by Jane Berkner
If the goal of the Cleveland Orchestra’s Fridays @ 7 series is to create more diversity in their audiences, the concert in Severance Hall on Friday, March 13 can be considered a fantastic success. Curated by Jamey Haddad, the pre- and post concerts that sandwich the orchestra’s performance included music from singer, songwriter and accordion player Magda Giannikou, students from Oberlin’s performance and Improvisation Ensembles, and the eclectic jazz and funk band Snarky Puppy. [Read more…]
A large and conspicuously intergenerational audience — unusually so for a Thursday evening — gathered at Severance Hall for The Cleveland Orchestra concert on March 12. Did they turn out in droves to hear guest conductor Fabio Luisi lead Beethoven’s seventh symphony? Or to hear Jean-Yves Thibaudet play Liszt’s second piano concerto? Maybe both. Whatever drew the crowds in, they experienced a distinguished evening of music. 
The brilliant and iconoclastic organist Cameron Carpenter performed at E.J. Thomas Hall in Akron on Friday evening. It was his first local concert using his self-designed digital instrument known as the International Touring Organ, built by Marshall and Ogletree of Needham, Massachusetts. The builders digitally sampled and stored sounds from a variety of pipe organs that are then reproduced on an array of speakers. At E.J. Thomas Hall, the speakers occupied most of the stage. 
Themed symphony orchestra programs — often cooked up by marketing departments — can be gimmicky. But Akron Symphony music director Christopher Wilkins’s “Four Rivers” program at E.J. Thomas Hall on Saturday, March 14 took three European rivers and one American one that lives only in the realm of metaphor, and made them tributaries that flowed beautifully together into a larger stream. 
Those who thought they knew the Beethoven cello sonatas probably had to think again after last Tuesday’s recital by Steven Isserlis and Robert Levin on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights. Over the last decade, the two performers have turned these pieces inside out and explored every crevice in their musical narrative. Heard in a performance like that on Tuesday evening, the results of that joint inquiry are a revelation. 
A gripping bassoon concerto from 1975, the world premiere of a cantata on a chilling subject, and a Buddist-inspired essay in instrumental colors written in 1997 provided Timothy Weiss and his Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble with plenty of opportunities to shine on Saturday afternoon, March 7, when they presented their fourth concert of the season in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art. 
The Cavani Quartet isn’t easing up after thirty years as an ensemble. Its faculty recital on Wednesday evening, March 4 in Kulas Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music with guest musicians Donald Weilerstein and Vivian Hornik Weilerstein featured exciting and disciplined performances of two very different Shostakovich works, followed by an exuberant reading of a Mendelssohn quartet. 
Held in the black box Studio Theater at the Stocker Center in Elyria, the Signature Series concerts curated by composer Jeffrey Mumford for Lorain Community College are usually spaced throughout the season. Last week there were two in a row. On Monday, March 2, pianist Nicholas Underhill played a solo recital, followed by harpist Shelly Du on Thursday, March 5, who in addition to performing solo pieces was joined by violinist Jeanelle Brierley in a work by Mumford. 
The Vienna Piano Trio’s program at West Shore Unitarian seemed traditional at first glance, but looks are deceptive. This well-respected group (now 25 years old, though with some changes of personnel over the years) specializes in the familiar classical repertoire of Austria and Germany, and last night was no exception — Beethoven, Brahms, and Schoenberg. But both the performances and the pieces themselves were full of surprises. 
On Saturday evening, February 28 at the Breen Center for the Performing Arts, the BlueWater Chamber Orchestra, under the baton of guest conductor Raphael Jiménez, performed a sumptuous program of two works by giants of the Romantic era, Gabriel Fauré and Johannes Brahms.