by Robert Rollin
Kent Blossom presented its fifth and final faculty series program in Ludwig Recital Hall last Wednesday, August 1. The evening’s highlight was the gorgeous performance of Charles-Marie Widor’s Sonata for Cello and Piano in A by Richard Weiss, Cleveland Orchestra first assistant principal cello, and Joela Jones, Cleveland Orchestra keyboardist.
by David Kulma
Wind players take every opportunity to play Mozart, and when they are musicians at the highest level, it’s easy to come away smiling. That was the case on the Kent Blossom faculty concert on Wednesday, July 25 in Kent State’s Ludwig Recital Hall, where an array of Mozart’s works for winds made for a splendid evening.
by Kelly Ferjutz
Special to ClevelandClassical.com
Ohio Light Opera is no stranger to the works of Franz Lehár: prior to this year, seven of his operettas had been performed by the company, the most frequent being his luscious The Merry Widow. Number eight, having opened at Freedlander Theatre on July 25, is Cloclo, which is not in the usual Viennese operetta mode. First off, it takes place in Paris, as well as the French countryside near Perpignan. And written a few years after the end of WWI, its musical sensibility sensibility is a good bit different: it includes jazz, a tango, blues, and even a take-off on the final scene from Fledermaus — not originally written by Lehár. You know the one, when the inmates and jailor are happily mixed with champagne. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
At 45 minutes in length, the first of 2018’s three Summers at Severance concerts may have been short, but guest conductor Herbert Blomstedt and The Cleveland Orchestra used their three quarters of an hour onstage to make a powerful experience out of a single work — Brahms’ Fourth Symphony. Conducting without a stick and never cracking open the small score on the podium, Blomstedt sculpted every detail of the piece, melding expressive, colorful lines into a pulsing musical organism. [Read more…]
by Delaney Meyers
On a recent visit to Grafton Correctional Facility, students from Credo Music Festival performed for and talked with some of the residents in the prison’s chapel, with an audience of about 50 and a backdrop of multiple green plants. This was part of Credo’s weekly service day, during which young musicians engage with the community in multiple ways — from picking up trash along the side of the highway, to performing at places that aren’t often filled with music. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Stevens
After the Emerson String Quartet’s performance with cellist Jerry Grossman at Kent State University last week, audience members exited Ludwig Recital Hall to find an extraordinary reception laid out. Food and drink of diverse tastes, textures, and temperatures lined half a dozen tables. It felt like a metaphor for the concert: so rich and extensive that to describe it is to make it sound excessive. Despite its duration and emotional range, however, the concert itself never felt overstuffed. It went down smoothly, like an expertly arranged and executed feast. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Stevens
The film-with-live-orchestra format has swept the U.S. of late because of its broad appeal. It boasts advantages over both the traditional open-air concert and the movie theater experience, uniting the vivid sound and fresh setting of the one with the narrative cohesion and thrilling visuals of the other. When a distinguished conductor leads one of the world’s greatest orchestras in one of history’s greatest film musical scores, what could go wrong? [Read more…]
by Kelly Ferjutz
You’ve heard of “screwball comedies,” right? Well, here’s your chance to see a screwball comedy disguised as an operetta. The sumptuous music is by the German-French master, Jacques Offenbach, and features a sparkling new English translation by OLO’s Jacob Allen. The original French libretto from 1868 is by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy. Offenbach wrote nearly 100 operettas from the 1850s–1870s, on more than a dozen of which Meilhac collaborated, while Halévy assisted on more than twenty. Today, only half a dozen or so are still in the active repertoire. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
The first Cleveland Orchestra concert at the Blossom Music Center occurred on July 19, 1968. On Saturday evening’s concert there was no official recognition of that 50th anniversary, but the event did mark another tradition in existence since 1990: a “side-by-side” performance in which members of the Kent Blossom Chamber Orchestra were interspersed with The Cleveland Orchestra. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Stevens
Straightforward though the concert experience may seem, myriad issues can intervene between performers and their audience. Programming is an art unto itself, and vagaries of context, time of day, and location can obscure the great music-making at the heart of an event. The July 15th performance on the Kent Blossom Music Festival’s Student Concert Series, hosted by the Hudson Library and Historical Society, illustrated as much. Each of the fourteen string players showed exceptional skill and experience as they performed, but the repertoire — along with the venue — conspired against them. [Read more…]