by Mike Telin
CLEVELAND – Margaret Brouwer’s “environmental oratorio,” Voice of the Lake, was inspired by an algae bloom in Lake Erie that caused a water crisis in 2014. Its premiere makes an urgent case that the lake is in trouble. Click here to read the article on Classical Voice North America, the website of the Music Critics Association of North America.
by Robert Rollin
Last Saturday night at Powers Auditorium, the Youngstown Symphony, under the direction of Randall Craig Fleischer, presented a charming concert of American music. The evening’s highlight was Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite with photomontage stills and film images collected by Texas composer Stephen Lias. Though the visuals showed the influence of Disney’s 1959 Academy Award-winning movie Grand Canyon, they incorporated new images. The performance sparkled in color, ensemble, and continuity. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Before dedicated conductors began standing in front of orchestras and wielding batons, ensembles used several means to coordinate their playing. The least subtle and most dangerous — as Jean-Baptiste Lully found out — was to pound on the floor with a staff. (He managed to wound himself in the foot and eventually died of gangrene.) More safely, ensembles were cued from the keyboard or by the first violinist, as Cleveland Orchestra audiences have experienced in past performances led by Mitsuko Uchida and William Preucil, who guided the proceedings while playing the piano and violin. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
There were no clinking glasses or telltale scents of hot dogs and Tater Tots on Sunday at Ensemble HD’s performance for Music from The Western Reserve at Christ Episcopal Church in Hudson. Let me explain: Ensemble HD was originally formed by several members of The Cleveland Orchestra to perform classical music gigs at Cleveland’s West Side iconic bar The Happy Dog, with its eclectic mix of entertainment. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
American tenor Nicholas Phan led members of Cleveland’s Baroque orchestra Apollo’s Fire in a stunning live performance of Phan’s English Baroque lute song album, A Painted Tale, this weekend at several local venues, including St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights on Friday night. [Read more…]
by Tom Wachunas
A particularly edifying component of the MasterWorks Concerts from the Canton Symphony Orchestra are the “Performance Preludes,” presented one hour before the program. Traditionally, these 30-minute sessions are lectures by guest speakers, often accompanied by recorded segments of music used to elucidate aspects of the upcoming program. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Johann Sebastian Bach’s 200 surviving church cantatas (some think he may have written even more) usually get performed out of context in modern times. Fifth-year Oberlin student Matt Bickett and friends created the Oberlin Cantata Project to surround one of these important works with other liturgical music that would have been experienced in the same service by Bach’s congregations in Leipzig. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Just back from its triumphant European tour, The Cleveland Orchestra joined two old friends — guest conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy and pianist Emanuel Ax — for resplendent performances of Elgar and Beethoven at Severance Hall on Sunday afternoon, November 5. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
What does it take to create a sparkling production of Mozart’s opera buffa The Marriage of Figaro? The music, of course, comes first, and you need a fine group of vocalists to put the composer’s engaging arias and brilliant finales across, a flexible conductor and orchestra in the pit, and a sure hand at the keyboard for recitatives. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
For reasons unknown, Sharon Isbin, one of the leading classical guitar virtuosos of our time, had never performed in Cleveland until Saturday evening, November 4, when she appeared in a recital for the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society at Plymouth Church of Shaker Heights. During the second half of the evening, she was joined by Cleveland native Colin Davin, a former Isbin student and current faculty member at the Cleveland Institute of Music and Baldwin Wallace University. [Read more…]