist Piotr Skweres, now on a multi-city tour of North America, will bookend their program with Haydn’s Quartet in D, Op. 64, No. 5, “Lark,” and Dvořák’s Quartet in A-flat, Op. 105. Following their custom of featuring at least one work by a Polish composer on each of their concerts, the Quartet will center their program with Krzysztof Penderecki’s Quartet No. 3, “Leaves from an unwritten diary.”

Written only two years after Apollon Musagète was formed — and named after Apollo ‘The Inspirer of the Muses’ — Penderecki’s third quartet marked the composer’s first foray into chamber music in four decades. As Peter Lakí writes in his program notes for the February 4 concert, “Penderecki rarely gives his works programmatic subtitles. The fact that he chose to do so in this case shows that this quartet meant something special to him.” [Read more…]

St. Olaf Choir to sing in Severance Hall as part of its 100th East Coast Tour

by

by Daniel Hathaway

Founded in 1912 in Northfield, Minnesota by F. Melius Christiansen, the St. Olaf Choir began its tradition of East Coast Tours in 1920. Its inaugural itinerary included a concert in Cleveland that inspired Plain Dealer critic James Rogers to write on May 4 of that year, “If there is such a thing as a virtuoso chorus, we have it here.”

On Monday, February 3 at 7:30 pm, Anton Armstrong will lead the 75-voice ensemble in a concert at Severance Hall, a venue which was still in the planning stages in 1920. The performance is the sixth stop on the Choir’s 100th winter tour, which will take the singers to thirteen cities in fourteen days.

“This will be my fourth or fifth appearance with the Choir at Severance, and I love that hall,” Armstrong said in a recent telephone conversation from Northfield. “After our tours I always ask the singers which spaces were best and easiest to sing in, and for the last two tours Severance has eclipsed all the others. I’m a New Yorker, and when I step onstage at Carnegie Hall, I close my eyes and imagine Leontyne Price, or Ella Fitzgerald, or The Beatles. In Cleveland, I’m delighted to add our weave to a great tapestry that includes George Szell and Robert Shaw.” [Read more…]

Moon in the Mirror comes to Cleveland State

by

by Mike Telin

The moon has inspired creativity from the beginning of time. In popular music, this object that orbits the earth has served as fodder for Fly Me to the Moon, made famous by Frank Sinatra, and Pink Floyd’s 1973 album The Dark Side Of The Moon. Classical music references include Arnold Schoenberg’s groundbreaking composition Pierrot lunaire.

On Friday, January 31 at 7:30 pm in Waetjen Auditorium, the Cleveland Contemporary Players Series in collaboration with the Confucius Institute at Cleveland State University will present Moon in the Mirror, with mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn and pianist Shuai Wang. Produced by Andrew Rindfleisch, the 40-minute operatic monodrama features music by Stephen Dembski, a libretto by Zhang Er and Martine Bellen, stage direction by Christine McBurney, and projection design by Kasumi. The free performance will also include Chen Yi’s Northern Scenes for solo piano.

Moon in the Mirror received a concert version performance by Hai-Ting Chinn and pianist Vicky Chow in October of 2015, and since that time, the creative team has been searching for funding and collaborators to fully stage the 40-minute work. [Read more…]

BlueWater: chatting with violin soloists Ken Johnston and Emily Cornelius

by

by Jarrett Hoffman

Two founding members of BlueWater Chamber Orchestra will partner as soloists this weekend, when conductor Daniel Meyer and the ensemble perform “A Classical Feast” at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights on Saturday, February 1 at 7:30 pm.

Concertmaster Ken Johnston and principal second violin Emily Cornelius will play the Op. 13 Symphonie Concertante in G by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, who is remembered as the first known classical composer of African origin. One of his contemporaries was Mozart, whose Symphony No. 40 in g closes Saturday’s program. And in between those two works, soprano Laura Pedersen will be featured in Beethoven’s concert aria Ah, Perfido! Tickets are available online.

Johnston and Cornelius have known each other for at least ten years — BlueWater celebrates its own decade in 2020 — but this will be their first time appearing together as soloists. “At this point, she and I are old friends,” Johnston said by telephone last week. “I have a tremendous amount of respect for her musicianship. I think we share the same sense of humor in a lot of ways, and that comes across.”

