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Akron Symphony:
“Symphonic Shakespeare”

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Akron Symphony music director Christopher Wilkins has long had an interest in theater. “I’ve kept my eye out for theater-related projects for years and years and years,” he said during an interview.

One of those projects was Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream interleaved with a significant chunk of Shakespeare’s play, a production ClevelandClassical.com reviewed in 2014. “I’ve also done The Tempest with the complete incidental music by Sibelius,” Wilkins said. “But these next two pieces are knockouts.”

Those would be Shostakovich’s Hamlet Film Suite and William Walton’s Henry V: A Shakespeare Scenario, which make up two-thirds of “Symphonic Shakespeare,” the Orchestra’s program this Saturday, October 19 at 8:00 pm at E.J. Thomas Hall.

[Read more…]

Augustin Hadelich makes
Severance Hall debut

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by Mike Telin

Violinist Augustin Hadelich is no stranger to The Cleveland Orchestra. In July of 2014 he wowed audiences with his performance of the Sibelius Concerto at Blossom Music Center. His August 2017 interpretation of the Dvořák Concerto was a highlight of the Blossom season.

On Thursday, October 17 at 7:30 pm, Hadelich will make his Severance Hall debut with Prokofiev’s Concerto No. 2. The concert, under the direction of the young Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä, making his Severance debut as well, will also include Messiaen’s Les Offrande oubliées and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. The program will be repeated on Friday, October 18 and Saturday, October 19 at 8:00 pm. Tickets are available online.

Hadelich has always been enjoyable to talk to. But when his performance and travel schedule, along with time zone differences, made a telephone interview impossible, he suggested that I send a few questions by email.

Mike Telin: Please tell me your thoughts on the Prokofiev Concerto.

Augustin Hadelich: It is one of the most exciting and beloved violin works of the 20th century. Prokofiev was a storyteller, and this piece contains just about every character, from the lyrical and pastoral to the manic. [Read more…]

Cleveland Museum of Art:
Fretwork and Michelangelo

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Fretwork, the famous England-based viol consort, will return to Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art next week for a program inspired by the Museum’s current exhibit “Michelangelo: Mind of the Master.”

On Wednesday, October 23 at 7:30 pm, Fretwork will play “Music from the Age of Michelangelo,” a program based on musical developments that occurred during that artist’s life. One was the emergence of the violas da gamba, and the trend of homogeneous ensembles.

Another was a book of music published in 1501 by Ottaviano Petrucci that represented a major technological breakthrough in the field of printing. The Harmonice Musices Odhecaton (“One Hundred Harmonic Pieces of Music”) was the first music book to be printed using movable type, and contained works for three to six parts — mostly vocal pieces, but without text — by major composers of the time.

[Read more…]

Dark Horse Consort joins Apollo’s Fire to explore “Echoes of Venice” 

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by Daniel Hathaway

Turning away at the beginning of the 17th century from the Flemish polyphonic tradition — which had long reigned in the private chapel of the Doges in Venice — San Marco organist Giovanni Gabrieli took advantage of the church’s multiple choir lofts to invent a new polychoral style that allowed for complex spatial effects, including echoes.

Probably more than a few audience members attending Apollo’s Fire’s “Echoes of Venice” performances this week were first introduced to Gabrieli’s opulent music through a famous old recording by organist E. Power Biggs, the Gregg Smith Singers, the Texas Boys Choir, and the Edward Tarr Brass Ensemble — who performed on modern trumpets and trombones.

In four concerts this week, Apollo’s Fire and Apollo’s Singers will join the Dark Horse Consort, a Boston-based ensemble comprising period strings, cornetti, and sackbuts, to recreate the sounds that might actually have bounced back and forth under the seven domes of St. Mark’s in 1615. That was the year Gabrieli published his 14-part motet for three choirs, In Ecclesiis. [Read more…]

CityMusic Cleveland:
a conversation with the
new music director, Amit Peled

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by Jarrett Hoffman 

All it took was one visit.

“Last time I was in Cleveland, what was really special for me was the deep connection I had with the orchestra right away,” cellist and conductor Amit Peled said during a telephone interview.

On that trip this past May, he joined CityMusic Cleveland as soloist in Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto No. 1, and the relationship he felt wasn’t that of soloist and accompanists. “It was really music-making in an equal way,” he said. “That’s what I liked about the orchestra from the time we spent together, and that’s what I want to preserve. I think we both felt a connection, and that’s why it resulted in this relationship.”

In July, it was announced that Peled would be the next music director of CityMusic, while his predecessor Avner Dorman has stepped into the role of music director emeritus. Peled will begin his first season — the ensemble’s 16th — by leading the orchestra in free performances October 17-20 in Beachwood, Willoughby Hills, Slavic Village, and Lakewood (details below).

