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Re•Views

Review: La Cambiale di Matrimonio at Kent/Blossom Festival (July 18)

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by Mike Telin

Rossini-CambialeAfter a nearly thirty-year absence, vocal music returned to the Kent/Blossom Festival on Saturday, July 18 in Ludwig Recital Hall, and what an enjoyable afternoon it was. In fact, there are so many good things to say it’s difficult to know where to begin. Let’s start with the delightful musical selection — Rossini’s first professional opera, La Cambiale di Matrimonio or The Marriage Contract, performed in a costumed concert version sung in Italian with English supertitles (Sarah Harvey). [Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom: big turnout for a festive opener (July 11)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Blossom-Lawn-071115A crowd estimated at 10,000 blanketed the lawn and filled the center section of the vast pavilion on Saturday evening, July 11, as The Cleveland Orchestra settled into its Blossom season. The program included striking performances of Olivier Messiaen’s L’Ascension and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 led by music director Franz Welser-Möst. That seemingly odd pairing of pieces added up to an evening of orchestral and choral ecstasy from two very different points of view.

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Ohio Light Opera: Oh, Kay, a madcap comedy with a bit of everything, set to music by Gershwin

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by Kelly Ferjutz, special to clevelandclassical

OLO-Oh-KayGet your laughter on, as you’ll surely need it in this marvelous recreation of the 1926 Broadway musical that the super-talented Gershwin brothers wrote for the great Gertrude Lawrence. With a book by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse and a little help from Howard Dietz, Oh, Kay! is, in the words of director Ted Christopher, “a madcap romp — a drawing room comedy, with a  Busby Berkley dance routine in the middle of it.” [Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra “Summers@Severance” with pianist Igor Levit (July 10)

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by Nicholas Jones

LEVIT-IgorFriday’s Cleveland Orchestra program, the first of 2015’s three Summers@Severance concerts, opened with Olivier Messiaen’s Hymne, composed in 1933. The score was lost during the war and reconstructed from memory by the composer in 1947. The original title (Hymne au Saint-Sacrement) indicated explicitly that it was an act of reverence to the Holy Eucharist of the Catholic Mass, and it apparently represents that ritual. [Read more…]

Ohio Light Opera: Gilbert & Sullivan’s Ruddigore (The Witch’s Curse), July 10

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by J.D. Goddard

RuddigorePosterOn Friday, July 10, after the customary singing of God Save the Queen, the curtain went up on the second performance of Ohio Light Opera’s Ruddigore in Freedlander Theater at the College of Wooster, and the audience was immediately swept into the action in the Cornish town of Rederring. Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1887 operetta has a rather baffling story line and a whimsical musical style. [Read more…]

Credo Faculty Concert at Oberlin’s Clonick Hall (July 10)

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by Daniel Hathaway

credo-logo-whiteFresh air was blowing into Friday evening’s chamber music concert by Credo faculty, even if the Oberlin Conservatory’s Clonick Hall — being the recording studio that it is — has no windows to open. Departing from the usual concert format, where pieces are played in some kind of curated sequence from beginning to end, concert designers Lee Joiner and Steuart Pincombe took works by Henry Purcell, John Dowland, Benjamin Britten, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. and rearranged their movements into a kind of musical crazy-quilt. [Read more…]

Jeff & Nina Nelsen open Kent/Blossom series with delightful recital (July 1)

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by Daniel Hathaway

NelsensMusic for French horn, mezzo-soprano and piano isn’t an everyday flavor of chamber music, so if you happen to be Jeff Nelsen and you marry Nina Yoshida and decide to perform together, you have to undertake some exploring, some arranging, and some commissioning, to come up with enough repertoire to build a concert program. Last Wednesday evening, July 1, Jeff and Nina Nelsen, in cahoots with pianist Elizabeth DeMio, proved that a delightful evening of chamber music can result from unlikely ingredients — if the performers and the music are as excellent and committed as these were. [Read more…]

ChamberFest Cleveland closes 2015 season with “Stars and Stripes” (July 1)

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by Timothy Robson

BlackstoneOrganThe 2015 season of ChamberFest Cleveland closed with a mostly American program in a spectacular venue: the angular, modernist home of Dr. Eugene and Janet Blackstone in Bratenahl along the shore of Lake Erie. The house, with its west-facing glass curtain wall, overlooks manicured lawns, and, after weeks of unending rain in Cleveland, there were sailboats on the lake as the sun set. The house also integrates a four-manual, custom-built pipe organ sprouting seemingly from every surface. The spaces not occupied by organ pipes (and a concert grand piano) were taken by audience members, in the main living area, an upper gallery and on the stairs. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: Tanglewood send-off concert (June 29)

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by Jane Berkner

AF-Intimate-BachApollo’s Fire regaled the audience with a musically satisfying and well-played concert on June 29 at First United Methodist Church in Akron. One of its gala send-off concerts planned for this summer, the group played the same program at the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts at the end of the week. The concert opened with selections from Telemann’s Don Quixote Suite, a musical portrayal of Cervantes’ novel. [Read more…]

ChamberFest: “Something Borrowed, Something Blue” at Mixon Hall (June 27)

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by Mike Telin

Cho-RabinovichChamberFest Cleveland added a new spin to the phrase “Something Borrowed, Something Blue” on Saturday, June 27 in Mixon Hall. Although no wedding took place, the program featured music that perfectly marries the classical ethos with jazz and folk idioms. As violinist Jinjoo Cho and pianist Roman Rabinovich prepared to open the concert with Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, suddenly from offstage, the sounds of the opening clarinet line from Rhapsody in Blue filled the hall. [Read more…]

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