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Review: BlueWater Chamber Orchestra with Neil Mueller and harpsichordist Kenneth Cooper (May 4)

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by Mike Telin

COOPER-KennethWhile associate conductor Neil Mueller aptly chose to title last weekend’s BlueWater Chamber Orchestra concert Baroque Reverberations, Mueller could have also appropriately named it “the many sides of Kenneth Cooper.” On Saturday, May 4th in Plymouth Church, the celebrated American harpsichordist and conductor returned to Cleveland for the first time since he was featured in multiple concerts with the Ohio Chamber Orchestra several years ago — and hopefully a return visit will not take nearly as long. Even better if that visit would reunite him with Mueller and the talented BlueWater players.

The concert featured music of the early 18th century, Handel’s Concerto No. 15 in d minor for harpsichord and strings, with Cooper in the role of soloist, and Bach’s Orchestra Suite No. 3 in D, where he displayed his astute continuo playing skills. Music from the 20th century also made an appearance with de Falla’s Concerto for harpsichord, flute, oboe, clarinet, violin and cello. Here Cooper became a virtuoso chamber musician. [Read more…]

Review: Arts Renaissance Tremont — Eliesha Nelson with James Howsmon at Pilgrim (April 28)

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by Mike Telin

NELSON-ElieshaHeadViolist Eliesha Nelson has a penchant for discovering interesting music written for her instrument. Her 2009 release Quincy Porter Viola Works, received four Grammy nominations and won in the Best Engineered Album Classical category. The tag line of her website homepage states: Showcasing the viola repertoire’s lost gems. And stating why her 2011 release Russian Viola Sonatas did not include the sonata of Shostakovich, Nelson writes, “I love the Shostakovich Sonata, but did not include it because I love to explore music off the beaten path.”

On Sunday, April 28 in Pilgrim Church, Eliesha Nelson and pianist James Howsmon presented a captivating recital that featured works by two lesser known composers as well as a household name on the final concert of Arts Renaissance Tremont’s season.

Nelson referred to the programming of the first half as “a homage to 20th Century American Music.” Composer Ross Lee Finney (1906 – 1997) was a student of Nadia Boulanger, Edward Burlingame Hill and Alban Berg as well as Roger Sessions and served on the faculties at Smith and the University of Michigan. [Read more…]

Review: Matteo Fedeli: “A Stradivari for the People” at Reinberger Chamber Hall (April 28)

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by Guytano Parks

FEDELI-MatteoCleveland’s Severance Hall was included in the eight-city American tour of the Antonio Stradivari 1726 “Ex Adams Collection” violin played by Matteo Fedeli with pianist Andrea Carcano. Presented by The Consulate of Italy in Detroit commemorating the Year of Italian Culture in the USA 2013, the program of short pieces served well to show off the rich qualities of the coveted instrument. Fedeli is councillor, associate founder and has been first violinist of the Academy String Concert Orchestra of Milan since 1995. Known as “the man of the Stradivarius,” he was a charming and enthusiastic ambassador, providing spoken program notes from Reinberger Chamber Hall’s stage.

Opening with Danse Hongroise by Rachmaninoff, violinist and pianist Carcano at once revealed a close and sensitive collaboration which prevailed throughout the entire evening. Fedeli drew a full-bodied tone from the instrument which was most impressive in its lower register, making the most of contrasts between the rhythmic and the lyrical. Après un Rêve — a dream of romantic elopement with a lover — is one of Fauré’s most famous songs and indeed the violinist became a singer, sensitively phrasing and breathing with subtle nuance and heartfelt emotion. [Read more…]

Review: Schola Antiqua of Chicago — Machaut at St. John’s Cathedral (April 26)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Schola-Antiqua-ChicagoWith the rise of Dante, Petrarch, Boccacio, Chaucer and the celebrated poet-musician Guillaume de Machaut, the fourteenth century was a heady era for literature in Europe. Schola Antiqua of Chicago under the direction of Michael Anderson treated the audience at St. John’s Cathedral on Friday evening, April 26, to a captivating survey of Machaut’s music and poetry. The program included his complete Mass of Our Lady interleaved with two of his twenty-three extant motets and five examples of his numerous secular songs.

