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Pianist Daniil Trifonov brings Brahms’ vision to life with Cleveland Orchestra (Oct. 9)

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by Peter Feher

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Johannes Brahms took more than two decades to compose a follow-up to his First Piano Concerto, but audiences at Severance Music Center have only had to wait two years for the sequel.

Pianist Daniil Trifonov is back with The Cleveland Orchestra this week, tackling Brahms’ monumental Second Concerto after playing the First here in 2023. And in a neat pairing, Music Director Franz Welser-Möst has programmed Sergei Prokofiev’s Seventh Symphony as the companion piece — the Sixth having accompanied Trifonov on his previous appearance.

Reversing the usual performance order (soloist on the first half, big symphonic work on the second), Brahms was the main event after intermission Thursday in Mandel Concert Hall. It’s a sensible way to present a piece that often resembles a symphony in style, scope and sheer impact.

[Read more…]

BlueWater combines two art forms in “Musical Momentum” (Oct. 4)

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by Stephanie Manning

BlueWater Chamber Orchestra opened their sixteenth season last weekend with a doubly enticing concept. Not only would audience members hear works by Elgar, Albinoni, and Handel, but they would also see these works brought to life by the dancers of Ohio Contemporary Ballet.

This collaboration between the two organizations isn’t new. Back in 2020, when Ohio Contemporary Ballet was known as Verb Ballets, the pandemic derailed plans for a similar concert, resulting in a pivot to video.

That admirable broadcast succeeded even though the musicians and dancers never performed in the same room. But as their October 4 event at the Lakewood Civic Auditorium reaffirmed, there’s nothing quite like the magic of live, in-person performance. [Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra performs Mahler, Honegger with philosophical depth (Oct. 2)

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By Daniel Hathaway|Cleveland Classical

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra set a high musical bar early in their new season at Severance Music Center on Thursday with totally committed performances of unique works by Arthur Honegger and Gustav Mahler.

Honegger set out to express the horror of World War II in three arresting movements named after religious texts in his Symphony No. 3, subtitled “Symphonie liturgique.”

And Mahler, who once said, “A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything,” turned away from that idea in his symphonic song cycle “Das lied von der Erde,” crafting a six-movement work that simply sought to capture the experience of being human on planet Earth.

[Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: Dido and Aeneas (Oct. 3)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Some operas overwhelm us with spectacle, others with sheer length. Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, first performed in the late 1680s, does neither. Barely an hour long, it holds a world of feeling — new love, dark magic, and nobility in death.

On Friday evening, October 3 at Greystone Hall in Akron, Apollo’s Fire gave the work youthful resonance by returning it to Purcell’s premiere setting, a London boarding school for girls. Jeannette Sorrell’s direction added a Shakespearean pulse — brisk, lively, and human. The performance opened with the chaconne from Purcell’s King Arthur, an elegant and radiant overture that set the evening’s tone.

Sorrell’s newly written prologue replaced Purcell’s lost original and set the scene as a school play that turns suddenly real — a nod to the opera’s first performances by students and to the scale of its story. Her approach emulated the fast-moving style of seventeenth-century English theater, when audiences stood at the players’ feet and tragedy mingled with laughter. [Read more…]

Faust at the Cinematheque: an intriguing combination of silent film and metal music (Sept. 27)

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by Stephanie Manning

Horror movies and metal music seem a natural fit. Too bad that F.W. Murnau’s Faust isn’t really a horror movie.

The late-night showing of the 1926 German Expressionist film, presented at the Cleveland Cinematheque, promised a spooky atmosphere with a score to match. This enticing premise didn’t always deliver, especially after the film’s plot veered off course. But the packed screening on September 27, which closed out this year’s Cleveland Silent Film Festival and Colloquium, provided other moments of synergy between screen and sound.

Live metal act The Silent Light — guitarist and synthesist Michael Formanski and drummer Matt Hardy — artfully set the scene as the opening credits rolled. [Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra opens 108th season with heroic U.S. premiere of Deutsch’s ‘Urworte’ (Sept. 26)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND — On Friday evening, Sep. 26, before The Cleveland Orchestra opened its 108th season, Music Director Franz Welser-Möst joined President and CEO André Gremillet onstage for a conversation previewing the next ten programs. With a reenergized music director, an impressive slate of repertoire, soloists, and guest conductors, the Orchestra’s 2025-26 season looks especially bright.

Austrian composer Bernd Richard Deutsch has become a familiar figure here in Cleveland under Welser-Möst. During his tenure as the Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow from 2017 to 2020, the Orchestra introduced his organ concerto “Okeanos” and later, his large orchestra work “Intensity.” On Friday came a third U.S. premiere, “Urworte” (2024). Such partnerships nourish everyone: the composer gains a champion, the orchestra fresh music, and the repertoire welcome enrichment.

[Read more…]

Oberlin Chamber Orchestra with cellist Nathaniel Abreu (Sept. 25)

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by Max Newman

For sheer polish of performance, under the direction of Raphael Jiménez, the Oberlin Chamber Orchestra is an ensemble that can scarcely be faulted. On the crisp fall evening of September 25, the Orchestra kicked off its 2025-26 season at Finney Chapel in a familiar vein: the well-rounded performance of three pieces, monumental in sound and cinematic in narrative. The Orchestra was able to simultaneously create the sensation of enormous musical objects and patchworks of delicate moments.

Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Rissolty Rossolty (1939) was a stirring rollercoaster ride of an opener. Its first moments were a guided journey through a pastoral, woodwind-dotted landscape, with staccato bassoon, clarinet, flute, and oboe tangents framed by earnest strings. [Read more…]

Great Lakes Theater: Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George (Sept. 27)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Great Lakes Theater opened its fall season at the Hanna Theatre with Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George. I saw the performance on September 27. In a house of just over five hundred seats, the show feels almost purpose-built for intimacy: audiences sit close enough to hear breaths behind every phrase and to see the small adjustments of light and posture that bring French Neo-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat’s world into focus.

Winner of the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Sunday resists conventional structure. Its first act imagines the years Seurat spent creating his pointillist landmark, La Grande Jatte. Sondheim and Lapine do not present the artist as genial or approachable. He is exacting, self-absorbed, forever chasing the perfect dot of color at the expense of his personal relationships. The cost is clear: his model and lover, another Dot, leaves him, unable to compete with the canvas.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Silent Film Festival opens with 1925 Phantom & live orchestra (Sep. 14)

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by Daniel Hathaway

The 2025-2026 Cleveland Silent Film Festival and Colloquium got off to an impressive start with the screening of one of the icons of the pre-talkies era: Universal Pictures’ Phantom of the Opera in a restoration of its original version of 1925.

Presented before a large crowd in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Sunday afternoon, September 14, the screening was accompanied by an orchestra score itself restored from the original piano score — mostly existing photoplay selections, plus three original cues by one G. Hinrichs orchestrated by Larry Moore. [Read more…]

James Ehnes and Orion Weiss open Cleveland Chamber Music Society season (Sept. 16)

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by Peter Feher

If James Ehnes ever decided to launch a fan club, one of the first chapters would undoubtedly be formed in Northeast Ohio.

The esteemed Canadian violinist has made occasional concerto appearances with The Cleveland Orchestra over the years, but local audiences have come to know him best through chamber performances that offer an unparalleled experience of his artistry.

This feeling of intimate familiarity united Ehnes and an enthusiastic crowd at Disciples Christian Church on Tuesday, Sept. 16, for the opening concert of the Cleveland Chamber Music Society’s 2025–26 season. [Read more…]

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