by Nicholas Stevens
Depending on how presenters and performers discuss it in concerts, music history can be a portal to deeper understanding or a padlock. Especially hazardous is the tracing of artistic lineage. If you talk engagingly about teacher-to-student “family trees,” the concert may gain in vitality and direction. If you list them dryly, you risk making textbook fodder of vibrant art.
by David Kulma
One of the great joys of teenage ensembles is the sheer vivacity and palpable excitement of the musicians, especially when they get to sink their teeth into important repertoire. This was in full view during this year’s joint Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra and Cleveland Orchestra Youth Chorus concert on Sunday, March 3 at Severance Hall under COYO music director Vinay Parameswaran. [Read more…]
by David Kulma
CityMusic Cleveland celebrated its 15th season with a powerful new piece by its music director Avner Dorman. His Third Violin Concerto was debuted in free concerts with soloist Sayaka Shoji in five different venues across the Cleveland area. I attended the fourth performance on Saturday, March 16 at the Shrine Church of St. Stanislaus in Slavic Village. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
Sounding Light is a professional-level mixed choir based in the Metro Detroit area, founded in 2003 by Northeast Ohio native Tom Trenney. Trenney is a musical polymath: concert organist, church musician at First-Plymouth Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, conductor, and preacher. He and Sounding Light, along with two fine soloists, soprano Lindsay Kesselman and tenor Brian Giebler, and the Stony Creek High School Choir from Rochester Hills, Michigan, visited Cleveland’s Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist on Friday evening, March 15, to give the local premiere of John Muehleisen’s Pietà. The composer was in attendance.
by David Kulma
A golden age in American popular music began about a century ago. Lasting four decades and pervading musical theater, sound recordings, film, radio, and jazz stylings, it left a body of music that has never gone out of circulation and is regularly trumpeted as one of America’s best collective creations. We now call it “The Great American Songbook.”
by David Kulma
There is something about the richly layered music of Johannes Brahms that brings out the best in musicians’ virtuosity and interpretive taste. Brahms somehow brings everything together. Exhibit A is the most recent Heights Arts Close Encounters program, “Johann Sebastian, Igor, and One French Horn,” performed on Sunday, March 10 at a board member’s house in Shaker Heights. Artistic director and violinist Isabel Trautwein and her longtime collaborative pianist Patti Wolf played duos by Bach and Stravinsky, and hornist Richard King joined them for Brahms’s Horn Trio. [Read more…]
by David Kulma
The West Shore Chorale and its longtime music director John Drotleff focused on psalms settings by Mozart and Bernstein together with a work by David Conte for its performance on the Helen D. Schubert Concert Series at The Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist on Friday, March 1.
by Rory O’Donoghue
Cellist Brian Thornton explores late chamber works by Debussy and Brahms with creative polish and refined sensitivity on his latest album from Steinway & Sons. Joined in masterful collaboration by a fellow Cleveland Orchestra member, principal clarinet Afendi Yusuf, and the superb pianist Spencer Myer, Thornton pairs Debussy’s 1915 Cello Sonata with Brahms’ 1891 Clarinet Trio, Op. 114, a thoughtful juxtaposition of the composers’ mature styles. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
In his spoken introduction before the Cleveland Chamber Choir concert on Sunday afternoon, March 10, Charles Edward McGuire characterized the program as very difficult. The statement was true, but director Scott MacPherson and the Choir gave extraordinary and virtuosic performances of unaccompanied music by three masters of choral music — Johannes Brahms, Andrew Rindfleisch, and Benjamin Britten. First Baptist Church of Greater Cleveland was an ideal location, with resonant but not overly reverberent acoustics that flattered the group’s well-blended sound but didn’t muddy the musical textures. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
Despite the lurid title of last weekend’s Apollo’s Fire concerts — Three Duels and a Funeral — no blood was shed onstage at St. Paul’s Church in Cleveland Heights on Friday evening, March 8. The entertaining program concocted by director Jeannette Sorrell was a set of concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach and Antonio Vivaldi, plus a humorous solo cantata by Georg Philipp Telemann eulogizing a talented, but murdered, canary. Each of the works had its own imaginative character. [Read more…]