Under the baton of Gerhardt Zimmermann, the final program of the Canton Symphony Orchestra’s MasterWorks season was yet more compelling proof of this ensemble’s consummate artistry. I have always enjoyed closely observing and listening to audience reactions, and on this occasion, awestruck wonder was the order of the evening throughout the performance of two masterpieces of the Romantic spirit: Brahms’ Violin Concerto and Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2. In the process, we witnessed the most magnificent performance by a guest soloist in recent memory. [Read more…]
The second event in Chamberfest Cleveland’s new House Concert Series on April 11 was a feast for the ears as well as the eyes, set at the astounding Blackstone Organ House on Lake Erie in Bratenahl and featuring two ChamberFest regulars, violinist Alexi Kenney and pianist Orion Weiss. Fittingly, the evening opened with Hannah Koby playing J.S. Bach’s Fugue in E-flat, BWV 552/2 on the 7400-pipe Aeolian-Skinner organ. [Read more…]
The Cleveland Chamber Symphony fused ballet and contemporary music on April 7 at the Maltz Performing Arts Center. Music director and conductor Steven Smith led the Grammy-winning ensemble through an energetic program with guest dancers from two local companies.
The Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival’s April 13 concert in Gamble Auditorium featured the BW Motet Choir under Dirk Garner in motets and cantatas from across Bach’s life. The first half paired what might be Bach’s earliest motet with his longest. The short motet Ich lasse dich nicht, du segnest mich denn, BWV Anh. 159 for choir and organ was long thought to be by an older relative, Johann Christoph Bach. Now accepted to be by the most famous Bach, this work takes its text from Genesis: “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” [Read more…]
“Everyone’s Italian tonight,” host and conductor Carl Topilow exclaimed, greeting the capacity Cleveland POPS audience at Severance Hall on Saturday, April 13. With the engaging assistance of soprano Alyson Cambridge, tenor John Cudia, and the POPS Chorus — not to mention a special green, white, and red clarinet, assembled from Topilow’s multichromatic collection of instruments — the Orchestra lined up and checked off 21 of everyone’s favorite selections from Italian opera, leaving few corners of the repertoire unexplored. [Read more…]
Les Délices concluded their tenth anniversary season from April 5-7 with evocations of what our Baroque forebears thought to be the basic constituents of the natural world. The three programs sprang from founder and oboist Debra Nagy’s arrangement of Jean-Féry Rebel’s brilliant Les Elements, but also included extracts from the operas of Jean-Philippe Rameau, and a new work commissioned from Theo Chandler. Harpsichordist Mark Edwards provided a complementary interlude: two of Rameau’s keyboard works that express the powers of nature. [Read more…]
The Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival concert on the afternoon of April 12 carried the title “Suites and Motets.” Fynette Kulas Music Hall, a former church worship space repurposed as a concert venue, was set up with the audience surrounding the orchestra and choir on three sides. Cellist René Schiffer, who performed three movements from Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites as “ear cleansers” between the motets, sat on what is normally the room’s stage platform. [Read more…]
The duo piano team of Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe combined virtuosity and entertainment at their afternoon concert on April 13 in Baldwin Wallace’s Gamble Auditorium, as part of the 2019 BW Bach Festival. Johann Sebastian Bach’s works were filtered through the lens of composers as diverse as Heitor Villa-Lobos and György Kurtág, and through the duo’s own arrangements.
In the third of four back-to-back performances of J.S. Bach’s “Great Catholic Mass” on Sunday afternoon, April 14 in St. Raphael Church in Bay Village, the musicians of Apollo’s Fire showed no signs of fatigue despite heavy physical and musical demands. Led by artistic director Jeannette Sorrell, soloists, chorus, and instrumentalists gave uniformly brilliant performances of a musical monument that the composer was only able to hear in bits and pieces during his lifetime. [Read more…]
It’s a near-sacred tenet of the concert business that the show must go on. Happily for the Oberlin Artist Recital Series, French pianist Alexandre Tharaud made that happen when he stepped in on very short notice — and soon after an international flight — to replace Piotr Anderszewski in Finney Chapel on April 3. And with J.S. Bach’s daunting “Goldberg” Variations, no less. [Read more…]