Anderson, a musicologist at the Eastman School of Music who assumed the directorship of the 13-year-old ensemble in 2008, prefaced the concert with an audience-friendly introduction to Machaut’s musical style, demonstrating how the composer created tension and release and giving examples of Machaut’s spiky, double-leading-tone cadences. That probably only partly prepared the listeners for Machaut’s sound-world with its stark open fifths, sudden bursts of lush harmony and flights of hocket — the ricocheting of short notes back and forth between voices imitating hiccups that Machaut and his contemporaries got a kick out of incorporating into sacred pieces. [Read more…]

Review: Peter Richard Conte on the Skinner organ in Stambaugh Auditorium, Youngstown (April 28)

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by Robert Rollin

ContePeter Richard Conte’s Sunday afternoon Stambaugh Auditorium organ concert was a delight. The large, recently renovated Skinner organ, putatively a gem of its type, was certainly put through its paces. The program, full of interesting highlights, included music from the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-century organ literature.

Conte, who presides at the mammoth organs at Macy’s in Philadelphia (formerly Wanamaker’s) and Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA as well as serving as music director at St. Clement’s Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, performed two interesting transcriptions of his own during the first half. The Mondscheinmusik from Richard Strauss’ opera Capriccio, opus 85 provided evocative post-Wagnerian harmony and tone color. Originally an orchestral interlude, the transcription provided the opportunity to feature string and French horn organ timbres. The music, enriched with many non-chord tones, presented lovely translucent accompaniment to beautiful melodic material.

Otto Nicolai’s lusty comic opera overture to The Merry Wives of Windsor provided source material for Conte’s second transcription. Here the irrepressible Falstaff pursues two married women who ultimately throw him into the river. [Read more…]

Review: Oberlin Artist Recital Series — Apollo’s Fire in “Mozart & Papa Haydn” in Finney Chapel (April 28)

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by Nicholas Jones

AFJSConductingIn its concerts this weekend, Apollo’s Fire burnt bright with the intensity of the mature Haydn and the brilliance of the young Mozart (not that he was ever old, alas!)

This winter has seen Cleveland’s baroque orchestra presenting “intimate” concerts of Vivaldi and Bach with reduced forces, perhaps for budget reasons. By contrast, this concert assembled a big band—almost thirty instrumentalists—fitting for late 18th-century operatic and symphonic literature. The investment in such a richness of talent paid off in an extraordinary mixture of precision, energy, and richness.

Full string sections were backed by pairs of natural horns and paired woodwinds—baroque bassoons, oboes, and flutes. In Oberlin’s Finney Chapel—acoustically clear and relatively dry—the group could play at faster tempos than in the resonant churches in which Apollo’s Fire normally performs, and with a tighter sense of ensemble.

This was Apollo’s Fire at its best: crisp, exciting, and beautifully transparent. Bass lines energized the music from below; in the middle, inner voices shone through with ease; oboes, flutes, and violins dazzled with rapid and always-varying intricacies. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus in Haydn’s The Seasons (April 25)

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by Daniel Hathaway

TCO&COCThe Cleveland Orchestra Chorus has had a lot on its plate this month, preparing and performing two major works just two weeks apart. This fine, all-volunteer ensemble — now celebrating its sixtieth anniversary — handily swapped the faux-medieval pastiche of Carmina Burana for the witty, cultured music of The Seasons, turning in a splendid performance of Haydn’s underappreciated, second oratorio under the baton of Franz Welser-Möst on Thursday evening, April 25 in Severance Hall — with a little help from The Cleveland Orchestra and three top-notch soloists.

