by Daniel Hathaway
At once historical and metaphorical in its subject, Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia delivers a lot in a compact package. The eight singers of Oberlin Opera Theater and fifteen instrumentalists of the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble delivered an outstanding performance of the British composer’s 1946 chamber opera last Wednesday evening in Hall Auditorium — one that left the audience with a lot to think about. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Making virtue out of necessity, CIM Opera Theater director David Bamberger introduced a new operatic technique in his production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro on Thursday, November 5 in Kulas Hall: ventriloquism.
by Yevhen Gulenko, guest writer
Have you ever heard a guitar tell a story? The thought may sound silly until you have heard the Croatian master Ana Vidović play. She is the rare musician who can make her instrument sound sublime, whether interpreting the Baroque works of Bach or performing arrangements of modern popular classics by Toru Takemitsu. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Performing to a full house, the Masterworks Chorale of Summit Choral Society began its 26th season under the new leadership of artistic director Marie Bucoy-Calavan with warm, confident performances of Johannes Brahms’s Schicksalslied and Wolfgang Amadè Mozart’s Requiem on Sunday, November 1 in Akron’s Holy Trinity Lutheran Church. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Jones
The truism holds that French aristocrats before the Revolution danced time away in utter complacency, refusing to change in the face of the inevitable. The image is probably true with respect to most things that would have mattered to those who stormed the Bastille. But in the world of music, things were changing decades before the Revolution. Writing within a framework of courtly elegance that would have pleased Marie Antoinette, composers were also pushing the boundaries of their music with wit, irony, turmoil, and glimmers of Romantic self-consciousness. [Read more…]
by Carlyn Kessler
On Sunday afternoon, October 25, Arts Renaissance Tremont presented the third concert of its 25th Season, “Franklin Cohen and Friends,” at Pilgrim Church in Tremont — a delightful autumn afternoon of clarinet and chamber music. Departing from the printed program, the concert opened with Mozart’s Trio in E-flat, K. 498 “Kegelstatt,” featuring pianist Rafael Skorka, clarinetist Franklin Cohen, and violist Kirsten Docter. “Kegelstatt” is German for the location where one would play “skittles,” a lawn game similar to bowling that was popular in Mozart’s era. [Read more…]
by Tom Wachunas
Conjuring the spirit of Halloween for just one more night, the November 1 program by the Canton Symphony Orchestra under the enchanted baton (or magic wand?) of Gerhardt Zimmermann, was frightfully delicious. Not that I favor socializing in the netherworld, but from beginning to end, the evening was a magnificent dance with the devil. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
Violinist Andrew Sords and pianist Eriko Izumida performed an audience-pleasing concert on Sunday afternoon, November 1, as part of the Chagrin Concert Series at the Valley Lutheran Church in Chagrin Falls. The program of works by Fauré, Ravel, and Franck included several landmarks of the late Romantic violin repertoire, all expertly performed. [Read more…]
by Robert Rollin
Under talented conductor Susan Davenny Wyner, the Warren Philharmonic presented a vibrant, imaginative family concert called Stories, Dances, Tricks and Treats at Christ Episcopal Church in Warren last Sunday, November 1. The opening half more than justified this title and contained a delightful mélange of programmatic compositions. Manuel De Falla’s El Sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat), Ballet Suite No. 1 and Alexander Borodin’s Polovetsian Dances from the opera Prince Igor, the most substantial pieces, received particularly fine performances and enlivened the afternoon. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
This week Steven Plank, the Andrew B. Meldrum Professor of Musicology at Oberlin College, will celebrate his 25th anniversary as director of the Oberlin Collegium Musicum, when over 70 of his former singers gather for a reunion concert on November 7 at 8:00 pm in Warner Concert Hall. Read more about the event here. In a recent compilation CD, CANTEMUS II: Music of the Oberlin Collegium Musicum, Plank leads his top-notch ensemble in stellar performances of seminal works of sacred music from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. [Read more…]