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Re•Views

Review: Oberlin String Quartet Intensive and Festival — Areta Zhulla & James Howsmon (January 7)

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by Daniel Hautzinger

ZHULLA-AretaDuring the month of January, Oberlin Conservatory is hosting a String Quartet Intensive and Festival, during which student quartets receive coachings from guest artists and faculty members while rehearsing diligently. Those guest musicians, joined by faculty, are also giving recitals throughout the month so that students may experience and learn from their artistry in a concert setting. On January 7, faculty pianist James Howsmon joined the young Greek violinist Areta Zhulla in Kulas Recital Hall for the festival’s inaugural concert.

The highlight of the night was Mozart’s Violin Sonata in e minor. Howsmon and Zhulla poignantly rendered the bare opening statement of the first theme, setting a mood of solemn pathos. The heartbroken melody of the second movement was wrenching, decorated by the most distinctive feature of Zhulla’s playing: her wonderful vibrato. Howsmon’s crystalline accompaniments provided stark relief for the emotive theme. When the music turns to major in the middle section, it is like a retreat into a comforting memory. But the solace does not last, as the pain of the present rushes back to end the piece. [Read more…]

Review: Akron Symphony with Olivier Brault and Todd Jelen (January 11)

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by Daniel Hathaway

JELEN-BRAULTScaled down for a Mozart symphony and concerto and Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, the Akron Symphony was lean and anything but mean on Saturday evening. The thirty-one players on the stage of E.J. Thomas Hall formed a tight, vibrant ensemble that responded like a high-performance sports car under the baton of Christopher Wilkins and the bow of Olivier Brault, and held bassoon soloist Todd Jelen in a warm embrace.

The highlight was a sensational performance of Vivaldi’s vividly pictorial quartet of violin concertos, for which, in a very smart and gracious move, Wilkins handed the conducting duties over to Brault. The Montréal violinist has dazzled Northeast Ohio audiences as concertmaster of Apollo’s Fire, but has rarely found himself in the position of having complete control over a performance.

Positioned in the middle of the string ensemble, Olivier Brault — always dashing and stylish — turned into a blur of kinetic energy, playing like a rock guitarist to his violin colleagues one moment, now swiveling around to communicate with the cellos and basses, then drawing himself in for intimate conversations with solo cellist Miles Richardson and harpsichordist Robert Mollard. [Read more…]

CD Review: Dan Visconti — Lonesome Roads

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by Daniel Hautzinger

Visconti-Lonesome-Roads-CDDan Visconti has a knack for titles. The young composer, who studied with Margaret Brouwer at the Cleveland Institute of Music and Aaron Jay Kernis at Yale, is so adept at naming his pieces that it’s nearly impossible to listen to his music without the title’s image blossoming in the brain. Take for instance the small ensemble piece, Drift of Rainbows (2009), included on Lonesome Roads, a 2012 Bridge Records release by the Scharoun Ensemble Berlin and the Horszowski Trio of some of Visconti’s chamber music. Ecstatic strings surge and arc over majestic chords like, well, rainbows drifting through the air.

One reason Visconti’s titles are so successful is the pictorial quality of his work. He creates vivid paintings in sound, depicting the vast fields of America and the people that populate them by incorporating vernacular music. Black Bend (2003), for string quartet and bass, is an inventive romp through the blues, with strings wailing in imitation of a soulful singer. The violin and harp piece, Lawless Airs (2008), takes cowboy songs as its starting point. [Read more…]

Review: Quire Cleveland — Carols for Quire 5 at Trinity Cathedral (December 20)

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By Daniel Hathaway

QuireTrinityRoss W. Duffin led Quire Cleveland in the first of three concerts in its annual “Carols for Quire from The Old & New World” series at Trinity Cathedral on Friday evening — a performance that will surely be counted as one of the brightest choral highlights of the holiday season.

Taking a new tack for the series’ fifth edition, Duffin constructed an intriguing program pairing older and newer carols on the same or similar texts that brought freshness to what is becoming a cherished Cleveland holiday tradition — and setting some new challenges for his excellent, 20-voice chamber choir, founded to sing period music but which has recently been stretching its vocal wings in the direction of more modern repertoire. [Read more…]

Review: Stopping in at two Sunday afternoon concerts — Lara Nie with Cleveland Virtuosi in Chagrin Falls, Buck McDaniel at Trinity Cathedral

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by Daniel Hathaway

NIE-LaraArea concertgoers had their choice of at least seventeen concerts to attend on Sunday, December 15. I took the opportunity to stop in for two events which were of particular interest.

New York-based mezzo-soprano Lara Nie was featured with the Cleveland Virtuosi Orchestra in an afternoon holiday concert presented by Chagrin Valley Chamber Music Series at Valley Lutheran Church in Chagrin Falls. I caught the first half of the performance, which departed from holiday music in the direction of singer’s choice. Nie had always wanted to perform the aria, Erbarme dich from J.S. Bach’s Matthew-Passion — and a pair of Handel’s opera arias — with violinist and artistic director Hristo Popov, and this occasion was the perfect opportunity.

