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Review: Akron Symphony opening concert with Levi Hammer (September 15)

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by Daniel Hathaway

ASO-WilkinsThe Akron Symphony opened its new season on Sunday evening at E.J. Thomas Hall under the expressive baton of music director Christopher Wilkins with assured performances of a Ron Nelson overture, a Mozart piano concerto with assistant conductor Levi Hammer at the “Three Graces” Steinway, and a Brahms Symphony. The High Holy Days bumped the performance a day later than the ASO’s normal Saturday evening slot and probably accounted for an opening night crowd a bit smaller than usual but no less effusive in its support for their local ensemble.

Brahms was famously nervous about producing his first symphony. The project languished for years as the composer’s original ideas were repurposed into a piano concerto and parts of his Requiem. What finally emerged in 1876 has become one of the standards of the repertoire, and the ASO did the piece proud. A rich, full, blended tone filled the hall in the tuttis and solo winds (notably oboist Terry Orcutt and clarinetist Kristina Belisle Jones) were splendidly lyrical. [Read more…]

Review: BlueWater Chamber Orchestra with violinist Diana Cohen (September 7)

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by Daniel Hathaway

COHEN-DianaApparently eager to be the first ensemble out of the gate at the beginning of the new concert year, BlueWater Chamber Orchestra opened its fourth season at the Breen Center on Saturday evening with a renewed commitment to musicians raised, trained or living in Cleveland and offered a couple of endearing innovations in concert presentation.

The excellent concert featured Samuel Barber’s violin concerto with Cleveland-born Diana Cohen in the solo role. It also turned the time-honored order of overture-concerto-symphony a bit inside-out, and was played without intermission. The performance also began at 7:30 — early for a Saturday night performance — and ended by 8:45 when the evening was still young for an unhurried post-performance meal.

Cohen, who currently serves as concertmaster for Canada’s Calgary Symphony, has recently deepened her ongoing Cleveland connections by founding ChamberFest Cleveland with her father, Cleveland Orchestra principal clarinetist Franklin Cohen. Those who have heard her play so eloquently during the first two seasons of that series had the opportunity to experience her artistry as a concerto player at the end of Saturday evening’s program, a role in which she proved to be equally impressive. [Read more…]

Film Review: “Becoming Traviata” at the Cleveland Museum of Art

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by Timothy Robson

Becoming-Traviata-PosterFew of us who love opera but do not participate in its performance have a true idea of all of the thought, energy and struggle that go into the creation of a new production, even of an opera performed as often as Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata. On Friday, September 6, the Cleveland Museum of Art gave the Cleveland premiere showing of French director Philippe Béziat’s 2012 documentary Becoming Traviata (original title, Traviata et nous).

The film follows director Jean-François Sivadier as he prepares a production of the Verdi classic starring French soprano Natalie Dessay as Violetta Valery and American tenor Charles Castronovo as Alfredo Germont. French baritone Ludovic Tezier plays the pivotal role of Alfredo’s father Giorgio Germont. Louis Langrée was the conductor for the production, made for the 2011 Aix-en-Provence Festival in France.

From the beginning, there are the challenges of working language, with French and American principals, a British orchestra (the London Symphony) and an Estonian chorus. It is fascinating to watch Sivadier switch seamlessly between French, English and Italian, sometimes a sentence at a time. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom — Pixar in Concert with Richard Kaufman (August 31)

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by Robert Rollin

Pixar-in-ConcertThe Cleveland Orchestra closed its Blossom Festival summer season on August 31 and September 1 with two performances of Pixar in Concert. I attended the Saturday performance, a delightful evening conducted by Richard Kaufman. Kaufman was for eighteen years music coordinator at MGM, supervising both film and television projects. He is now an active pops conductor.

Pixar, the most innovative animation company in recent years, has had a remarkable succession of hits since Toy Story (1995), and the evening concentrated on the quality film music that has helped usher in this new era. Several enormous screens projected the film visuals. Pixar’s skill has been in humanizing digital animation characters, whether children’s toys, monsters, fish, automobiles, insects, or rats, by giving them personalities, endearing expressions, and showing them in life and death struggles to fight the good fight simply to do what is morally right.

Kaufman skillfully coordinated the correlation of music with the films’ visual actions. Though a few musicians wore earphones providing click tracks to maintain ensemble, the large majority relied on Kaufman’s clear beat to stay together. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom with David Afkham & Martin Helmchen (August 24)

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by Nicholas Jones

AFKHAM-DavidSaturday’s Cleveland Orchestra concert at Blossom took its lead from the young – two guest artists barely thirty, and two composers even younger.

The brilliant German conductor David Afkham, returning to Blossom where he debuted in July of 2011, brought fire and freshness to a familiar program of music by Beethoven and Schubert. A former Dudamel conducting fellow, Afkham shares with his mentor a focus on the details coupled with an unflagging sense of the big picture.

The opening piece was Beethoven’s stormy “Coriolanus” overture (in C minor: the rest of the program moved to the sunnier key of C major). While there was a little rhythmic uncertainty as the piece began, the conductor soon established control. Afkham has a sure hold on how important contrast is to Beethoven: the overture unmistakably showed the contrast between the angular theme that depicts the overbearing Roman general with its abrupt leaps and terrifying silences, and the gentler tune usually associated with the pleadings of Coriolanus’s mother. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Orchestra & Joffrey Ballet with Tito Muñoz — Gould, Adams, Khachaturian & Stravinsky at Blossom (August 17)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Joffrey-Cast-Bow

For their third Blossom collaboration under conductor Tito Muñoz, Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet and The Cleveland Orchestra brought four scores composed within the last hundred years to the pavilion stage at the Blossom Music Center on Saturday evening, August 17 (to be repeated on Sunday evening).

