by Robert Rollin
On Wednesday evening, July 12, Youngstown’s St. John’s Episcopal Church, in cooperation with Pennsylvania’s Newcastle Eintracht Männerchor and WYSU-FM, played host to an unusual and outstanding event. Elias David Moncado, a fifteen-year-old violinist from Germany, was the headliner. Moncado’s mother, Mooi Jieu, played the lion’s share of the piano parts, and her husband Bernard, a conductor and chorus master, also played piano and provided commentary. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
Since its formation in 2010 at the Colburn School in Los Angeles, the Calidore String Quartet has been on a fast-track to success in the competitive world of professional chamber music. In 2016 alone the Quartet won England’s Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship, becoming the first North American ensemble to receive the £20,000 award in the foundation’s history. During May they made their Carnegie Hall debut, and also won the $100,000 grand prize at the inaugural M-Prize Chamber Music Competition.
by Kelly Ferjutz
special to ClevelandClassical.com
As a general rule, elevators go up and down, conveying people or goods from one level to another in a given building. The elevator on stage for OLO’s production of Have a Heart, however, goes backwards. It takes the happy audience (plus cast and crew) straight back to early 1917, and the premiere production of Jerome Kern’s then-new musical. It’s a delightful journey, one you won’t want to miss. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Jones
Two Romantic meditations on death comprised the first of this year’s Cleveland Orchestra Summers @Severance programs last Friday evening — Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration and Johannes Brahms’s A German Requiem — both works of ambitious scope and seriousness, led by music director Franz Welser-Möst.
The Romantics knew how to face death. John Keats declared himself “half in love with easeful death.” “Death is the mother of beauty,” asserted Wallace Stevens, that modernist poet with a Romantic soul. [Read more…]
by Neil McCalmont
Summer time is a funner time, and what could be more fun than putting together a picnic and heading off to Blossom Music Festival for wonderful weather and music performed by The Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of Franz Welser-Möst?
On the evening of Saturday, July 9, thousands of listeners gathered in the pavilion, and on the lawn in the Blossom Bowl, spreading their blankets, reclining in their lawn chairs, and soaking up the warm summer night with their loved ones. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Jones
Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor is, to say the least, a daunting work. It’s full of challenging vocal and instrumental parts that seem to venture into every key in the theory book. It’s composed of one complicated counterpoint after another. And like any sung mass, its musical integrity can seem at odds with the liturgical functions of the texts. And it’s long (over two hours). In its recent embodiment at Oberlin’s Baroque Performance Institute (BPI), all of these challenges seemed to disappear. [Read more…]
by Neil McCalmont & Mike Telin
In celebration of the summer solstice on June 21, Cleveland inaugurated its first Make Music Day. Over 700 cities worldwide participate in this open-to-all festival, launched in 1982 by the French Ministry of Culture. Local venues offered performances throughout the city, including the Cleveland Clinic, the Bop Stop, Edgewater Park, Stone Mad Park, Toast, the Happy Dog, and many others. [Read more…]
by Neil McCalmont
On Wednesday evening, July 6, the Miami String Quartet and pianist Spencer Myer gave a thrilling concert in Ludwig Recital Hall at Kent State University. This installment of the Kent/Blossom Faculty Concert Series showcased two short but fiery string quartets — Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Serioso” in f, Op. 95 and Gabriela Frank’s Milagros (“Miracles”) — as well as Johannes Brahms’s Piano Quartet in g, Op. 25. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The twelfth and final event of ChamberFest Cleveland 2016 was a festive, multimedia concert at the Maltz Performing Arts Center on Saturday, July 2. The event was built around Igor Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat, complete with puppetry and video projections — with free admission for 17 and under, and ice cream for all afterwards. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Expanding its “Tales & Legends” theme in the direction of expeditions, ChamberFest Cleveland presented “Schubert Journeys” on Friday, July 1 in Reinberger Chamber Hall at Severance. In this case, the composer’s journeys were either brief and dramatic (in the Quartettsatz in c) or agreeably rambling — like a stroll in the countryside with no destination and no timetable (in the Octet). In between, Kurt Rohde’s … maestoso … mysterioso … sent two musicians off into uncharted territory with a curious set of tools. [Read more…]