by Daniel Hathaway
It’s one thing to win a major international piano competition by a pleasing a panel of jurors, and quite another to go on to make a successful career by enthralling audiences with your playing. Stanislav Khristenko, who took first place in the Cleveland International Piano Competition in 2013, left no doubt in his Carnegie Hall preview recital on Sunday evening, May 11 in CIM’s Kulas Hall that he has all the right stuff to thrive on the international concert circuit.
On Sunday evening, Khristenko was on a mission. While some pianists serve up little hors d’oeuvres — a few Scarlatti sonatas or some pre-prandial Haydn or Mozart just to get the digestive juices flowing — the Ukrainian-born artist plunged headlong into Béla Bartók’s Sonata before even bothering to fasten his seat belt. Rhythmically incisive and explosive with accents, his opening salvos took hold of the crowd and probably nobody did much breathing until the three-movement work ended in a riotous dance. [Read more…]
Not every wind that blows into Cleveland from the North is a bone-chilling polar vortex. The boreal breeze that accompanied the 80-degree weather on Thursday evening, May 8, was a refreshing one that brought Finnish conductor (and newly reappointed Minnesota Orchestra music director) Osmo Vänskä to Severance Hall with striking symphonies by his countrymen Aulis Sallinen and Jan Sibelius in hand. The Grieg concerto, featuring frequent guest pianist Garrick Ohlsson, added another Scandinavian voice to the evening.
On Sunday, April 27 the CMA Concerts at Transformer Station series concluded its inaugural season with a stunningly beautiful performance by Norwegian virtuoso classical accordionist Frode Haltli.
When you mostly present ensembles as portable as string quartets, what do you do when an ensemble requires a whole lot of percussion? In the case of the Cleveland Chamber Music Society and eighth blackbird, you move the concert to where the percussion lives — to Cleveland State University’s Waetjen Auditorium, where the celebrated new music sextet performed their acoustic program, “Still in Motion,” on Tuesday evening, April 29.
Arts Renaissance Tremont crowned its 23rd season at Pilgrim Church Auditorium on Sunday afternoon, April 27 with an excellent concert of music for winds and piano featuring Cleveland Orchestra members Mary Lynch, oboe, Robert Woolfrey, clarinet, Barrick Stees, bassoon and Richard King, horn, with Youngstown State University faculty member Cicilia Yudha, piano. A new Yamaha concert grand piano was the sixth performer.
Through a combination of scheduling conflicts and the sin of sloth, I had never heard a performance by the highly regarded Cleveland Baroque ensemble Les Délices until Sunday afternoon May 4, in the Herr Chapel at Plymouth Church, Shaker Heights. Les Délices are artists in residence at the church, so this was home base, although they regularly perform in other venues around town. The evening before they had presented this program, “The Leading Man,” at the William Busta Gallery. These concerts ended their 2014/15 series, and the Sunday afternoon concert was, with a couple of niggling reservations – more about them later – an unalloyed pleasure.
The eighty-second edition of the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival, “the first collegiate Bach Festival in the Nation,” comprised four afternoon and evening concerts in Gamble Auditorium on Friday and Saturday, April 25 and 26. Set up so that BW’s students will get a crack at performing each of four extended Bach works during their college career, the festival rotates the Leipzig cantor’s two passions, the Christmas Oratorio and the B-Minor mass during each four-year cycle.