[Read more…]

Kirill Gerstein to give Cleveland premiere of Thomas Adès Piano Concerto

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by Mike Telin 

A new piano concerto is always an occasion, but the premiere of Thomas Adès’ Concerto, performed by pianist Kirill Gerstein and the Boston Symphony under the direction of the composer, has caused critics and audiences to sit up and take note. Following the New York premiere of the work, Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times wrote that the Concerto was

written for Gerstein, who exhilaratingly dispatched this joyous and audacious piece’s formidable solo part… This breathless, 20-minute concerto, structured in three essentially traditional movements (fast, slow, fast), comes across as zesty and accessible. But don’t be fooled. Just below the surface, the music sizzles with modernist harmonies, fractured phrases, gaggles of counterpoint and lyrical strands that keep breaking into skittish bits. The finale is a riotous, clattering, assaultive romp. I can’t wait to hear it again.

This weekend Kirill Gerstein will play the Cleveland premiere of Adès’ Piano Concerto with The Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of Alan Gilbert. The program also includes J.S. Bach’s Suite No. 3 and Brahms’ Symphony No. 3. The Severance Hall concerts take place on Friday, October 11 at 11:00 am (no Bach) and 8:00 pm, and Saturday, October 12 at 8:00 pm. Tickets are available here.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Composers Guild kicks off 60th anniversary on Sunday

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by Mike Telin

If you’ve ever been asked to define new music, you’ve probably found yourself over-thinking the question. As the Minneapolis-based ensemble Zeitgeist explains it on their website, “In the end, new music is simply that: newly created music written by living composers.”

On Sunday, October 13 at 3:00 pm in Drinko Hall at Cleveland State University, the Cleveland Composers Guild will kick off its 60th anniversary season with a program that celebrates the membership’s diversity of musical styles. The free concert will feature works by Sebastian Birch, Margaret Brouwer, Margi Griebling-Haigh, Scott Michal, Ryan Charles Ramer, Robert Rollin, Matthew C. Saunders, and James Wilding.

“I always say that our concerts are for adventurous listeners who like a smorgasbord of the unexpected,” Composers Guild vice-chair Margi Griebling-Haigh said during a telephone interview. [Read more…]

Mexican pianist Daniela Liebman returns to Tri-C Classical Piano Series

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by Daniel Hathaway

She was fourteen when she first played on the Tri-C Classical Piano Series in 2016. Three years later, Mexican pianist Daniela Liebman returns for a free recital of works by Beethoven, Debussy, Prokofiev, and Chopin on Sunday, October 13 at 2:00 pm in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

The original invitation to play in 2016 came through Antonio Pompa-Baldi. “He was on the jury when I won the Russian Piano Competition in California at the age of nine,” Liebman said by telephone from Fort Worth, Texas. “I came to Cleveland to study with him for a couple of months, and I was delighted that he and Emanuela Friscioni invited me to play on the Tri-C series.”

Born in Guadalajara to an American father and Mexican mother, Liebman began studying the piano at a young age. “My dad’s a violinist who graduated from Eastman, but he ended up going into business. He started me on piano at the age of five. [Read more…]

Rocky River Chamber Music Society to feature cimbalom player Alexander Fedoriouk

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by Jarrett Hoffman

The Rocky River Chamber Music Society will explore “Chamber Music of Hungary” to begin its 61st season on Monday, October 14 at 7:30 pm at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church.

Four Cleveland Orchestra members — violinists Katherine Bormann and Emma Shook, violist Stanley Konopka, and cellist Martha Baldwin — will open the program with Bartók’s String Quartet No. 2.

The second half is all trios: Shook will join another Orchestra colleague, bassist Henry Peyrebrune, and cimbalom player Alexander Fedoriouk in traditional folk music from Hungary and Romania, and in works by Brahms and Vittorio Monti. A freewill offering will be taken.

The largest instrument in the hammered dulcimer family, as Fedoriouk expalined in an interview, the cimbalom is struck with wooden hammers to create sound. One feature that distinguishes the instrument from other dulcimers is its damper pedals, an innovation of József Schunda in the 1870s.

[Read more…]

Season 14 of Close Encounters, Year 20 of Heights Arts

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Close Encounters Chamber Music and artistic director Isabel Trautwein have two reasons to celebrate: the series’ 14th season, and the 20th year of its parent organization, Heights Arts.

The minds behind the scheduling have kept things simple for concertgoers to store away in their brains (and for writers to explain): the four concerts take place on Sundays at 3:00 pm, which does seem like a particularly nice time for “up close and personal” chamber music, just as the series likes it. Single and season tickets are available online.

Up first is the Omni Quartet on October 13 at a Carriage House on Herrick Mews Lane in Cleveland Heights. Cleveland Orchestra musicians Amy Lee and Alicia Koelz, violins, Wesley Collins, viola, and Tanya Ell, cello, will bring along Haydn’s Trio in C, Hob V:G1, Mozart’s Quartet No. 22 in B-flat, and Robert Schumann’s Quartet No. 3 in A — written during his exuberant, love-filled first year of marriage to Clara Wieck.

[Read more…]

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