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BlueWater Chamber Orchestra and Cleveland Chamber Choir: “I Believe!” (May 17)

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by Peter Feher

Trust in a higher purpose is part of what’s sustained BlueWater Chamber Orchestra and Cleveland Chamber Choir for many seasons now.

So it was fitting that the two local ensembles came together in a concert titled “I Believe! Knitted Voices of Justice and Faith” on May 17 at Trinity Cathedral. The evening not only marked major milestones for BlueWater and CCC — their 15th and 10th anniversaries, respectively — but also spoke to a shared mission. Making classical music more accessible is a priority for both organizations, whether through pay-what-you-wish performances or programming that forges new connections.

Saturday’s concert paired Margaret Bonds’ Credo and Mozart’s “Great” Mass in c in a righteous demonstration of belief that swelled to fill the magnificent space of Trinity.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra’s “Vox Humana” haunts with a tale of reconciliation (May 23)

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by Daniel Hathaway

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Instructions for a classical programming chatbot: design a full-length program of music that illustrates the theme of Reconciliation, using in any combination a narrator, a full symphony orchestra, a mixed chorus, a vocal monologue and an instrumental quintet.

That’s not how Friday’s Vox Humana concert at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival came to be. But such a prompt might help explain how apparently unrelated works by Francis Poulenc, J.S. Bach, Galina Ustvolskaya, and Richard Strauss made it from Franz Welser-Möst’s fertile imagination to the Mandel Concert Hall stage.

Based on Jean Cocteau’s monodrama, Francis Poulenc’s 1958 opera La voix humaine presents the audience with one side of a telephone conversation between a jilted woman (“Elle”) and her former lover. [Read more…]

Akron Symphony concludes season with a grand Verdi’s Requiem (May 10)

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by Peter Feher

The Akron Symphony is ready to stage a full opera in some upcoming season, judging by the spectacular success of the orchestra’s performance of Verdi’s Requiem on May 10 at E.J. Thomas Hall.

All of the elements essential for a winning production were present. A sense of drama, a compelling cast of vocal soloists, and a stage packed with extra choristers and instrumentalists made the evening feel like a thoroughly theatrical event. It was a grand way for the Symphony to conclude its 2024-25 concert year.

That a sacred piece should seem so lavish and entertaining is the glorious crux of Verdi’s Requiem. Classical composers going as far back as the 15th century have set the Latin Mass for the dead with a certain creative flourish and delight in excess, but Verdi’s contribution represents the operatic peak of the tradition.

His realization was always intended for a concertgoing audience. The work was first conceived in 1868 as part of a tribute to the late leading opera composer Gioachino Rossini but only completed in 1873 following the death of Italian writer and politician Alessandro Manzoni.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra Opera & Humanities Festival: Moth Mainstage (May 16)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

The Cleveland Orchestra’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival opened on May 16 with The Moth Mainstage: Live from Severance, an evening of true, personal storytelling centered on the theme of reconciliation.

Presented in partnership with Ideastream Public Media, the show marked The Moth’s first live appearance in Cleveland. Founded in 1997 in New York City, The Moth is a nonprofit celebrating “the art of true, personal storytelling.” It produces hundreds of live events annually across the U.S. and abroad, including the widely popular podcast The Moth Radio Hour. [Read more…]

Franz Welser-Möst leads powerful performance of Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa (May 17)

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by Daniel Hathaway

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio – How can an opera be so profoundly disturbing, yet so achingly beautiful?

That was the conundrum after hearing Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa at Severance Music Center on Saturday, in a performance by Franz Welser-Möst, the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus and 11 first-rank soloists.

Welser-Möst chose the Czech composer’s 1904 opera as the centerpiece of this season’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival because of its resonance with the theme of reconciliation. That’s a complex process that “transcends mere forgiveness and forgetfulness,” festival curator Elena Dubinets writes in the elaborate program book. “It entails recollection and progression.”

[Read more…]

CityMusic Cleveland Chamber Orchestra at Fairmount Presbyterian (May 15)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

In a 1902 interview, Gabriel Fauré, who spent much of his career as an organist, said his goal in writing his Requiem was to stray from the established path, “after all those years accompanying funerals.” So, rather than ending with the horror of a Dies irae, he chose In Paradisum instead.

On Thursday, May 15, at Fairmount Presbyterian Church, CityMusic Cleveland delivered both heaven and earth over the course of a diverse program. Responding to conductor Lorenzo Lopez’s assured direction, the ensemble gave sympathetic readings of William Grant Still’s Danzas de Panama and Gabriela Lena Frank’s Leyendas, then ascended to a higher place in Fauré’s Requiem, aided by superb singing from soprano Chabrelle Williams, baritone Edward Vogel, and the CityMusic Community Choir.

[Read more…]

Les Délices delights with “The Mermaid” in Rocky River (Apr. 27)

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by Daniel Hathaway

As their name implies, the rarefied music of the French baroque is the pain quotidien of Cleveland’s period instrument ensemble Les Délices, but artistic director Debra Nagy occasionally points her excellent and variable group in other directions.

The latest crossing of genres at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church on Sunday afternoon, April 27,  took Nagy and her colleagues out of the salons of Paris across the Channel to the docks of Portsmouth.

Wielding her baroque oboe and recorder, Nagy joined soprano Elena Mullins Bailey, violinist Allison Monroe, cellist Rebecca Landell, percussionist Anthony Taddeo, and special guest Sean Dagher, shantyman and Irish bouzouki artist, in slightly more than an hour’s worth of rollicking sea shanties, plus oceanic tunes by Henry Purcell, Joseph Haydn, and Maurice Green.

[Read more…]

Rocky River Chamber Music Society: horn, violin, and piano make a delightful trio (May 5)

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by Stephanie Manning

The Rocky River Chamber Music Society’s season-ending concert, featuring the principal horn of The Cleveland Orchestra, was understandably marketed as “Nathaniel Silberschlag & Friends.” But the other two names contained in the “& Friends” — violinist Genevieve Smelser and pianist Alicja Basinka — were equally as important to the evening’s success.

On May 5 at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church, the trio of local musicians delivered a wonderfully relaxing evening of chamber music by Johannes Brahms and Charles Koechlin. [Read more…]

Evgeny Kissin mesmerizes with Bach, Chopin, and Shostakovich at Severance (May 7)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Few pianists today elicit the kind of eager expectation, borne of star-power and reputation, that Evgeny Kissin does the moment he takes the stage. There is a quality to his presence — austere and shy yet fully possessed — that electrifies a listener before a single note sounds. In Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center on Wednesday evening, May 7, Kissin’s program of J.S. Bach, Chopin, and Shostakovich, plus encores, had something to satisfy every fan’s wish.

Bach’s Partita No. 2 in C minor began the evening on low heat, with an understated approach to the Sinfonia‘s long, elegant lines. But it wasn’t until the final Capriccio that the pianist’s rhythmic and technical polish fully enlivened Bach’s polyphony without diminishing its architectural integrity.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra presents world premiere of poignant, Cleveland-inspired work by Allison Loggins-Hull (May 8)

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by Stephanie Manning

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Composer Allison Loggins-Hull spent the past three years immersing herself in the city of Cleveland as The Cleveland Orchestra’s Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow. Drawing on her interactions with residents and community organizations, her valedictory composition, Grit. Grace. Glory., is a sonic celebration of the city she recently called home.

The piece, co-commissioned by the Toronto Symphony, received its world premiere by Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra on Thursday, May 8, at Severance Music Center. The 22-minute work was the rightful centerpiece of the evening, interposed between symphonies by Mozart and Prokofiev.

[Read more…]

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