by Jarrett Hoffman
This past Thursday, October 9, Oberlin welcomed acclaimed jazz group Hot Club of Detroit for the first Performance and Improvisation (PI) guest recital of the year. Clonick Hall was packed for the occasion, all seats filled and its back wall lined with listeners. Three impressive student ensembles kicked off the evening, each of them featuring Hot Club of Detroit accordionist Julien Labro. Then, for the second half of the night, the group tore through a set full of stunning solos and duets, particularly from Labro and group founder and lead guitarist Evan Perri. [Read more…]
If it’s Tuesday, it must be Cleveland — the second of four stops in as many days on the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra’s breathless tour of the eastern United States under chief conductor Muhai Tang. Beginning on October 6 at Symphony Hall in Chicago, the BPO continued on after its performance in Severance Hall on October 7 to play at Strathmore in the Washington D.C. area on October 8, and at Carnegie Hall in New York on October 9. 
Maestro Gerhardt Zimmermann’s program notes for this, his 34th season with the Canton Symphony Orchestra, are full of enthusiasm and gratitude for the recently opened $5.4 million Zimmermann Symphony Center adjacent to Umstattd Performing Arts Hall. “At last,” he writes, “the CSO family (orchestra, music, library, staff and board) will be housed under one roof. This is a dream come true for me…” 
Director Emanuela Friscioni has chosen to take a new tack with this season’s Tri-C Classical Piano series at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Three Sunday afternoon recitals will showcase young pianists who are beginning to come to international prominence, commencing with 21-year-old Italian pianist Beatrice Rana, who won the silver medal at the fourteenth Van Cliburn Competition in Fort Worth in 2013. 
The opening night program for a symphony orchestra season is usually the occasion for an extra bit of celebration. In the case of The Cleveland Orchestra, a Beethoven symphony (other than the ninth) and three Ravel pieces looked on paper like mid-season repertory. But on Saturday, Franz Welser-Möst and the ensemble, fresh off a European tour, blew a capacity Severance Hall audience away with stunningly fresh performances of well-known pieces that seemed newly-minted for the occasion.
The Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra opened its CIM @ Severance series on Wednesday evening, October 1, with a single work on the program: Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor, conducted by CIM president Joel Smirnoff. The performance was highly competent. I often had to remind myself that this was a conservatory orchestra, and there was a high probability that this was the first time that many of the students had performed this monster work. 
In this day and age it’s not unusual for classically-trained musicians to experiment with and perform music of seemingly unrelated genres. And it’s always interesting to hear how they go about incorporating their classical sensibilities into the works of bands like the Beatles or into bluegrass tunes like “Orange Blossom Special”. 
Oberlin’s new quartet-in-residence through 2016 introduced itself with a lengthy but compelling concert on Tuesday, September 30 in Finney Chapel. The performance by violinists Benjamin Jacobson and Andrew Bulbrook, violist Jonathan Moerschel and cellist Eric Byers also launched this season’s Artist Recital Series. 
Historians of the arts sometimes ask: did England have a Baroque? Northern, chilly, and Protestant, could the British match the splendid Counter-Reformation emotionality of Catholic Rome? The answer arguably lies in three artists of the late seventeenth century, all of them working primarily in London: Christopher Wren (St. Paul’s Cathedral — noble, symmetrical, and infinitely baffling); John Milton (Paradise Lost — magnificent, touching, radically modern); and Henry Purcell — whose music is moving, challenging, surprising, and constantly creative. 