Two were newly-minted contributions to the dance repertoire. Stanton Welch choreographed John Adams’s Son of Chamber Symphony (2007) in 2012 for Jacob’s Pillow — the original commission, entitled Joyride, involved Stanford University, Carnegie Hall, and the San Francisco Ballet, with choreography by Mark Morris. And Aram Khachaturian’s Adagio, a pas de deux from Spartacus (1954) was refashioned from the original ballet by Yuri Possokhov for the 2012 Napa Valley Festival de Sole.

Two were twentieth-century classics. Jerome Robbins’s 1945 Interplay was set to Morton Gould’s 1943 American Concertette. And Igor Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps had its famous, riotous debut in Paris a hundred years ago last April. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland International Piano Competition — Final rounds with The Cleveland Orchestra (August 9 & 10)

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by Daniel Hathaway

CIPC-Severance-SteinwayRoger Mastroianni’s photo captured the mood of expectation as the final four pianists in the Cleveland International Piano Competition waited their turns to perform concertos with Stefan Sanderling and The Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall on Friday and Saturday evenings — the last stop on the way to the top.

Two of the contestants chose Tchaikovsky’s first concerto, performances which were wisely distributed between the two evenings. François Dumont was up first on Friday, Jiayan Sun first on Saturday, and if cataloging the differences between their interpretations didn’t amount to comparing apples to oranges, it was at least an exercise in distinguishing between McIntoshes and Galas. Both performers brought abundant technique, fine musicianship and a clear game plan to their tasks. Choosing between them was a matter of taste, and a task we were happy to leave to the jury.

[Read more…]

Review: Cleveland International Piano Competition — Award Ceremony and Medalist Recital (August 11)

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by Guytano Parks

CIPC-Medalists-081013“Everything must gel at that one moment…a culmination and balance of mind, heart and soul.” That bit of wisdom was shared by HaeSun Paik of Korea, one of the jurors of the Cleveland International Piano Competition during the Jury Roundtable Festival Conversation on August 5. All twenty-eight of the extremely talented contestants certainly had their moments, but several stood out from the rest and they were recognized and rewarded for their outstanding performances in the 2013 CIPC on Sunday, August 11 during the Awards Ceremony at Severance Hall.

Serving as host for the event was WCLV’s program director Bill O’Connell who welcomed, greeted and thanked all forces involved in making the 2013 CIPC a splendid and exciting success, in addition to remarks by Piano International Association of Northern Ohio president Teresa Good and Pierre van der Westhuizen, Executive Director of CIPC. Generous individuals and foundations provided special cash awards which ranged from $1,500 to $2,500 and presented them to the pianists who were all present except for one. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland International Piano Competition — Semi-Final Round, Day Two (August 7)

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by Daniel Hathaway

C13 Treutler-AnnikaOn Wednesday, with the moment of decision only hours away, the last four pianists in the semi-final round stepped up to the Hamburg Steinway in Gartner Auditorium to vie for a slot in the final round with The Cleveland Orchestra on Friday and Saturday night.

Annika Treutler (23, Germany) assembled a program of Haydn, Hindemith, Scriabin, Chopin and Liszt for the afternoon’s opening set. Her elegant phrasing, graceful but forceful technique and fine sense of musical line and architecture touched everything she played. Only subtle shadings of color and dynamics differentiated each of Haydn’s f-minor variations from the other. Hindemith’s Suite “1922”, a piece parodying popular dances of the era — which the composer later advised his publisher not to bother to reprint — was far more eventful as Treutler navigated her way through its Marsch, its gloomy, atonal Shimmy, its thick-textured but later sparkling Nachtstück, its waltzy and rhetorical Boston and its uptime Rag, which sported a huge ending. Scriabin’s op. 13 Preludes were by turns rumbling, wistful, ornate and powerful. Treutler played Liszt’s reworkings of Schumann’s songs, Widmung and Frühlingsnacht with grace and agility, and Liszt’s own Hungarian Rhapsody No. 8 with characteristic spirit. The audience enthusiastically applauded after each item in the set. [Read more…]

Report: Cleveland International Piano Competition Festival film — The Art of Chopin (August 7)

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by Guytano Parks

Chopin-PortraitThe Art of Chopin, an hour-long documentary film by Gerald Caillat produced by Euroarts Studio and released in August 2010 to commemorate the great Polish composer’s 200th birthday, was the fifth “Festival Event” presented by The Cleveland International Piano Competition at The Cleveland Museum of Art. The CIPC website describes the film as “a thought-provoking and enlightening film paying tribute to the art of Frederic Chopin (1810-1849), whose unique and inimitable writing laid the groundwork for twentieth century music and the modern piano.”

Garrick Ohlsson, the first American to win the International Frederic Chopin Competition in 1970, provides much of the dialogue during the documentary. Taken aback as he views a video excerpt from his exciting and historic competition winning performance at the onset of the film, he humbly says, “wow — only a few minutes, but such a big part of my life.” [Read more…]

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