by Daniel Hathaway
Northeast Ohio has had the pleasure of hearing London’s Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble twice in the past few months. Last May, eight string players from the Academy’s expandable and contractible large chamber music group visited the Tuesday Musical Series in Akron to play Brahms, Shostakovich, and Mendelssohn. Last Tuesday, a string quintet enhanced by three wind players opened the Cleveland Chamber Music Society’s 66th Season with Antonín Dvorak’s Quintet in G and Franz Schubert’s Octet in F. String Quartets are able to conjure up a vast palette of sonorities, but the addition of a double bass, clarinet, horn, and bassoon can increase the possibilities exponentially. [Read more…]
On Wednesday evening, September 30, Tuesday Musical kicked off its 2015-2016 concert series with the Escher String Quartet (violinists Adam Barnett-Hart and Aaron Boyd, violist Pierre Lapointe and cellist Brook Speltz). The New York-based ensemble delivered warm, passionate performances of music by Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, and Alexander Zemlinsky in the E.J. Thomas Performing Arts Hall on the campus of The University of Akron. 
The theme of the Canton Symphony Orchestra’s season-opening concert on October 3 at Umstattd Hall with Gerhardt Zimmermann conducting was “Heroes Among Us.” It is an ambitious theme, to be sure, and one that understandably sets up an expectation of hearing truly iconic music exemplifying lofty ideals such as bravery, courage, or sacrifice. And yet I felt half the program content on this occasion to be somewhat underwhelming in that regard, if not downright peculiar. 
This past Saturday night the Youngstown Symphony opened its 2015-16 Powers Auditorium season with a powerful, all-Russian program. Prior to coming to Ohio, Music Director Randall Craig Fleisher served as Mstislav Rostropovich’s assistant conductor at the National Symphony. Fleisher clearly displayed a talent and predilection for this music, and the Orchestra responded beautifully. The evening’s highlight was an excellent rendition of Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky’s impassioned Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Opus 74, “Pathetique” (1893). 
If The Cleveland Orchestra’s recent performance of Gustav Mahler’s third symphony were a restaurant, it would deserve the maximum three stars in the Michelin Guide (“exceptional…worth a special journey”). Franz Welser-Möst, the Orchestra, two of its choruses, and mezzo-soprano Kelley O’Connor took a captivated audience on a 95-minute journey into Mahler’s magic world on Thursday evening, October 5, the first of a pair of performances that weekend at Severance Hall, and an experience audiences in Paris and Vienna can look forward to during the Orchestra’s October tour. 
One of the most versatile early music ensembles in the country, Minneapolis-St. Paul’s Rose Ensemble offers touring programs that range from the life and deeds of St. Francis of Assisi, to an exploration of the roots of Bluegrass, to “Sibyls of the Rhine — Hildegard von Bingen and the Minstrel’s Song of Songs.” On Wednesday, September 30, Jordan Sramek brought his twelve singers to St. John’s Cathedral to perform “Slavic Wonders: Feasts and Saints in Early Russia, Poland, and Bohemia,” a wonderfully varied and superbly performed program. 
Officially raising the curtain on its new partnership with Italy’s International Piano Academy Lake Como, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music opened the 138th season of its Artist Recital Series on Sunday, September 27 in Finney Chapel with an impressive recital by Ran Jia, Alessandro Deljavan, and Marcos Madrigal, three artists who have recently been honing their skills to a fine edge at the institution founded by William Grant Naboré in 2002. 
English horn and organ make for a wonderfully sensuous combination, contrasting the mellow, almost mournful sound of the oboe’s big brother with the clarity of the organ’s tone. Oberlin Conservatory faculty members James David Christie, organ, and Robert Walters, English horn, (who is also a member of The Cleveland Orchestra) played a lovely recital on Sunday, September 27, at Immaculate Conception Church, on Superior Avenue just east of E. 40th Street in Cleveland. 
The Cleveland Orchestra crossed Wade Lagoon on Sunday afternoon, September 27 to launch two ships on important missions with a single concert. One order of business was to crack a musical champagne bottle across the bow of the Milton and Tamar Maltz Performing Arts Center at The Temple-Tifereth Israel. The newly renovated University Circle landmark will continue to serve as a space to celebrate major religious holidays and life events while also providing Case Western Reserve University with the first stage in the creation of a long-needed performing arts facility. 
When you go to one of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s concerts at Transformer Station in Hingetown on Cleveland’s near West Side, expect to hear music as edgy and provocative as the art on the walls (and just as hip: the current exhibition from the collection of the Akron Art Museum dispenses with wall tags in favor of elucidation from your smart phone). The performance on Friday, September 25, the second of three concerts by featured performer Ellen Fullman and cellist Theresa Wong, fit that m.o. perfectly.