The Virtuosi, an eleven-member string ensemble with harpsichord conducted by Michael Gelfand, opened with a lush reading of Bach’s chorale from Cantata BWV 147, known in English as Jesu, joy of Man’s desiring. [Read more…]

Review: Choir of Clare College, Cambridge in concert at Fairmount Presbyterian Church (December 14)

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by Nicholas Jones

Clare-College-ChoirIt is one of the joys of the holiday season that choral music rings all about us. Clevelanders have a banquet of our own choral groups to enjoy, but it is an added pleasure to hear an accomplished choir from England, where the choral tradition is so deeply established.

A goodly crowd turned out at Fairmount Presbyterian Church in Cleveland Heights on a very snowy Saturday evening to hear the choir of Clare College, one of the 31 colleges of the University of Cambridge (indeed, the second oldest of those colleges, established in the early 14th century). The choir, some 25-strong, warmed the church and the audience with its accomplished and vigorous musicality.

[Read more…]

Review: Camille Norment at CMA’s Transformer Station (December 15)

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by Mike Telin

NORMENT-CamilleIn last week’s ClevelandClassical concert preview, multi-media artist Camille Norment said that her artistic goal is to push limits and to create something new. On Sunday, December 15 during her concert on the CMA at Transformer Station series, she and her trio colleagues did exactly that during their fifty minute set of four hauntingly beautiful sound installations that live in the blurred area between composition and improvisation.

Performing on the exotic glass armonic and singing bowls, Camille Norment’s trio includes Håvard Skaset, electric guitar, and Vegar Vårdal, hardanger (Norwegian fiddle). Individually they are fine musicians — Vegar Vårdal possesses a great bow arm. But it is in the collective that the group shines brightest. Founded in 2010 in Norway to “explore the instruments’ paradoxical relationships to notions of beauty, noise, tension and harmony as a musical experience.” The trio gave their debut performance at the Ultima New Music Festival in Oslo on September 11, 2011. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Orchestra Celebrity Series — Natalie Cole (December 11)

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by Guytano Parks

Cole-Natalie-Chris-PizzelloThe Cleveland Orchestra kicked off its Holiday Festival 2013 at Severance Hall on Wednesday, December 11 with a Celebrity Series, one night only performance by multiple Grammy-winning recording artist Natalie Cole. The hall was beautifully decked with festive holiday decorations and featured lovely mood-enhancing lighting effects during the performance.

The Orchestra, augmented with local jazz musicians, was conducted by Gail Deadrick, Cole’s conductor since 2000, and joined by Cole’s backup band: Mahesh Balasooriya, piano, Edwin Livingston, bass, Robert Miller, drums, Tony Pulizzi, guitar, Dave Trigg, trumpet, Alessandro Alessandroni, keyboards, and Robert Yancy, percussion, in addition to background vocalists Lynne Fiddmont and Traci Brown-Baily.

Looking elegant and statuesque in a cream-colored gown, Cole slinked onto the stage to sing a dreamy and lush arrangement of Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust, the first song in a diverse program of standards, R&B, Pop, jazz and Spanish songs. [Read more…]

Review: Apollo’s Fire — Praetorius Christmas Vespers at Trinity Cathedral (December 14)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Michael Praetorius

Michael Praetorius

Well before the more pietistic style of Lutheran church music that Johann Sebastian Bach wrote at Leipzig in the second quarter of the eighteenth century came the Italian-influenced, Renaissance style of Michael Praetorius, the subject of Jeannette Sorrell’s well-crafted and expertly performed Christmas Vespers with Apollo’s Fire, which began a four-concert run at Trinity Cathedral on Friday evening before moving on to three different venues around town.

You could hear the difference in approach in Philip Nicolai’s Wachet auf! Everyone knows the glorious, equal-note setting that ends Bach’s cantata of the same name. Not so familiar is the early form of the chorale tune with its dancelike, uneven rhythms, nor its delightful and ornate elaboration by Praetorius from his 1619 collection Polyhymnia caduceatrix. The latter, already bursting at its seams with exuberance, was decorated even further by Apollo’s Fire’s violinists and cornetto players (Olivier Brault, Johanna Novom, Kiri Tollaksen and Nathaniel Cox), who could barely force themselves to arrive at the final chord at several cadences. [Read more…]

Review: Contemporary Youth Orchestra with El Sistema @ University Circle and The Oblivion Project at CSU (December 7)

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by Daniel Hathaway

GROSSMAN-LizaLiza Grossman and the Contemporary Youth Orchestra always pack their concerts full of content, and the opening concert of the ensemble’s nineteenth season on December 7 in Waetjen Auditorium at Cleveland State University continued in that tradition. In addition to two solo orchestra works and a concerto, CYO invited Isabel Trautwein and the young string players of El Sistema @ University Circle for a side-by-side, and welcomed The Oblivion Project for half a dozen nuevo tango pieces by Astor Piazzolla.

CYO and its dynamic conductor raised the curtain with John Adams’s high-energy overture, Short Ride in a Fast Machine. Driven by the pervasive rhythm of a wood block and propelled by an excellent brass section, the piece raced along like the top-performance sports car it invokes and safely arrived at its destination (and with no white knuckles on the curves!) [Read more…]

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