by Daniel Hathaway
Akron Baroque marked its tenth anniversary as an ensemble with a festive performance of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks and the premiere of founder Amy Barlowe’s expressive Magnificat at Fairlawn’s Faith Lutheran Church on Sunday, June 5, led by guest conductor Marie Bucoy-Calavan. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Susan Graham’s splendidly communicative recital program on the Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival on Thursday evening, May 26 in Gamble Auditorium, involved slipping twenty extra songs in between the original eight of Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben. That resulted in a rich, nuanced commentary on the composer’s chronicle of a woman’s life cycle from the first glimpse of her beloved all the way through marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth, ending with his demise. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
On Tuesday, May 24, French baritone Edwin Crossley-Mercer and pianist Jason Paul Peterson opened the 2016 edition of the Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival with a recital in Gamble Auditorium. Now in its 30th year, the week-long festival, which focuses on the combination of solo singer and piano, is the brainchild of retired Cleveland Institute of Music voice professor George Vassos. [Read more…]
by Robert Rollin
On Sunday evening, May 22, Choral Arts Cleveland presented its third and final concert of the season at Christ Episcopal Church in Shaker Heights. The program, titled “Chiaroscuro, Light and Shadow, Bodies in Motion,” included an interesting variety of styles and performance forces, including solo songs; a capella choruses; choruses accompanied by piano, organ, and additional instruments; and dancers from Verb Ballets. In the waning golden evening light, the sanctuary sparkled with atmosphere. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
Hearing a concert featuring six premieres is not unusual. However, when those new works are all written by high-school age composers, that is a reason to take note. On Sunday afternoon, May 15, a capacity crowd gathered at the Bop Stop to hear an impressive concert that featured works by students in the Northern Ohio Youth Orchestra Young Composers Program. The concert also included performances by ensembles from NOYO’s Chamber Music Extension. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
For the finale of the 2015-2016 Wednesday Noon Brownbag Concert season, music director Todd Wilson invited his predecessor, Horst Buchholz, back to conduct the Trinity Chamber Orchestra in works by George Frideric Handel and Howard Hanson featuring organist Nicholas Haigh, soprano Margaret Carpenter Haigh, and Wilson himself. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Constructing a concert devoted to the work of a single composer is like curating a gallery retrospective. On Sunday afternoon, May 22 at Historic St. Peter Church in downtown Cleveland, Ross W. Duffin and the 24 professional singers of Quire Cleveland treated a large audience to a well-chosen selection from the sacred music of “England’s Phoenix,” William Byrd, a composer who led a charmed life. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Strange to tell, but in its nearly hundred-year history, The Cleveland Orchestra never got around to playing two major works by Antonín Dvořák and Leoš Janáček until last Thursday evening. On May 19, Franz Welser-Möst led the orchestra in their first-ever performance of Dvořák’s The Wood Dove and their first performance of more than the overture from Janáček’s opera The House of the Dead. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Music director Avner Dorman and CityMusic Cleveland Chamber Orchestra wound up their current five-concert tour around Cleveland on Sunday afternoon, May 15 at Lakewood Congregational Church. Guest violinist Tessa Lark was the engaging soloist in Antonín Dvořák’s Violin Concerto, and finely-wrought performances of Felix Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture and Symphony No. 3 filled out the program. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Jones
The Cleveland Chamber Music Society presented the Dover Quartet on Tuesday, May 10 in the final concert of its 2015-16 season at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights. The program ranged from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, unified by a Romantic palette that perfectly matched the expressive playing of this distinguished young ensemble. [Read more…]