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Review: A Mixed Scottish Bag from the Canton Symphony Orchestra (October 5)

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by Tom Wachunas

CSO-ZImmermannWhat more appropriate way to begin a Scottish-themed program than with a live pipe and drum band? Members of the Celtic Eagle Pipe Band joined the Canton Symphony Orchestra (CSO) in opening its 2013- 2014 season with Marches and Airs, written by local composer and Music Director of the Tuscarawas Philharmonic, Eric Benjamin.

In his program notes, Benjamin made no secret of his love for the sound of bagpipes. Addressing the task of effectively blending the orchestra with the sequence of six traditional Scottish tunes that comprise the work, he wrote, “As the music exists for pipes and drums alone, the challenge for me as an arranger was to come up with interesting things for the orchestra to do so as to contribute something unique to the sequence.”

Not least among the challenges was to allow the orchestral instruments to be heard against a loud group of three pipers and two drummers. [Read more…]

Review: Hawkeye Trio makes its debut in Oberlin concert (September 25)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Hawkeye-TrioThe Hawkeye Trio, a newly-hatched chamber ensemble made up of Oberlin Conservatory faculty members Michael Isaac Strauss, Richard Hawkins and James Howsmon, played its inaugural concert in Kulas Hall at the conservatory on Wednesday evening, September 25.

Three fine chamber musicians who play viola, clarinet and piano and want to concertize together need to do some research. That’s not a standard configuration of instruments. What repertory exists — like Mozart’s Kegelstatt Trio (not included on Wednesday’s program) — was usually written for domestic use by friends and family.

Case in point: Max Bruch’s Eight Pieces, op. 83, were composed for Bruch’s clarinetist son, Max. The Hawkeye elected to play two sets of four pieces each at the beginning and end of their program, leading off with Nos. 8, 6, 5 and 7 and finishing with the first four, in order. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Orchestra: Russian evening with Vassily Sinaisky & Kirill Gerstein (September 26)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Sinaisky-VassilyNow that classical music has become increasingly homogenized through globalization, there’s something deeply satisfying about experiencing works from a national tradition interpreted by conductors and soloists who grew up speaking the language. On Thursday evening, Russian conductor Vassily Sinaisky and Russian-born pianist Kirill Gerstein treated the Severance Hall audience to deeply-felt performances of music by Liadov, Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev. Led early on by Russian conductors, The Cleveland Orchestra has a near-native feel for this repertory and played it with expressive passion coupled with New World precision.

Conducting with his bare hands, Sinaisky, who is music director of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre, painted perfect little scenes for each of Anatoly Liadov’s Eight Russian Folk Songs to open the program. English horn and bassoon solos (Robert Walters and Barrick Stees) set a solemn mood for the “Religious Chant,” an affect that first assistant principal cellist Richard Weiss recaptured later in the “Plaintive Song.” “Dance of the Gnat” created a buzz both in the strings and an amused audience. Mary Kay Fink’s piccolo soared out over pizzicato strings in the “Round Dance,” and a vivacious orchestral tutti brought the set of tiny pieces to a celebratory ending in the “Village Dance Song.” [Read more…]

Review: Cantus opens 2013-2014 Tuesday Musical Series at E.J. Thomas Hall (September 24)

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by Timothy Robson

CantusAkron’s Tuesday Musical opened its 126th season on September 24 at E.J. Thomas Hall in fine fashion with the Twin Cities-based, nine-voice men’s vocal ensemble Cantus. Cantus has distinguished itself from other male vocal ensembles – especially the San Francisco-based Chanticleer – by using the traditional configuration of tenors, baritones and basses, rather than also including male altos and sopranos. Throughout this concert, Cantus was a model of beautiful vocal sound, unanimity of ensemble and thoughtful, intriguing programming.

The title of Cantus’s program was “A Place for Us,” taken from a phrase in Stephen Sondheim & Leonard Bernstein’s song “Somewhere” in West Side Story. Spoken narrative linked the individual numbers together with poetry and excerpts from prose works expressing the experience of home, and how we know that a place is home to us.

An abbreviated version of “Somewhere” opened the concert, which was followed by the traditional Protestant hymn “This is my song” sung to the main theme from Jean Sibelius’s Finlandia. Cantus member Chris Foss’s complex arrangement of a traditional fiddle song followed, using jazz scat syllables to depict a country fiddler going at it. [Read more…]

Review: Burning River Baroque and hūmAnómali — “Desperation and Desire” at Lakewood Presbyterian Church (September 27)

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by Nicholas Jones

Rauschenfels-MalinaIn his short life, Henry Purcell (1659-1695) composed hundreds of extraordinarily expressive songs. It was a rare treat this weekend to hear some of the best of them grippingly performed by the dramatic soprano Malina Rauschenfels.

I heard Rauschenfels in the acoustically vibrant sanctuary of Lakewood Presbyterian Church, with Peter Lekx on baroque violin, David Ellis on gamba, and Paula Maust on harpsichord (a second performance was to be the next night at St. Alban’s in Cleveland Heights). The program was presented jointly by Burning River Baroque and by a group named hūmAnómali (the name was not explained in the otherwise very informative program materials). Rauschenfels has played beautifully on the baroque cello in previous Burning River concerts, but her decision to perform as a vocalist gives these programs an extra focus and intensity.

One of Purcell’s talents was to elevate relatively undistinguished poetry—by, for example, Nahum Tate, who is known mostly for giving Shakespeare’s King Lear a happy ending. Purcell’s daring song settings are astonishingly modern: he is the true precursor to Benjamin Britten, of whom we are hearing a great deal this centennial year. [Read more…]

Review: Pianist/composer Lera Auerbach opens Mixon Masters Series on September 17

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by Daniel Hathaway

Auerbach-MH1-MastroianniMoving in a new direction this season, the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Masters Series is celebrating composers who are also skilled performers. Russian-born pianist and composer Lera Auerbach played the first “Return of the Composer/Virtuoso” concert on Tuesday, September 17, offering a good-sized audience her 24 Preludes for Piano, op. 41, and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an exhibition.

