by Samantha Spaccasi
“The Cavani Quartet is the heart and soul of ENCORE Chamber Music,” festival director Jinjoo Cho said before the group’s performance Friday night at the Gilmour Academy’s Tudor House. The Quartet proved why they are beloved during enjoyable performances of Shostakovich, Joaquín Turina, and Schubert. [Read more…]
by Joshua Rosner
On June 23, as beautiful light poured through Mixon Hall’s many windows, ChamberFest Cleveland presented “Hommage,” a program showcasing composers paying tribute to J.S. Bach. The concert began with the final two movements of Bach’s Suite No. 2 in b, replacing the originally programmed Cantata BWV 209 due to the withdrawal of mezzo-soprano Lauren Eberwein. [Read more…]
by Robert Rollin
On Sunday afternoon, June 18, Encore Chamber Music presented “Summer Tango,” an outstanding collaborative concert including the Jupiter and Cavani String Quartets and violinist Jinjoo Cho. The enthusiastic audience filled the small but opulent, wood-paneled room at Gilmour Academy’s Tudor House. [Read more…]
by Joshua Rosner
The audience at Mixon Hall was abuzz with anticipation Thursday night, June 22 for the fifth installment of the sixth season of ChamberFest Cleveland. “Fin de Siècle” (end of century) was a tapestry of compositions with roots in Austria from before and after the First World War. The evening consisted of works by Brahms, Ravel, and Korngold and was designed to showcase pianist Orion Weiss, a Lyndhurst native. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
György Kurtág, unlike his friend and fellow Hungarian György Ligeti, never softened his composing style. While his early works were more or less tonal, Ligeti’s style turned to modernism in the 1960s before evolving to become considerably more approachable by casual listeners. Kurtág’s severely modernist music is austerely beautiful and darkly dramatic, perhaps more to be admired than loved. [Read more…]
by Samantha Spaccasi
A hot and humid Friday night did not stop the Jupiter Quartet from putting on a stellar performance at the Gilmour Academy’s Tudor House. The group performed a “Beethoven sandwich” — two pieces by Beethoven with a delicious Ligeti work in the middle — for a fantastic opening to ENCORE Chamber Music’s second season.
The intimate setting was perfect for an evening of chamber music. Gathered in a richly decorated, wood-paneled room complete with grand portraits, the audience was transported back in time, as if we were aristocrats in a Parisian salon in the mid-1800s. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
With the theme of Cycles: Phases, the sixth ChamberFest Cleveland opened Thursday evening, June 15, in Mixon Hall, at the Cleveland Institute of Music. The theme reflects on “the complexity of the human experience at each stage of life, and ultimately circles around all types of musical, political and emotional phases.”
The concert showed off the qualities we have come to expect from ChamberFest: brilliantly imaginative programming, with a mix of old, new, familiar, and unfamiliar works, in superior performances by (mostly young) musicians hand-picked by festival directors Franklin and Diana Cohen. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
With a mission to “give a voice to the composers of our time,” the latest addition to Northeast Ohio’s opera scene, ContempOpera/Cleveland, presented an impressive first installment of the company’s Incubator Series at Cleveland Public Theatre on Friday, June 9. The evening featured musical selections from five operas, some of them works in progress.
The evening began with two duets from Verlorene Heimat by Dawn L. Sonntag. The piece recounts the true story of East Prussian Nazi resistors and the Jewish-Ukrainian girl they sheltered during the final months of World War II. The haunting “Once I Had a Garden” was beautifully sung by sopranos Rebecca Freshwater and Andrea Anelli. Baritone Brian Keith Johnson joined Freshwater for the hopeful “I Promise I Will Find You.” Sonntag’s musical color palette is enticing, and the three singers gave heartfelt performances. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
For its annual plunge into the non-Baroque, Apollo’s Fire took its early summer audiences on a cultural excursion around the Mediterranean, a journey resembling the travels of Ziryab, a 9th-century African troubadour who was the Johann Gottlieb Goldberg of his era, the favorite oud player for the insomniac kalif of Baghdad.
Ziryab’s musical skills launched his wanderings — he was kicked out of the palace by its jealous regular minstrel — as well as inspiring co-curators Amanda Powell and Brian Kay to gather fifteen songs and dances from Medieval and Renaissance Spain, Cyprus, Italy, and Greece into an engaging program. [Read more…]
by Jeremy Reynolds
In the eight years since Martina Filjak won the gold medal at the 2009 Cleveland International Piano Competition the Croatian pianist has performed around the world with distinguished orchestras and conductors. In December 2016 Filjak released a solo album titled simply Martina Filjak, Piano on the German Solo Musica label. [Read more…]