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Ehnes & Armstrong to play complete
Beethoven violin sonatas
on CCMS Series

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by Daniel Hathaway

The Cleveland Chamber Music Society will take a bit of a different tack for its 70th Anniversary Season in 2019-2020. Violinist James Ehnes and pianist Andrew Armstrong will appear in three of the nine concerts, performing Beethoven’s complete Sonatas for violin and piano, a series that will be presented at the Maltz Performing Arts Center in University Circle on September 17, January 14, and April 21.

Concerts at the Society’s customary venue, Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights, will include the Jerusalem Quartet (October 22), the Dover Quartet (December 3), the Apollon Musagète Quartet (February 4), and Chanticleer (March 3).

Other exceptions to the Plymouth Church location: pianist Till Fellner will play a recital in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music on November 12, and the series will end back at the Maltz Center on May 5 with a performance by violinist David Bowlin and the Albers Trio.

I reached James Ehnes at his home in Florida last week and began by asking how the idea of performing all of Beethoven’s ten violin sonatas originated. [Read more…]

CIPC Concert Series:
15 minutes with Shai Wosner

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by Daniel Hathaway

The final event in the Cleveland International Piano Competition’s 2019 Concert Series will feature the duo-piano team of Orion Weiss and Shai Wosner in music by Schubert, Brahms, and David Lang on Saturday, September 14 at 8:00 pm in Reinberger Chamber Hall at Severance Hall.

The recital reunites two longtime friends and colleagues and introduces the Israeli-born Wosner to Cleveland (Weiss, born in Gates Mills, is well-known in these parts). I caught up with Shai Wosner by telephone earlier this month and began by asking whether he and Weiss have played this particular program before.

Shai Wosner: We performed it at the Kennedy Center earlier this year, and will play it in New Mexico next month. We’re having a great time with it.

Daniel Hathaway: You and Orion have a long history of performing together.

SW: We go back nearly twenty years. For a long time we were each doing our own thing, but a few years ago we thought it was time to play together again. We had this unusual idea for a program with two huge pieces. [Read more…]

Wrongful conviction as told through music: KSU and Oberlin to present The Innocents

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Imagine spending even a year of your life in jail, and what that would do to you and to those around you. Now imagine it’s for a crime you didn’t commit, and that the punishment stretches on much longer than one year, possibly for decades.

That scenario is more common than you may think. Percussionists Allen Otte and John Lane will explore the issue of wrongful conviction in the U.S. justice system this weekend through their work The Innocents, which involves the spoken word, non-traditional instruments, African mbiras/kalimbas, and electronics.

The free concerts take place at Ludwig Recital Hall at Kent State University on Saturday, September 14 at 7:30 pm, presented as part of the Vanguard Guest Artists Series, and at Stull Recital Hall at Oberlin Conservatory on Sunday, September 15 at 4:30 pm.

[Read more…]

BlueWater and Amitai Vardi celebrate Jewish music in season opener

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by Jarrett Hoffman

There’s something poetic about the way BlueWater Chamber Orchestra will open its tenth anniversary season next week. Israeli-American clarinetist Amitai Vardi, a member of BlueWater since the ensemble’s beginning, will solo in Srul Irving Glick’s The Klezmer’s Wedding on Sunday, September 15 at The Temple-Tifereth Israel. That’s part of a 3:00 pm program led by Daniel Meyer that will celebrate Jewish music.

The Klezmer’s Wedding is an important work for Vardi: he gave the North American premiere of the concerto version in 2004 at the Pittsburgh Jewish Music Festival with members of the Pittsburgh Symphony.

Glick, who has been celebrated for his contributions to Jewish music, passed away in 2002 in his native Toronto. “The way that he captures klezmer music in the concert hall, as opposed to within a klezmer band, is unique, beautiful, and a lot of fun,” Vardi said. He also pointed out the composer’s authentic handling of Jewish music, saying that this concerto could easily be part of a Jewish wedding. “When I’m playing it, I definitely imagine walking around though the guests and wailing a klezmer tune.” [Read more…]

Oberlin’s second opening festival to consider “End of Life, End of Time”

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by Daniel Hathaway

Last September, Oberlin violin professor Sibbi Bernhardsson was the catalyst for a two-day festival, “Creative Arts & Music in the Shadow of War,” marking the centenary of the end of World War I with four concerts, two panel discussions, and parallel events at Oberlin’s Allen Art Museum.

That festival built on Bernhardsson’s fascination with music written during The Great War, and proved to be a great success. “Although the topic was somber, it ended up being an energizing and fun project — a way to collaborate with different professors in the College and the Conservatory, and a great opportunity for students to kick off the school year and see the faculty in action as performers and speakers,” the violinist said in a telephone conversation. “Since Oberlin has so many intellectual and musical resources, I wanted to do some kind of compelling project as a follow-up.”

