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ENCORE Chamber Music Institute: two Sunday afternoons at Harkness (June 9 & 16)

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by Daniel Hathaway

ENCORE Chamber Music Institute brought its Music & Ideas Festival —  and its entire student body — to Harkness Chapel at Case Western Reserve University on two adjacent Sunday afternoons, June 9 and 16. Lectures by experts on the natural world’s often overlooked musicians were followed by artist-teacher showcase performances featuring the human participants in this summer’s institute.

On June 9, in a collaboration with the Cleveland Humanities 2024 Festival, bird and insect song was the subject of an engaging, illustrated, half-hour lecture, “The World’s First Musicians” by composer and naturalist Lisa Rainsong. On June 16, in “Earth Makes Us Equal,” the songs of male humpback whales (the females don’t sing!) was the topic of a fascinating talk by David Rothenberg, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, who brought his bass clarinet along to engage in expressive duets with some of his subjects.

[Read more…]

Petra Poláčková dazzles at CICGF with a journey into Czech Music (June 9)

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by Max Newman

You will not hear many classical guitarists with a better feel for emotion, atmosphere, pace, and tone than Petra Poláčková. The talented Czech musician showcased all of these talents and more for the audience at the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Hall on Sunday afternoon June 9.

The performance, the penultimate event of the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival, spanned four exhilarating Czech works. On this particular afternoon, golden sunbeams streaked in through Mixon’s floor-to-ceiling windows, drenching the stage with a light that underscored the otherworldly quality of Poláčková’s playing. One would be hard-pressed to find a more musically exhilarating way of closing out this magnificent series. [Read more…]

Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival: Nicolò Spera plays on ten strings (June 7)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Filling a void in the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival when a scheduled artist developed visa complications, University of Colorado Boulder professor Nicolò Spera stepped in with his 10-string guitar and a stimulating program that was technically and mentally challenging — both for the guitarist and his Mixon Hall audience — on Friday, June 7.

The extra strings on that instrument added range and resonance to Spera’s program, which began and ended with famous works from the passacaglia family, with a contemporary piece at its center.

At the end of his “Mystery” Sonatas — fifteen little suites for violin and continuo based on the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries of Christ represented by the beads on the Rosary — Heinrich Ignatz Franz Biber added a postlude in the form of a passacaglia for solo violin based on a four-bar descending bass figure. [Read more…]

Jason Vieaux & Mari Sato open 2024 Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival (June 6)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Jason Vieaux, a guitarist with an uncommonly clean technique and broad palette, made a fine opening act for the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival at the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Hall on Thursday, June 6. He was joined in the second half by violinist Mari Sato, an ideal chamber music partner. Vieaux’s ability to bestow tonal and dynamic nuance gave refreshing variety to every piece, and his cleanly articulated rhythms added panache and polish.

The concert opened with Mexican composer Manuel Ponce’s Sonatina Meridional (“Southern Sonatina”), written to sound Spanish at the behest of Andrés Segovia. Vieaux brought out the linear elegance of the first movement, called “Campo” by Segovia, and the right amount of Iberian swing. So convincing was his ability to change color, you might have thought he had changed instruments if you weren’t looking — the low-register “pizzicato” passages, for example, sounded like an electric bass. The following two movements, “Copla” and “Fiesta,” were artfully done, too, with Segovia-like virtues: a multitude of colors, subtle dynamics, and long arcs of phrasing. [Read more…]

She Scores: a dazzling display from composers & performers (June 2)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

You might have gone to the Sunday, June 2 She Scores concert to hear exemplary works by female and nonbinary composers, or simply to enjoy some fresh new sounds. But once there, you would have stayed for the dazzling expertise on display, from both composers and performers alike.

Credit the Local 4 Music Fund and executive director Amber Rogers for organizing the fourth annual iteration of this splendid concert series, which ran from May 30-June 2 in CIM’s lovely Mixon Hall. Genre or gender aside, this was an afternoon of superb music.

Margi Griebling-Haigh’s Triskaidekaphilia (“love of the number thirteen”) for three violins made for an arresting and mathematical start. Violinists Ken Johnston, Leah Goor-Burtnett, and Emily Cornelius drew out the composer’s introspective and playful sides in this well-crafted three-movement work. [Read more…]

She Scores: a night of musical excellence and importance (May 31)

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by Max Newman

Even in the Cleveland music scene’s creatively positive atmosphere, female and non-binary composers are often underrepresented on the concert stage, and the Local 4 Music Fund’s She Scores series is looking to change this.

