by Daniel Hathaway
After a Wednesday evening concert in Dublin, near Columbus, CityMusic Cleveland opened its new season at Lakewood Congregational Church on October 15 with the first of four area concerts featuring violinist Sayaka Shoji. On Thursday, she turned in a tidy reading of the Brahms concerto, and the orchestra itself delivered an impressive, highly polished performance of Robert Schumann’s first symphony led by music director Avner Dorman. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The three programs scheduled by The Cleveland Orchestra last weekend were each colorful in their own right, but the blueprint of works being performed was complicated enough that the program book color-coded each evening to keep patrons apprised about what they were hearing, and in what order. Come to think of it, the orchestra and stage crew probably appreciated those navigational aids as well. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Vespers is the only service of the medieval church outside of Mass to have survived and prospered from the Protestant Reformation. Some elaborate musical settings of this early evening rite have come from the Roman Catholic pens of Claudio Monteverdi and Wolfgang Amadè Mozart, but the tradition has really gone on to thrive in Lutheran and Anglican circles, where musical Vespers services and Choral Evensongs have inspired countless settings of the psalms and canticles (especially the Magnificat) which form the backbone of the service. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Jones
The opening concert of the Cleveland Philharmonic Orchestra season on Sunday, October 11 was an exuberant memorial to long-time Philharmonic music director William Slocum. Maestro Slocum, who conducted the orchestra for twenty-six years, passed away in the spring of 2015. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Jones
Arts Renaissance Tremont opened its twenty-fifth anniversary season Sunday with an ambitious and satisfying program of two masterpieces of the piano trio repertoire: Beethoven’s Opus 97 in B-flat (“Archduke”) and Shostakovich’s Opus 67 in e-minor. Performing were the members of the Autana Trio (Venezuelan violinist Rubén Rengel, cellist Anna Hurt — originally from Utah — and South Korean pianist Yuri Noh), who are participants in the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Advanced Piano Trio Program, directed by noted cellist Sharon Robinson. [Read more…]
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…]
by J.D. Goddard
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. [Read more…]
by Tom Wachunas
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. [Read more…]
by Robert Rollin
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). [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
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. [Read more…]