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Cleveland Orchestra opens Blossom Festival with ‘America at 250′ (July 3)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — There is nothing like a picnic, American music and a torrential downpour to bring a Blossom Music Center crowd closer together. On Friday, July 3, the Cleveland Orchestra’s summer season opener offered all three, plus fireworks, making this annual rite feel complete.

The occasion was “America at 250,” a broad sampler of our nation’s music led by Edwin Outwater and presented under the title “Out of Many, One: A Tapestry of American Music.” The evening also marked the loss of Limmie Pulliam, the Oberlin-trained tenor and a favorite of Cleveland Orchestra audiences, who had been scheduled to appear but unfortunately passed away earlier this year.

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ChamberFest wraps up season with “Convergence” (June 27)

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by Stephanie Manning

Both parking and seating were at a premium for ChamberFest Cleveland’s June 27 concert, which concluded this year’s festival right where it began less than three weeks earlier. Kulas Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music hosted the culmination of the fourteenth season with its optimistic program, titled “Convergence.”

ChamberFest finales often feature a seminal small ensemble work — last year it was the Brahms’ Piano Quintet in F minor, this year it was Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet. Ultimately, the final concert of 2026 leaned more traditional, a choice that felt a bit anticlimactic after a season that otherwise concentrated a good deal of energy on contemporary works.

Still, the Saturday evening performance did include one piece by a living composer: Olli Mustonen’s Nonet II. As Donald Rosenberg’s program notes reminded us, the three pieces on tap were all generally sunny and upbeat, and the players came dressed in colors to match: yellow, pink, purple, and cream, to name a few.

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Ohio Light Opera’s Damn Yankees has all kinds of heart (June 18)

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by Stephanie Manning

Any hardcore Cleveland Guardians fan might say they’d do anything to see their team win. But would they strike a deal with the devil for it?

The character of Joe Boyd makes just that kind of Faustian bargain for his beloved baseball team in Damn Yankees, the second of six shows to open at Ohio Light Opera this season. The 1955 musical, with music and lyrics by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross and a book by George Abbott and Douglass Wallop, began its run in the College of Wooster’s Freedlander Theater on June 18.

A premiere for the company, this golden age musical has plenty of heart, even if its second half doesn’t quite hit a home run. But with a strong cast and direction by Steven Daigle, it’s a production worth checking out, filled with colorful sets and infectious energy from the performers.

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ChamberFest Cleveland: Continental Rifts (June 26)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

A sold-out crowd gathered June 26 in the “King Cobra” room at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland for “Continental Rifts,” the next-to-last program of ChamberFest Cleveland’s 2026 season.

As artistic director Diana Cohen noted from the stage, wars in Iran and Syria were central to the evening’s design. Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” string quartet cast its shadow forward to George Crumb’s Vietnam-era Black Angels.

The evening began with the Andante from Schubert’s Quartet — a movement borrowed from the composer’s own death-haunted song. Michelle Barzel Ross and Geneva Lewis, violins, Emad Zolfaghari, viola, and Jay Campbell, cello, operated on an extraordinary scale of subtlety. We entered a miniature, almost fairy world, where pianissimos felt loud, inaudibility marked the far horizon, and feeling still registered in a thousand hues.

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Cleveland Orchestra Summer Choral Institute makes impressive debut with excerpts from Matthew Shepard oratorio (June 26)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Young Matthew Shepard’s iconic suffering and death in Wyoming in October of 1998 have inspired a number of social, political, and artistic initiatives, including Craig Hella Johnson’s “passion oratorio” Considering Matthew Shepard.

Johnson was deeply affected by the murder of the young University of Wyoming student, who was offered a ride from a gay bar by two young men who took him to a remote spot, bound him to a split-rail fence, beat him unmercifully, and left him to die on a freezing night on the prairie.

Members of the Cleveland Orchestra joined participants in the new Choral Institute in performing excerpts from the work led by Lisa Wong, the Orchestra’s Director of Choruses, on June 26 at Severance Music Center. Preparing and presenting  a one-hour version of Johnson’s nearly two-hour work was the central agenda of the inaugural week-long Summer Choral Institute. Nothing essential to Matthew’s story was lost in the process.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s passion settings with their narration, reflective arias, and congregational hymns were an obvious model for Considering Matthew Shepard. But other influences include Broadway, Country & Western, Blues, Jazz, Appalachian hymnody, and Gospel.

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ChamberFest Cleveland: Flights of Fancy (June 25)

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by Daniel Hathaway

ChamberFest Cleveland’s concert in Mixon Hall on Thursday. June 25 offered the audience many points of departure in a program of wildly different chamber ensembles. The program was introduced (if not fully explained) in an enjoyable pre-concert lecture by University of Akron geology professor Ira Sasowsky.