[Read more…]

Oberlin Winter Term Opera to premiere The Wild Beast of the Bungalow

by

by Mike Telin

Complicated relationships between children and their parents have often served as inspiration for opera. Most people know the disaster that awaits Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel after they misbehave and their mother sends them to the haunted forest to look for strawberries. In Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges, after being scolded by his mother, a young boy destroys everything in the room — later the objects come to life and show him the error of his ways.

A new addition to opera with a child/parent theme is Rachel J. Peters’ The Wild Beast of the Bungalow with libretto by Royce Vavrek. The work, presented by Oberlin’s Winter Term Opera and directed by Christopher Mirto, will receive its world premiere on Wednesday, January 29 in Warner Concert Hall. Additional performances run from Friday, January 31 through Sunday, February 2. All begin at 7:30 pm and will be followed by a talkback with members of the artistic staff, performers, and the creative team. The event is free, but reservations are required. The Wild Beast of the Bungalow is the inaugural work of the Oberlin Opera Commissioning Project.

With a duration of 90 minutes and a cast of one coloratura soprano with eight additional principals playing multiple roles, the opera is played out in three sections. The plot unfolds in the bedroom of a nameless eleven-year-old Girl, where, over the course of a few days, a mermaid, a family of stuffed prairie dogs, and singing groups of chickenpox and shingles force her to come to terms with what it means to care for others and to allow others to care for you. [Read more…]

CMA: “Journey to the Heart of the Iraqi Maqam”

by

by Jarrett Hoffman

Amir ElSaffar has had the type of musical career that you can imagine laid out as a board game: a winding path with important points along the way where he’s taken on new instruments, absorbed new genres, and crossed the globe to research musical practices more deeply.

He began as a classical trumpeter growing up in Chicago, the son of an Iraqi immigrant father and an American mother. And he has since found his way to jazz, Arabic music, composition, and Iraqi maqam, a centuries-old tradition of highly structured, semi-improvised compositions sung to Classical Arabic and colloquial Iraqi poetry.

The foremost purveyor of that tradition is Hamid Al-Saadi, who will join ElSaffar and the group Safaafir for “Journey to the Heart of the Iraqi Maqam” in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Wednesday, January 29 at 7:30 pm as part of the Museum’s Performing Arts Series. Tickets are available online.

[Read more…]

fp Creative: a conversation with trumpeter Theresa May

by

by Jarrett Hoffman

Brass chamber music and world premieres make up the latest program from fp Creative. “Classic, New, Borrowed & Blue” takes place at Snap House Studios on Thursday, January 23 beginning at 7:45 pm (doors open at 7). Admission is $0-$15 upon entrance.

The mind behind the curation of the concert is trumpeter Theresa May, a native of Shaker Heights who performs with such groups as Mourning [A] BLKstar, Gabriel’s Horns, the Cleveland Brassworks, and the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra.

The program she’s produced for fp Creative includes new works by Ahmed Alabaca and Buck McDaniel, as well as music by Regina Harris Baiocchi and Richard Peaslee.

[Read more…]

No Exit and Zeitgeist present “Here and There 2020” 

by

by Mike Telin 

Composers have always turned to works of art, literature, folklore, and music by other composers as sources of inspiration. This week, St. Paul-based Zeitgeist and Cleveland-based No Exit will present “Here and There 2020” featuring music inspired by the art of Auguste Rodin and Paul Klee, the myth of Cupid and Psyche, a poem by Nicolás Guillén, the music of Steve Reich and Andrew Rindfleisch, as well as by stories of a young woman who was buried alive, and of a haunted hotel. The free concerts take place at Kent State on Thursday, January 16 at 7:30 pm, the Bop Stop on Friday, January 17 at 8:00 pm, and Heights Arts on Saturday, January 18 at 7:00 pm.

This week’s concerts also mark the continuation of a collaboration that began over a decade and a half ago — before Tim Beyer had even thought about starting his own ensemble. “I first met Zeitgeist when they came to Cleveland State when I was a student,” Beyer said during a recent telephone call. “Every summer they hold a workshop for composers they want to work with, and about ten or eleven years ago they chose me.”

[Read more…]

Follow ClevelandClassical.com

Contact us