The series, which aims to remind us of “the urgent need to redouble our efforts toward closing the chasm of opportunity and representation that separates women from men,” was held between May 30 and June 2 at the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Hall, showcasing an impressive catalog of works that spanned a wide variety of styles and moods. I was lucky enough to attend the May 31 performance.

The striking setting went a long way in terms of adding to the experience. Curved rows of seats gently descended down to a well-lit stage, just in front of the space’s crown jewel: a floor-to-ceiling window that looked out upon the beautiful architecture and vegetation of the CIM campus. As the evening sky darkened over the course of the concert’s two hours, the program order seemed to match it in mood, with bright, energetic, and percussive pieces towards the beginning, and more contemplative and somber works towards the conclusion.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra: Mozart’s Magic Flute (May 16)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

In what has become a welcome springtime tradition at Severance Music Center, Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra devoted their season finale to opera. Mozart’s The Magic Flute contained many delights — a beautiful score, superb singing, imaginative staging by Nikolaus Habjan, spare but thought-provoking sets — in such quality as to perhaps win over even the most opera-resistant. And maybe to prompt the timeless question: doesn’t Cleveland deserve a full-time, professional opera company? I attended opening night on May 16.

A centerpiece of the second Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival, Magic Flute shares the festival’s theme of “power.” The characters of Tamino, Papageno, and Pamina eventually vanquish an angry queen, though the allegorical plot is more a parable of growing up and learning to love and trust. There are also initiation rites, a rescue, and a conversion to the high ideals of another powerful figure, Sarastro. [Read more…]

Sentiment, Satire, Horror, and Noir in silent film (May 10)

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by Mike Telin

At a time when performing musical scores during the showings of blockbuster films has become popular  programming for symphony orchestras, it’s interesting to turn back the clock to an era when audiences never heard the actors’ voices and the music was always performed live by whatever size ensemble was available.

This past semester a group of Oberlin students in the Music and Melodrama on Stage and Screen class, taught by Emily Laurance, immersed themselves in the creation of film scores from a historical perspective.

On Friday, May 10 the members of the class presented their final projects at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Transformer Station. “The Many Moods of Melodrama: Sentiment, Satire, Horror, and Noir” was a fascinating and thoroughly entertaining evening that featured five short silent films exploring the melodramatic mode, with original scores performed by the students.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra closes Severance season with glorious performance of Mozart’s Wind Serenade No. 10 (May 23)

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By Daniel Hathaway | Cleveland Classical
This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Most orchestras choose to close out their subscription seasons with a blowout piece of epic proportions. Not Cleveland. Trusting its players to produce something grand and memorable with modest resources, The Cleveland Orchestra sent its strings, brass, and percussion players home early (except for principal bass Maximilian Dimoff) on Thursday, May 23.

After a mammoth stage reset during intermission, music director Franz Welser-Möst and thirteen players filed onstage to serenade the large audience in Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center with a glorious performance of Mozart’s Wind Serenade No. 10 (Gran Partita) that wonderfully shared the program with works by Wagner and Berg.

That was no small feat. The evening began with Richard Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde and continued with Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto featuring Leila Josephowicz, works that made lasting impressions due to their sonic magnificence or the successful fusing of disparate musical elements. [Read more…]

Making its Cleveland debut, Verona Quartet closes Arts Renaissance Tremont season (May 5)

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by Daniel Hathaway

The original plan for the season finale of Arts Renaissance Tremont called for the Cavani Quartet — joint artistic directors of the series at St. Wendelin Church — to join the Verona Quartet, Oberlin Conservatory’s resident string quartet, to form an octet. But when a member of the Cavani became indisposed, the Verona agreed to play the whole program on Sunday afternoon, May 5.

Although the audience at St. Wendelin might have been surprised by the change in plans, nobody could possibly have been disappointed. Violinists Jonathon Ong and Dorothy Ro, violist Abigail Rojansky, and cellist Jonathan Dormand gave revelatory accounts of Mendelssohn’s first and Beethoven’s fifteenth quartets. And they very likely introduced all but a few cognoscenti in the audience to the fascinating music of Grażyna Bacewicz with the Fourth Quartet by the Lithuanian-Polish violinist and composer, who lived from 1909 to 1969.

[Read more…]

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