Michelle Barzel Ross’s string quartet Birds on the Moon nudged closest to the evening’s theme of “Flights of Fancy.” Written in memory of the late Juilliard String Quartet violinist Roger Tapping and performed by violinists Michelle Barzel Ross and Steven Copes, violist Teng Li, and cellist Jay Campbell, it’s a captivating piece that draws you in from the beginning with its kaleidoscope of colors, allusions, and quotations from other works and doesn’t let up until the end.

Some of the material arose from Ross’s “wild, imaginative” improvisations, some from remembered snatches of poetry by Wallace Stevens. Fanciful notions like the avians that gave the work its title dwell deep in the subconscious (are there birds on the moon?)

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ENCORE spotlights the “Next Gen” (June 20)

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by Daniel Hathaway

A good sized crowd came out to hear the fruits of the labor of ENCORE Chamber Music Institute’s Young Artists on Saturday afternoon, June 20, packing the Gates Mills Community Hall with energy and enthusiasm.

The program began with York Bowen’s Fantasia for viola quartet and gradually added players and gathered momentum, ending with a confident performance of a complicated Benjamin Britten work plus an exuberant, infectious finale by Shelly Washington.

Violists Ilgyeong Shin, Vivienne Lucier, Mai Ikemura, and Ellis Peterson produced the kind of rich, dark blend you’d hope to hear from an ensemble of tenors of the string family. Based on a simple theme whose long lines were seamlessly passed from player to player, Bowen’s piece would be perfect for an English Garden Party.

The rest of the program featured works for large string ensembles, all played senza conductor.

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ChamberFest Cleveland: Summer Music (June 20)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

ChamberFest Cleveland’s Saturday, June 20 program at Federated Church, “Summer Music,” brought together works by Karen Ouzounian, Samuel Barber, Benjamin Yusupov, and Franz Schubert. The title suggested ease and warmth, but the music had other plans, ranging from restless rhythms and shifting colors to high virtuosity and broad lyricism.

Ouzounian’s Songs of the Sap opened the program, with the composer herself as solo cellist. A Toronto-born musician of Lebanese-Armenian heritage, Ouzounian draws on folk material not as a tourist, but through personal inheritance. The music uses Anatolian dance rhythms, though the performance never treated them as mere display.

“Tamzara” moved with restraint and concentration. Left-hand pizzicato made one cello sound like two. Fossnes’s entrance from the balcony gave the viola a smaller, fainter sound, answering the cello from a distance as if from long ago. “Curcuna” was quicker and more physical. Ouzounian gave its symmetrically divided 10/8 rhythm a clear, driving pulse while leaving room for freer, more rhapsodic passages. The result was tightly controlled but never dry.

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ChamberFest Cleveland: Appalachian Spring & Crossroads (June 17 & 18)

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by Daniel Hathaway

While it’s unusual to see two composers taking credit for a single composition, the 18th-century Catalonian brothers Josep Pla and Joan Baptista Pla are an exception, having jointly crafted many works including trio sonatas.

On Wednesday, June 17 in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music, ChamberFest Cleveland opened their concert “Appalachian Spring” with a terrific performance of the Pla brothers’ Trio Sonata in D minor for oboe (Izaiah Cheera), violin (Julia Schilz), cello (Julie Albers), harpsichord (Adam Golka), and percussion (Jeff Stern).

Throughout the engaging piece, Cheeran produced a beautiful oboe tone while making the sonata’s many (and long) technical passages sound easy. During the lighthearted opening movement, extended lyrical lines were expertly traded between the players. And yes, there was percussion. Stern’s rhythms on the cajon were inspired, adding a new dimension to the Baroque era composition.

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Ohio Light Opera: My Fair Lady (June 17)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Ohio Light Opera’s production of Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady seems tailor-made for the company’s knack for giving familiar repertory fresh legs.

Half Edwardian social experiment, half hit parade, Jacob Allen’s staging treats its manners and melodies as pleasures rather than relics, while keeping the show’s questions about social class, gender stereotypes, and women’s independence unresolved. The show runs in rep through August 2 at The College of Wooster’s Freedlander Theatre. I saw the performance on June 17.

The plot, based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, remains familiar. Phonetics professor Henry Higgins wagers with a colleague that he can take Eliza Doolittle, a Covent Garden flower seller whose accent he finds intolerable and whose intelligence he badly underestimates, and pass her off as a duchess. Through drills, bullying, coaxing, and one miraculous breakthrough involving ‘The Rain in Spain,’ he succeeds. The trouble is that Eliza turns out not to be clay in Higgins’s hands, but a person with an acute self-awareness.

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