By Mike Telin
Anyone familiar with FiveOne Experimental Orchestra knows one thing: no concert will be like the last one. With their “no-boundaries” approach to music, this inventive group has a knack for creating happenings. They regularly incorporate artistic disciplines such as sculptors, filmmakers, dancers, and visual artists into their concerts. And they stand by their mission to present their concerts in unusual spaces like the Sculpture Center and the East Cleveland Township Cemetery.
On Saturday, Saturday, April 5 as part of NEOSonicFest, FiveOne Experimental Orchestra outdid themselves during their performance at The Screw Factory in Lakewood. And once again, it was a happening.
The Screw Factory is a massive complex that once served as the home of the Templar Motor Company. It later became a production facility for nuts and bolts, hence its name. Today it is home to an electrical wire manufacturer while the second and third floors serve as artists’ studios. [Read more…]
If you don’t know violinist Miranda Cuckson, you should. Cuckson, who has firmly established herself as one of the foremost interpreters of contemporary music — especially on the east coast — presented two area concerts last week at LCCC’s Signature Series (March 31) and CMA@ Transformer Station (April 1). I heard the Transformer Station concert.
Ross Duffin and the twenty voices of Quire Cleveland turned their attention to nearly three hundred years of American music on Sunday afternoon at Historic St. Peter Church in downtown Cleveland, visiting some well-known tunes in lesser-known packaging and dusting the cobwebs off some fine music that deserves to come down out of the attic and be heard once again.
On Monday evening March 31, the audience at Trinity Methodist Church in downtown Youngstown witnessed the first modern performance of Carl Philip Emanuel Bach’s Passion According to St. Luke. The piece is actually attributed to Gottfried August Homilius, a student of Johann Sebastian Bach. 
The latest Saturday night snow massacre did little to keep patrons away from music director laureate Christoph von Dohnányi’s return to Severance Hall on March 29 and his looked-strange-on-paper program of two Schumann symphonies with The Cleveland Orchestra. As it turned out, the pairing of the two symphonies was an insightful idea and Dohnányi drew playing of both sweeping grandeur and arresting detail from the ensemble he led with such distinction from 1984-2002.
Opera is fun! Even if in the end all parties do not live happily ever after. Still, when everything works during a performance, when it all comes together, one would be hard pressed to find a more entertaining way to spend three hours than at the opera. 
The Cleveland Classical Guitar Society (CCGS) concluded its 2013-2014 season on Saturday evening, March 29 at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights with a performance by the celebrated guitarist, David Russell. Within the span of just four years, under the direction of Erik Mann, the CCGS has gone from offering a handful of small local events per year to presenting high-profile international performers like Grammy-award winning David Russell, arguably the best classical guitarist in the world.
Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in d (“Choral”) stood alone on the program as a symbol of brotherhood and joy in a concert entitled A Celebration of Community at Severance Hall last Friday evening, March 28. Cleveland Institute of Music president Joel Smirnoff conducted the CIM Orchestra with the combined forces of vocal soloists from CIM and the community, Cleveland School of The Arts instrumentalists (Dianna Richardson, department head and director of the orchestral program) and chorus (William B. Woods, choir director), The Singers’ Club of Cleveland (Dr. Melvin P. Unger, choral director) and members of The Antioch Baptist Church Sanctuary Choir.