Auerbach, who grew up in the Ural mountains on the borders of Siberia, then trained at Juilliard, is an artistic polymath. She writes poetry and prose, paints, and composes prolifically. Prolifically and obsessively, judging from her three sets of 24 preludes, first for piano, subsequently for violin and piano and cello and piano. She couldn’t get that project out of her mind.

Auerbach prefaced her performance of the solo piano preludes with her own description of the pieces, which last about 45 minutes. They are “throwaway ideas” of “fragile beauty” that “disappear quickly”. She liked the idea of arranging a series of evanescent miniatures into a grand form — a plan she also followed with the other two sets. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Orchestra opening night at Severance Hall with Fabio Luisi and Hélène Grimaud (September 19)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Luisi-&-Grimaud-(Mastroianni)In a break with tradition, The Cleveland Orchestra has entrusted the first month of its new season to guest conductors. Presiding over opening night on Thursday, September 19, was Fabio Luisi, who took some time off from The Metropolitan Opera on Thanksgiving weekend of 2011 to make a thrilling debut at Severance Hall.

On that occasion, Luisi shaped impressive accounts of two Strauss tone poems and a Mozart concerto with pianist Jonathan Biss. On Thursday, he led a nuanced, characterful reading of Mahler’s fourth symphony and a regal performance of Beethoven’s fifth piano concerto with his frequent collaborator, pianist Hélène Grimaud. (For the Fridays @ 7 concert on Friday, Luisi swapped Mahler out for Schumann’s first symphony, returning to the original program for his third concert on Saturday).

Luisi and the orchestra set the tone for Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto with a grandly symphonic introduction. In her first entrance, Hélène Grimaud nearly matched them in power and brilliance. [Read more…]

CD Review: Bruce Dickey: La Bella Minuta — Florid Songs for Cornetto around 1600

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by Daniel Hathaway

Dickey-La-Bella-Minuta-CDBoth the Dodo (the bird) and the cornetto (the instrument) suffered extinction toward the end of the seventeenth century. By 1665, humans and their domestic animals had hunted down all the Dodos on Mauritius, while changes in musical taste spelled the end of the Cornetto, according to virtuoso cornettist Bruce Dickey, whose wonderful new Passacaille CD, La Bella Minuta, preserves the florid, vocalistic repertoire of that instrument’s golden age just as vividly as Lewis Carroll kept the idea of the Dodo alive in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

La Bella Minuta takes its title from Girolamo Dalla Casa’s 1584 term for the improvisatory divisions or diminuzioni that skilled players use to elaborate musical lines, a technique, Dickey writes, that “touch the very soul of the cornetto, utilizing its amazing agility and its astonishing vocality.”

To help show off those features of the instrument — fingered like a recorder but played by vibrating the lips against a small, cupped mouthpiece — Dickey has assembled a winning team of musicians, including organist Lieuwe Tamminga, viol players Claudia Pasetto, Leonardo Bortolotto and Alberto Rasi, and harpist Maria Christina Cleary, and got permission to take over the private chapel of the Este court, the Basilica Palatina of Santa Barbara in Mantua, for a week for rehearsing and recording. That church, “conceived and built, it is said, with music in mind…for a court in which music played an enormous role,” (liner notes) also houses a Graziadio Antegnati organ from 1565 (restored in 2006 by Giorgio Carli) which contributes handsomely to the musical proceedings. [Read more…]

Review: Music from the Western Reserve — pianist Caroline Oltmanns (September 15)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Oltmanns-CarolineYoungstown State University piano professor Caroline Oltmanns launched the new season of Music From The Western Reserve’s distinguished concert series at Christ Episcopal Church in Hudson on Sunday afternoon with an engaging hour of music by Schubert, Beethoven, James Wilding and Chopin. Oltmann’s easy confidence as a performer and her skill as a commentator drew the nice-sized audience in as though listeners and performer were gathered together in an intimate living room.

The centerpiece of the afternoon was Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata, op. 53, which Oltmanns prefaced with the intelligence that the sonata’s earlier nickname was L’Aurore (Dawn) and with the caveat that this would, at 25 minutes, be the most demanding listening assignment of the afternoon. She dispatched the work with a refreshing straightforwardness and relaxed tempos which allowed the music to breathe in places where other pianists press nervously ahead. The final prestos gained extra character from that approach.

[Read more…]

CD Review: Sultans of String — Symphony

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by Mike Telin

Sultans-Symphony-CDKnown as “Canada’s ambassadors of musical diversity”, the Sultans of String make a return visit to Cleveland this Sunday, September 22nd beginning at 7:00 pm at Nighttown. If you missed the group’s Nighttown performance back in January you have a second chance to hear the Sultans’ blend of Spanish Flamenco, Arabic folk, Cuban rhythms, and French Manouche Gypsy-jazz that earned them a 2010 Juno Award nomination as well as being named the World Group of the Year at the Canadian Folk Music Awards (2012). The group has also been nominated for the 2013 World Group of the Year at the 2013 SiriusXM Canadian Indie Awards. In February of this year, bandleader and violinist Chris McKhool was awarded the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal for his work in building community, and for his contributions to Canada.

The group’s Nighttown performance also coincides with the release of their latest CD, Symphony, available in stores today distributed by Sony/Red through Red River Entertainment. Suffice it to say, this is a CD that goes beyond a gratuitous synthesizing of diverse musical styles and influences with sugarcoated orchestral arrangements. [Read more…]

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