by Daniel Hathaway
The five sold-out performances of “Christmas on Sugarloaf Mountain” this month attest to the popularity of Apollo’s Fire’s crossover shows. Heard on Saturday, December 9 at First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights, the holiday sequel to “Sugarloaf Mountain: an Appalachian Gathering” was just as alluring and infectious as its predecessor, even if some of its elements were still in the process of settling in. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
For the past 22 years, conductor Liza Grossman has been turning young musicians on to the expansive repertoire that falls under the category of new music. On Saturday, December 9 in CSU’s Waetjen Auditorium, Grossman led her Contemporary Youth Orchestra in the opening concert of the impressive ensemble’s 23rd season. The program, titled “Go! Music to Get You Moving,” took listeners on a stroll from the English countryside to the birthplace of techno music in the empty warehouses of downtown Detroit. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Stevens
At performances by CityMusic Cleveland last week, principal guest conductor Stefan Willich began his comments with a terse observation: “Love is a complicated thing.” It served as a wry introduction to Richard Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, five settings of poems by the married Mathilde Wesendonck, written as Wagner (also married) pursued an affair with her. However, the statement could have served as a motto for each of the pieces on the program. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The last regular Cleveland Orchestra concert before Severance Hall was to be decked out for its Christmas Concerts featured a new work by Julian Anderson, a Mozart concerto with pianist Richard Goode, and Brahms’ First Symphony led by Finnish guest conductor Mikko Franck. [Read more…]
by Jarrett Hoffman
With their latest album, The Book of Keyboards, Chicago-based Third Coast Percussion drops you into another world. The inhabitants: six bafflingly good players, one revelatory composer in Philippe Manoury, a family of four tuned percussion instruments, and you — and after hearing this music there’s no going back.
by Daniel Hathaway
Last Tuesday evening, December 5, the Emerson String Quartet visited the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights for the first time in several years. They made up for that hiatus with performances of striking works by Haydn, Britten, and Shostakovich, the last of the three all the more intense for having been played with most of the lights out. [Read more…]
by Tom Wachunas
In the beginning, I thought that the Canton Symphony’s December 3 MasterWorks program, called “Gifts of Fate,” was a peculiar, even arbitrary pairing of very disparate works: The Secret Gift, a Christmas-themed symphonic poem of sorts, written in 2013 by American composer Eric Benjamin, and Ludwig van Beethoven’s iconic 1807 masterpiece, Symphony No. 5. But by evening’s end, I heard the connective light. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
With echoes of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony still lingering in the corners of Severance Hall from their elder ensemble’s concert on Thursday evening, the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra (COYO) made an impressive showing in works by Beethoven, Barber, and Prokofiev on Friday, December 1, marking the debut of their new conductor Vinay Parameswaran at the beginning of their 32nd season. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Salvatore Sciarrino’s Piano Concerto: Il sogno di Stradella and Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4 (“Romantic”) shared Thursday evening’s Cleveland Orchestra program on November 30 at Severance Hall, conducted by Fabio Luisi and featuring pianist Jonathan Biss. Perhaps the two works were related on a deep, metaphysical level. Perhaps they merely provided extreme contrasts in scale. [Read more…]
by Jarrett Hoffman
Myth & Tradition unfolds like a series of trials that our protagonist, cellist Darrett Adkins, must overcome. Alongside the impressive Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, directed by Timothy Weiss, Adkins conjures a mythical bird in the world premiere recording of Su Lian Tan’s five-movement Legends of Kintamani (2016). Next he navigates the brainy twists and turns of Philip Cashian’s Concerto for Cello and Strings (2012), another work written for Adkins.