by Mike Telin
Like a great dinner menu, concert programs should provide listeners with a variety of tastes. On Friday, November 3 in Oberlin Conservatory’s Warner Concert Hall, Timothy Weiss and his top-notch Contemporary Music Ensemble deftly performed three works that never ran out of inventive musical ideas. [Read more…]
by Robert Rollin
Last Friday night Opera Western Reserve presented Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at Stambaugh Auditorium, sung in Italian with production director David Vosburgh’s fine supertitles. The excellent cast, coupled with Susan Davenny Wyner’s adroit conducting, a terrific orchestra, and Austin Pendleton’s well-paced staging, made for a very successful single performance. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
OBERLIN – At 25, British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor is a deep thinker whose touring recital program this season highlights historical-stylistic contrasts between composers such as Ravel and Berg, Brahms and Brett Dean. Click here to read the article on Classical Voice North America, the website of the Music Critics Association of North America.
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…]