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Rocky River Chamber Music Society: Africa→West Percussion Trio (Jan. 26)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

On Monday evening, January 26  at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church, the Rocky River Chamber Music Society offered listeners a kind of gentle shock: a stage transformed into what looked like a percussionist’s greenhouse — a whole garden of instruments, some recognizable, many not, brightly colored and often hard to name.

Africa → West Percussion Trio (Jamie Ryan, Ryan Korb, and Josh Ryan) made an evening out of that abundance, blending West African and Afro-Caribbean traditions with their Western classical and jazz training. The playing was expert, but the trio’s real gift was making the unfamiliar feel accessible — and joyful. [Read more…]

Akron Symphony looks forward to 2026 with composers new and old (Jan. 17)

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by Stephanie Manning

The musical journey of a concert can’t always be summed up by its title. The Akron Symphony’s January 17 performance certainly delivered on its promise of “Beethoven’s Seventh” with a dignified reading of that famous work. But the headline did not hint at the more intriguing pieces on offer — nor the idea that this program aimed to spark enthusiasm about the year ahead.

“Hope and optimism” were the words that conductor Christopher Wilkins used to describe the musical choices to the audience in E.J. Thomas Hall on Saturday.

This idea of looking toward the future appeared right away with a piece by Sarah Hegenderfer, a composition student at The University of Akron. Her lovely little gem of a piece, Clearing of Snow, paints a winter scene at sunset in lush textures.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Jazz Orchestra & Musical Theater Project at the Maltz (Jan. 24)

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By Kevin McLaughlin

On Saturday at the Maltz Performing Arts Center, the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra and The Musical Theater Project offered a timely reminder: Hoagy Carmichael wasn’t just the composer of “Stardust.” He was one of America’s great musical storytellers — a songwriter with a midwestern plainness that could turn suddenly tender, funny, or wise in the space of a single line.

Star Dust: The Songs of Hoagy Carmichael, part of the two organizations’ tenth season of collaboration, folded biography and performance into a single leisurely program. The format has become a signature of these shows: songs set in context by narration, supported by projected slides and film excerpts. Here those visuals — Carmichael portraits, footage of Carmichael in motion, stills from To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) — were discreet, and perhaps too few. But they reinforced the point that this music came from a particular life, and a full one.

[Read more…]

Brownbag Concert: Madness & Melancholy at Trinity (Jan. 21)

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By Kevin McLaughlin

At noon on alternate Wednesdays, Trinity Cathedral becomes a refuge from the workweek. On January 21, the Cleveland Chamber Choir’s Brownbag Concerts continued a downtown tradition started in 1978 by Cleveland Classical.com’s own Daniel Hathaway — a series that offers listeners a midday pause, with informal, high-quality performances and a welcome sense of community.

The Cleveland Chamber Choir has recently been part of this tradition as artist-in-residence, offering programs that complement the cathedral’s acoustic and reward an audience listening closely over the lunch hour. For this concert, a subset of the full choir performed: Abigail Hakel-Garcia (soprano and violin), Kira McGirr (mezzo-soprano) Gregory Ristow (tenor and harpsichord), Dominic Aragon (baritone), and Adrian Murillo (theorbo).

[Read more…]

Relic Ensemble: Odyssey at Heights Theater (Jan. 18)

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By Kevin McLaughlin

On Sunday, January 18, the New York–based Relic Ensemble presented an imaginative interweaving of Baroque music and Homer’s Odyssey at Heights Theater. The project used historical layering as its technique, allowing ancient Greece, Baroque Europe, and the present to meet on the premise that an epic can be retold in different ways without losing its force.

Operating from its early-music comfort zone, Relic assembled a sequence of Baroque movements, chosen for their affect and fitted to eight episodes from Homer’s tale. The music leaned toward illustration rather than direct dramatic correspondence — a tension that would surface more fully as the evening unfolded. Still, the fleet, precise, and often virtuosic playing of the ensemble carried the evening.

[Read more…]

No Exit and Zeitgeist: An Evocation of Our Current Time (Jan. 9)

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by Mike Telin

On Saturday, January 9 at SPACES, Cleveland-based No Exit and St. Paul-based Zeitgeist continued their long-standing collaboration with An Evocation of Our Current Time.

Unlike most performances where the audience is aware of what they will be experiencing, this one gave you very little information in advance other than it was to be “a 55-minute multimedia experience that draws on improvisation, film, artificial intelligence, environmental manipulation, lies, magic, gaslighting and other forms of chicanery.”

Unlike most No Exit concerts there were no elaborate programs to follow. And instead of presenting a number of works by a variety of composers, An Evocation of Our Current Time was a single work by No Exit artistic director Timothy Beyer with technical assistance by James Praznik. As the capacity audience took their seats in the long gallery they were face to face with a dozen musicians, a projector, and a white wall.
[Read more…]

Trio Seoul: warmth and thoughtfulness at the Cleveland Museum of Art (Jan. 14)

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by Stephanie Manning

Despite the frigid Wednesday weather dumping snow outside the Cleveland Museum of Art, January 14 almost felt like a pleasant spring day inside Gartner Auditorium. That phenomenon had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with Trio Seoul, whose warm camaraderie and excellent musicianship brightened the venue considerably.

Pianist Kyu Yeon Kim, cellist Brannon Cho, and violinist Jinjoo Cho — whose ENCORE Chamber Music Institute co-presented the event — started things off with their sunniest piece, Joseph Haydn’s Piano Trio No. 39 in G. The musicians kept the affect light and flowing, centered on the tasteful piano lines from Kim.

[Read more…]

Verdi’s Requiem, Welser-Möst, Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus find sacred balance, stamina (Jan. 15)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Photo by Yehven Gulenko

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Verdi’s Requiem surprised in its beauty on Thursday evening Jan. 15 at Severance Music Center in a performance by Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus.

Welser-Möst understands that the Requiem lives on a fault line between opera house and church, but, as he explains in the program, a performance ought never lose sight of Verdi’s reverence for the mass text. On Thursday the balance felt wisely judged. The “Dies irae” was terrifying precisely because it was controlled. The choir’s entrance struck with sudden force.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra’s MLK Celebration Concert lifted spirits with affirming reflection (Jan. 11)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Photo by Roger Mastroianni

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — In a political moment that might have provoked heaviness or solemn reflection, The Cleveland Orchestra’s annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration Concert chose affirmation instead.

Led by assistant conductor Taichi Fukumura before a full Mandel Concert Hall, the Orchestra, soprano Latonia Moore, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration Chorus, under Dr. William Henry Caldwell, lifted spirits — and even got the audience to sing along.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra: Welser-Möst leads two symphonies with The Cleveland Orchestra (Jan. 9)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Franz Welser-Most conducts the Cleveland Orchestra on Thursday evening. Human Artist Photography + Cinema / Yevhen Gulenko

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio – What makes a piece a symphony? That label invokes the ancient Greek notion of musicians playing together harmoniously, but in actual usage, “symphonies” are just containers into which composers pour their orchestral inspirations, with few common features from one work to another.

This was obvious on Thursday evening, January 8 at Severance Music Center, when music director Franz Welser-Möst led The Cleveland Orchestra in wildly dissimilar Symphonies by Wolfgang Amadé Mozart and Dmitri Shostakovich.

[Read more…]

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