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BlueWater: chatting with violin soloists Ken Johnston and Emily Cornelius

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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

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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”

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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

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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” 

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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…]

Akron Symphony: Christopher Wilkins talks Mahler 5

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Programming a concert is like working out a puzzle. And if one of the pieces is Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, a better comparison might be a Rubik’s Cube.

“It’s challenging to program the Fifth Symphony because it’s 70 minutes, so that could be a full evening,” Akron Symphony music director Christopher Wilkins said during a phone call. “But I think most conductors are reluctant to just open the doors, let people get settled in their seats, and boom — have 70 minutes of music. It’s of course tough for latecomers. And the first and second movements are meant to be played without pause, so you don’t even get to relax until you’re a good twenty-plus minutes into the piece.”

How about starting with a short piece? That’s worse. Either the audience gets an oddly early intermission, or they have to sit still for maybe an hour and a half.

For the Akron Symphony’s concert this Saturday, January 18 at 8:00 pm at E.J. Thomas Hall, Wilkins has opted to precede Mahler’s Fifth with a pair of short pieces: Mozart’s Overture to The Marriage of Figaro and Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan and Isolde. In a way, all three works are about love — but more on that later.

[Read more…]

Early Music America: Ensembles Meld To Probe Affairs Of The Heart

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by Mike Telin

For centuries, people have wanted the things they cannot have, especially when it comes to love. In their current collaborative program, Lessons in Love, Debra Nagy of Cleveland-based Les Délices and Scott Metcalfe of Boston-based Blue Heron have created a musical and philosophical journey that focuses on the late Medieval attitude toward intimacy. The program draws from the narrative poem Roman da la Rose, in which the allegorical character Hope (Esperance) counsels a courtly lover through his amorous pains, guiding him down the path of turning his suffering into delight.

Lessons in Love features Martin Near (countertenor), Jason McStoots (tenor), Sumner Thompson (baritone), Metcalfe (vielle and harp), Nagy (medieval winds), and Mark Rimple (lute). Performances in Ohio will take place in Akron, Columbus, and Cleveland Jan. 16-19. The program will travel to Massachusetts for concerts in Cambridge and Norwell on Feb. 22 and 23.

Read the article on the website of Early Music America

Announcements

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Tuesday Musical invites college-age students pursuing careers as music performers and/or educators to apply online for its 2020 Scholarship Competition to be held in Akron on March 21. The deadline is February 1. Click here for information.

Cleveland’s Broadway School of Music and the Arts is hiring part-time teachers of violin, piano, woodwinds & drums for classes on weekdays between 2:00 and 8:00 pm and possibly on Saturdays. Click here to download application details.

Cleveland Chamber Symphony will be accepting scores from Northeast Ohio composers until midnight on January 17 to be considered for its April 7 NeoSonicFest concert at Baldwin Wallace. Click here for criteria and details.

Cleveland Chamber Music Society: Second Ehnes & Armstrong recital features Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata

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by Daniel Hathaway

Credit Opus 47 for inspiring the complete cycle of Beethoven’s violin sonatas that James Ehnes and Andrew Armstrong are touring this season to celebrate the composer’s 250th birthday.

As the Canadian-born violinist told us in a phone conversation last fall, he and his piano colleague once booked a studio in England to record a commissioned piece, but the work wasn’t ready yet. “The space, the recording engineer, and the producer were all on hold and we were faced with a whole day of dead time. What could we do to turn this into a useful day?”

Having performed Beethoven’s Ninth Sonata (the “Kreutzer”) quite frequently around that time, Ehnes proposed using that day to record it. “It’s never a bad idea to have a recording of the ‘Kreutzer,’ and we could figure out what to do with it later.”

What they did with it later was to record Beethoven’s Sixth Sonata and release the two sonatas on the same disc. “Some publications assumed that this was the start of a cycle,” Ehnes said, and that prediction came true when the violinist was looking for a way to mark the big anniversary of the composer’s birth in 2020. [Read more…]

Vinay Parameswaren to conduct 40th MLK Celebration at Severance Hall

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by Daniel Hathaway

The Cleveland Orchestra will celebrate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for the 40th consecutive year on Sunday, January 12 at 7:00 pm in Severance Hall. Assistant conductor Vinay Parameswaran will lead the Orchestra and the Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Chorus, William Henry Caldwell, director, in a program whose repertory departs slightly from past concerts.

“There won’t be a featured soloist this year,” Parameswaren said in a telephone conversation late last month. Instead, the majority of the program will feature African American composers.

“We’ll open with Adolphus Hailstork’s Fanfare on Amazing Grace, then move to a couple of pieces from Duke Ellington’s suite, The River, and on to the first movement of Florence Price’s First Symphony. Jahja Ling is going to conduct her Fourth Symphony in April, and I’m doing a movement from that piece with the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra during the Open House on January 20. It’s nice to get to celebrate a composer like Price, who wrote a ton of music and had premieres performed by the Chicago Symphony and other big orchestras, but who doesn’t make it onto concert programs very often these days.”

Duke Ellington’s music is a similar case. “I’ve conducted his Harlem and I’ve studied his Three Black Kings,” Parameswaran said. “Ellington doesn’t get as much recognition for his orchestral writing as he does for his jazz, but he certainly knew what he was doing. Again, it’s a rarity to find his music appearing on a classical program, but I’m glad it’s on this one.” [Read more…]

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