by Daniel Hathaway
As their name implies, the rarefied music of the French baroque is the pain quotidien of Cleveland’s period instrument ensemble Les Délices, but artistic director Debra Nagy occasionally points her excellent and variable group in other directions.
The latest crossing of genres at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church on Sunday afternoon, April 27, took Nagy and her colleagues out of the salons of Paris across the Channel to the docks of Portsmouth.
Wielding her baroque oboe and recorder, Nagy joined soprano Elena Mullins Bailey, violinist Allison Monroe, cellist Rebecca Landell, percussionist Anthony Taddeo, and special guest Sean Dagher, shantyman and Irish bouzouki artist, in slightly more than an hour’s worth of rollicking sea shanties, plus oceanic tunes by Henry Purcell, Joseph Haydn, and Maurice Green.
The Rocky River Chamber Music Society’s season-ending concert, featuring the principal horn of The Cleveland Orchestra, was understandably marketed as “Nathaniel Silberschlag & Friends.” But the other two names contained in the “& Friends” — violinist Genevieve Smelser and pianist Alicja Basinka — were equally as important to the evening’s success.
This article was originally published on 
This article was originally published on 
To celebrate its 75th anniversary, the Cleveland Chamber Music Society engaged the dauntless Jerusalem Quartet to play a complete cycle of Dmitri Shostakovich’s fifteen string quartets. The works were performed in chronological order over five evenings in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
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There are very few American cities who can count themselves as having an official fanfare. But now, Akron is one of them.