The suddenly-flowering trees out front augured well for the occasion, which opened with an orchestral introduction depicting “the passage from winter to spring”. That was followed closely by the choral caveat: “Do not rejoice all too soon / for often, wrapped in mists, / winter creeps back again and strews / on blossom and bud his rigid poison.” Apparently, what goes for Cleveland also goes for Vienna. Though all four seasons cycled by onstage, Spring prevailed outside on Thursday night.

In setting Baron von Swieten’s adaptation of a lengthy text by Scots poet James Thomson, Haydn planned a major scene as the centerpiece of each season, calling on the chorus to play joyful, grateful countryfolk in Spring, storm-frightened villagers in Summer, hunters and wine tipplers in Autumn and spinners and storytellers gathered toastily around the fire in Winter. [Read more…]

Review: CityMusic Cleveland — Intergenerational Concerts at Fairmount Temple Auditorium (April 18)

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by Daniel Hathaway

DORMAN-AvnerCityMusic Cleveland has started a tradition of sponsoring a week’s worth of Intergenerational Concerts at the end of its season. This year’s cycle included four morning performances (opening with a limited access concert at the Juvenile Detention Center) and two evening concerts conducted by David Alan Miller. The morning events began with Rossini’s Thieving Magpie overture and continued with Avner Dorman’s Uzu and Muzu from Kakaruzu, based on the children’s book of the same name by Ephraim Sidon, featuring percussionists Haruka Fujii and Luke Rinderknecht. The two evening performances at the Shrine Church of St. Stanislaus and St. Noel, Willoughby Hills added Schumann’s fourth symphony.

I caught the Thursday morning performance at Fairmount Temple Auditorium, which got off to a bit of a late start waiting for school buses to arrive. When everybody was in place, the audience was as intergenerational as one could expect at 10:00 am: students, their teachers and aides and a number of older attendees — people whose commitments and schedules allow them to come to a true “matinee.” [Read more…]

Review: Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival — four concerts in two days (April 19-20)

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by Daniel Hathaway

B-WBachFestivalBig

For the eighty-first time, Baldwin Wallace (formerly College, now University and no longer hyphenized) honored the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and some of his forebears and contemporaries with four main concerts on its campus in Berea on April 19 and 20 — plus a lecture, a Bach Institute open house, a master class, ancillary events held in area churches and a reunion of former Bach Festival participants. The Cantor of Leipzig would have been proud.

CONCERT ONE

The opening concert was an organ recital of music by Bach and music that inspired Bach given by Hungarian-born, Oberlin-trained organist Bálint Karosi, who now lives and works in Boston. Playing the 1974 Rudolf Janke organ in Berea Methodist Church, Karosi presented music by Nicolaus Bruhns, Dietrich Buxtehude and Bach, as well as music by others — Johann Friedrich Fasch, Prince Johann Ernst and François Couperin — that Bach had arranged for the organ. Additionally, Karosi improvised on a chorale theme given to him on the spot. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Chamber Music Society — Quatuor ébène at Plymouth Church (April 16)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Quatuor-ebeneAnybody who thinks that string quartet concerts can be uneventful — or downright ennui-producing — should have heard the French bad boys who make up Quatuor ébène on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series at Plymouth Church on April 16. Pierre Colombet, Gabriel Le Magadure, Mathieu Herzog and Raphaël Merlin took mostly well-mannered quartets by Mozart and Mendelssohn out and gave them a hard ride. Either you hated their interpretations for their sheer wilfulness and distortion or you adored them for their sang-froid and cockiness. And then les garçons flipped a switch during intermission and turned into an astonishingly sophisticated pop/jazz group (chouette alors! — turn down the lights and break out the cabernet!)

You know it’s going to be an odd evening when the “dissonant” introduction to Mozart’s K. 465 quartet goes by without much of a ripple but the happy-sunny musical events that follow raise multiple eyebrows. [Read more…]

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