by Daniel Hathaway
There was no need for Opera Circle Cleveland’s collaborative production of The Bartered Bride to try to break down the “fourth wall” between performers and audience at Cleveland’s Bohemian National Hall on Sunday afternoon, October 25: the wall never went up in the first place. As the audience arrived, cast members were already milling about in the auditorium and its corridors, brightly attired in Czech folk costumes, and greeting friends and family. Carrying their instrument cases, members of the Cleveland Women’s Orchestra threaded their way through the throng, and the young acrobats who would appear in the third act were enjoying pastries in the snack bar. It felt like a big family reunion. [Read more…]
It takes a special artist to hold an audience completely in thrall for an hour and twenty minutes. Such an artist would be Christian Tetzlaff, who stood all alone with his violin on the stage of Oberlin’s Finney Chapel last Friday evening, charming a large audience with solo works by Eugène Ysaÿe, Johann Sebastian Bach, György Kurtag, and Béla Bartók. 
The plangent sounds of Merima Ključo’s accordion, combined with an arsenal of musical effects from pianist Seth Knopp and evocative video art by Bart Woodstrup, told the affecting saga of a medieval Jewish prayer book last Wednesday evening in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art. 
The program might have looked conventional, but Cuarteto Casals’ performances of string quartets by Haydn, Shostakovich, and Beethoven on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series last Tuesday at Plymouth Church were exceptional. Every piece shone with its own individual character, contributing many-hued elements to an outstanding whole. 
According to Wikipedia, in the early decades of the 20th century there were as many as 7,000 organs installed in movie theaters in the United States for the purposes of entertaining audiences before and between shows and, especially, for accompanying silent films. The theaters have, alas, mostly vanished, the organs either destroyed or re-installed elsewhere, and the skills for accompanying silent films have been lost. That is why organist Todd Wilson’s performance on Friday night at Severance Hall accompanying the 1923 American film The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring Lon Chaney was such a brilliant feat of musical invention, theatricality and stamina. 
Todd Wilson returned to Stambaugh Auditorium’s Skinner organ on Sunday afternoon, October 25, to improvise a score to Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 silent film, The Gold Rush. Wilson, who is organist at Cleveland’s Trinity Cathedral and chair of the organ department at the Cleveland Institute of Music, played a similar role last season in providing musical accompaniment to the Harold Lloyd comedy Speedy. Though The Gold Rush is also a comedy, it focuses on Chaplin’s beloved little tramp character in an unusual context. 
String players sometimes say that instruments can “remember their past” — that one can tell the quality of the previous owner by listening to the violin’s tone. Played for years by a mediocre player, the violin settles into mediocrity; played by the best, the violin becomes the best. The violins played in last week’s community concert at Severance Hall have a long and heavy past. Now, restored to life, they seem to remember the tragedy and the hope of the Holocaust, a memory that can remind us of the worst and the best in human life. 
The newest addition to Cleveland’s classical music scene, Earth and Air: String Orchestra, made its debut on Thursday, October 8 in Tucker Hall at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights. Founder and director David Ellis chose a challenging program entitled “Prague Serenades” that featured Antonín Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings, Op. 22, and the Serenade, Op. 6 by Dvořák’s student (and son-in-law), Josef Suk. 
Modernity — with its fresh inventions, sounds, and sensations — often inspires us to respond in kind. We are in constant dialogue with our environs. We listen. We talk back. We create reflections of our experience. This was certainly the case in last Sunday’s Cleveland Composers Guild concert (October 11), which filled Drinko Hall at Cleveland State University with an array of new resonances. 
Venice, always on the verge of sinking into the Adriatic, rose well above sea level on Friday evening at Fairmount Presbyterian Church in Cleveland Heights as Apollo’s Fire began its 24th season with “Splendor of Venice: An Orchestral Extravaganza.” Following a parade by the musicians up the center aisle heralded by natural horns on either side of the stage, founder and conductor Jeannette Sorrell announced in her opening remarks that she would play the role of Rick Steves that night, taking the audience on a musical tour of 18th-century Venice.