by Kelly Ferjutz
Special to ClevelandClassical.com
Screwball comedies of the mid-20th Century may well have been inspired by the zany 1866 operetta La Vie Parisienne, which ran for 136 performances. Judging from Ohio Light Opera’s wildly entertaining production (I saw the show on Saturday, July 16), composer Jacques Offenbach surely knew what he was doing. If you want to laugh a lot and have your mood lifted by fast-paced dancing and singing, this show is for you. [Read more…]
by Neil McCalmont
On the evening of Saturday, July 16 at Gilmour Academy, the “Sonata Duo” portion of ENCORE Chamber Music’s inaugural season opened with a titanic concert by Brazilian pianist Arnaldo Cohen, consisting of works by Bach, Brahms, and Chopin. Lauded by one critic as “the greatest pianist you’ve never heard of,” Cohen has led a successful international career, but has yet to become a household name in the States. Given the night’s thrilling performance, this should soon change. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
When it comes to groups whose music combines a myriad of musical styles ranging from classical to pop, jazz to bluegrass, and everything in between, there’s Time for Three, and there’s everybody else. On Wednesday, July 13 Tf3 returned to Northeast Ohio for a concert at Cartwright Hall on the campus of Kent State University, violinists Nikki Chooi and Nicholas (Nick) Kendall and bassist Ranaan Meyer once again proving that nobody does it better than they do. [Read more…]
by J. D. Goddard
On Sunday, July 3, I attended the second of two pre-Fourth of July concerts at Blossom, performed by the Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of Johannes Debus. The open air pavilion was a picture perfect setting and the weather was ideal.
The evening opened with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, inspired by Tales of the Arabian Nights. The composer called it “A kaleidoscope of fairy-tale images,” [Read more…]
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…]