The impetus for this year’s Festival came from Bernhardsson’s colleagues, who wanted to perform Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, written and performed in a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1941. “It’s such a great and important work that it’s not the kind of piece you play on a Sunday afternoon faculty recital and then go out and have a dessert afterward. But it occurred to me that maybe it would be a great work to build a festival around.” [Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra does Star Wars: Sarah Hicks on conducting in-concert films

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Film music leaves an impression on many of us at an early age, and Sarah Hicks was no exception. The principal conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra’s “Live at Orchestra Hall” series, Hicks is also known as an in-demand guest conductor, particularly in the genre of in-concert film.

“I saw the original Star Wars movies in theaters as a very young child,” Hicks said during a telephone interview. That wasn’t the spark to her interest in music — she was already playing the piano by age five — but it was still an experience she called transformative. “I remember those movies, I remember that music. It was a huge part of my childhood.”

Hicks will revisit The Empire Strikes Back, the second film from the original Star Wars trilogy, during screenings with The Cleveland Orchestra on August 30, 31, and September 1 at 7:30 pm at Blossom. (Fireworks to follow each performance, weather permitting.) That score by John Williams introduced the world to “The Imperial March (Darth Vader’s Theme)” — it’s hard to imagine Star Wars without it — and to “Yoda’s Theme.”

[Read more…]

New organ for First Lutheran Lorain continues Boe & Brombaugh legacy

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by Daniel Hathaway

The staff and parishioners of Lorain’s First Lutheran Church must have found images of the burning of Notre-Dame de Paris last April especially poignant. In August of 2014, arson reduced their sanctuary to rubble, taking with it the church’s stained glass windows and its historically important organ built by John Brombaugh in 1970.

On Sunday, August 25, nearly five years to the day after that conflagration, the church will formally inaugurate a new instrument by Paul Fritts of Tacoma, Washington in a 3:00 pm recital by Katelyn Emerson. The recitalist, who graduated from Oberlin in 2015 with degrees in organ performance and French and is now based in Stuttgart, Germany, will play a varied program of music by Lübeck, J.S. Bach, Muffat, Bridge, Brahms, and Franck, as well as the premiere of a commissioned work by Aaron David Miller. The recital is free.

Music director Brian Wentzel said in a recent telephone conversation that working on the project of a new sanctuary and organ has been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “It’s one that I never imagined I’d have. But it’s been very fulfilling, and a joy to work with Paul Fritts and his crew. I’m very pleased with the result.” [Read more…]

South Pacific with BW & Cleveland Orchestra: talking to director Victoria Bussert

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Musical theater fans have a thrill coming their way this Saturday, August 24 at 8:00 pm at Blossom. On tap is a production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s 1949 South Pacific featuring students from the Baldwin Wallace Music Theater program. And the orchestra? It’s one you might have heard of.

“There’s no way for me to describe what it’s going to be like the first time the students hear The Cleveland Orchestra play this music,” Victoria Bussert said during a recent phone call. She heads the Music Theater program at BW and directs Saturday’s performance. 

“It will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity because even on Broadway, you don’t get orchestras of this size, or this world-renowned,” Bussert said. “I’m kind of tingly just waiting for when we all walk into Severance [for rehearsal] and the students sing with them for the first time.”

[Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom: catching up with Parameswaran

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by Jarrett Hoffman

For Vinay Parameswaran, leading The Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom on Saturday, August 17 at 8:00 pm will be only one important event in what has to be called a good couple of months. He’s also conducted in Europe, driven about 5,000 miles back and forth across the U.S., and gotten hitched.

We spoke last week over the phone, and first he filled me in on all the details of June, July, and the first bit of August. Then we talked about this Saturday’s program, which includes Ives’ “Decoration Day” from the Holidays Symphony, Bernstein’s Jeremiah: Symphony No. 1 with mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano, and Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances.

[Read more…]

Summers@Severance: Osmo Vänskä and The Cleveland Orchestra

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by Jarrett Hoffman

August is when the end of summer comes into sight, a blues for which Mendelssohn’s Fourth Symphony might be the antidote. The composer himself called it “the jolliest work I have so far written” — and the first movement really is bottled joy.

That symphony, known as the “Italian,” will sit side by side with Samuel Barber’s lesser-known Symphony in One Movement this Friday, August 16 at 7:00 pm, when guest conductor Osmo Vänskä pays a visit to Severance Hall to close out The Cleveland Orchestra’s Summers@Severance series.

“I have to say that I am so happy about the Barber,” Vänskä said during a telephone interview. “Even three years ago, let’s say, I didn’t know anything about this first symphony of his. Now I have done it twice during the last season. I really love the piece, and I think that it might be a good surprise for many people to hear it.”

[Read more…]

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