by Daniel Hathaway
The more predictable big performances at the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival each year take place on Friday and Saturday evenings, but the afternoons of those days offer more varied fare. For the 86th Festival, the organizers invited the Pittsburgh early music trio Chatham Baroque on Friday, and the Kenari Saxophone Quartet on Saturday, for programs that considered the legacy of J.S. Bach from two widely different points of view. [Read more…]
by David Kulma
The wonderful Nathan and Fannye Shafran Planetarium at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History is an unexpected venue for a music critic. But after the Planetarium upgraded to a digital projection system in 2010, its manager Jason Davis started 360° of Sight + Sound: The Planetarium Project in collaboration with the Cleveland Institutes of Art and Music (CIA and CIM) to develop student-animated short films. The fascinating fourth iteration — titled “Through the Ages” — graced the inside of the dome on Wednesday, April 18. [Read more…]
by David Kulma
A captivating art song recital lit up Finney Chapel on Tuesday, April 17. For this installment of Oberlin’s Artist Recital Series, the Canadian bill of bass-baritone Gerald Finley and pianist Michael McMahon explored well-chosen sets of works by Beethoven, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, and Rachmaninoff. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
In conjunction with Young Concert Artists and with the support of Maison Française de Cleveland, the Cleveland Chamber Music Society brought the young French cellist Edgar Moreau and American pianist Jessica Osborne to Plymouth Church on Tuesday, April 17 for spirited performances of sonatas by Prokofiev, Poulenc, and Franck. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Stevens
Variety, virtuosity, and vitality: by inviting the Laredo-Robinson Duo to play the penultimate concert of its 27th season, Arts Renaissance Tremont virtually guaranteed that listeners would experience all of the above. In a concert in Pilgrim Church on Sunday, April 15, the distinguished spouses Jaime Laredo, violin, and Sharon Robinson, cello, championed 20th-century and new pieces alongside familiar favorites.
by Robert Rollin
Last Saturday, April 14, the Youngstown Symphony presented “Side by Side,” the fourth and last Classics Series concert under the baton of Randall Craig Fleischer. The evening’s highlight was the performance of movements from Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony with teenage Youth Symphony musicians sitting in tandem with regular orchestra members.
by Daniel Hathaway
In their most recent appearance at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Peter Phillips’ renowned British vocal ensemble, Tallis Scholars, dedicated a program of sacred Renaissance music — with a couple of modern insertions — to those who lost their lives in the First World War from 1914 to 1918.
by Daniel Hathaway
The final event in the Cleveland Chamber Symphony’s 2018 NEOSonicFest gave eight young composers the opportunity to hear their creations played by a professional orchestra led by Steven Smith — himself a composer. The pieces were performed in Gamble Auditorium at Baldwin Wallace University on Wednesday, April 11.
by Nicholas Stevens
The sun is shining, the leaves regenerating — and something wonderfully alive is stirring in Severance Hall. The Cleveland Orchestra billed its programs on April 12 and 13 as “sneak previews” of the concert cycles that close its 100th season: windows into the ensemble’s preparations for The Ecstasy of Tristan and Isolde and The Prometheus Project. [Read more…]
by David Kulma
The Syndicate for the New Arts kicked off their new Transmitter series at Historic St. John’s on Tuesday night, April 10. Focusing on a collaboration among experimental noise musicians and video and performance artists, this first night had the Parish Hall both visually and aurally glowing. [Read more…]