by Daniel Hathaway
Among the more important activities during the four-month Violins of Hope Cleveland project are the extensive educational activities being offered to schools and students by a number of area institutions. On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday (December 2 – 4) at 10:10 am and 12:10 noon, associate conductor Brett Mitchell and The Cleveland Orchestra — in conjunction with graduate students from the Case Western Reserve University / Cleveland Play House MFA Program in Acting — presented six engaging, hour-long concerts that unflinchingly presented the events of the Holocaust in music, mime, and words. [Read more…]
With characters like Stanley Kowalski and Blanche Dubois, its setting in the French Quarter of New Orleans in the 1940s, and its subplots of sensuality, delusion, and madness, Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire makes it a shoo-in for operatic treatment. Composer André Previn and librettist Philip Littell took that task on in 1995, and Cleveland Opera Theater chose their adaptation of Streetcar for its second show at the Masonic Performing Arts Center, mounting a production that was admirable for its ambition and impressive in its results. 
The Cleveland Classical Guitar Society took a different approach to the term “Classical” on Saturday, November 12 at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights when they presented their first concert featuring Flamenco music. And as we have come to expect from CCGS, their choice of artist could not have been better. From first note to last, Russian guitarist Grisha Goryachev performed with brilliant technique and musical passion during his program that could have easily been subtitled “Homage to Paco de Lucía.” 
In the closing movements of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, the full brass section makes a spectacular entrance. In 1830, it must have seemed a sound that had never been heard before. Even in the jaded 21st century, it has a startling sonic complexity — at times as metallic as a locomotive’s firebox, and at others as smooth as the oiled bearings that drive the machine. 
In Classical mythology, Terpsichore, the daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne, is the Muse of Dance. On November 21, she was present at Umstattdt Performing Arts Hall, in all her poetic vivacity, for a magnificent performance by the Canton Symphony Orchestra (CSO). 
Continuing Cuyahoga Community College’s distinguished Classical Piano Series, Italian pianist Orazio Maione played an intriguing program of works by Sergei Prokofiev and Frédéric Chopin in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Sunday afternoon, November 22. This concert was sponsored by the Northern Ohio Italian American Foundation. 
On the eve of St. Cecilia’s Day — but obviously blessed in advance by the patron saint of music — the Cleveland Chamber Choir sang a splendid inaugural concert at First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights. Under the direction of its founder, Scott MacPherson, the new ensemble’s performance on Saturday, November 21 set a very high standard for themselves as a professional choral ensemble, and MacPherson’s programming whetted the appetite for more imaginative concert menus to come. 
The plucky concert presenters at Arts Renaissance Tremont continued their excellent 25th Season on Sunday afternoon, November 22 at Pilgrim Church with a complete performance of Igor Stravinsky’s 1918 theater piece, L’Histoire du soldat, as well as the first performance of a new work by ART’s guest composer-in-residence, David Conte, who was present to conduct his own work. 
Replicating in concert form the format he developed for his recent CD, Pictures, the 21-year-old piano phenomenon Conrad Tao walked his audience through two musical galleries on Wednesday evening, November 18. The second half of Tuesday Musical’s Margaret Baxtresser Annual Piano Concert had already been curated by Modest Mussorgsky, who used paintings by Victor Hartmann to inspire his popular suite Pictures at an Exhibition. 
On Saturday, November 14, BlueWater Chamber Orchestra presented a program at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights that could be described as a showcase for some of Cleveland’s most talented musicians. Led by founder and conductor Carlton Woods, the ensemble performed three sublime and challenging works by Gabriel Fauré, Giuseppe Maria Cambini, and Francis Poulenc. These high-energy pieces, calling for technical bravado and some for lush romanticism, seemed to be joined at the hip, and made for an evening that was both serene and breathtakingly beautiful.