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Review: Opera Per Tutti: the rest of Il Trittico at Cleveland Public Theatre

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by Mike Telin

OPT-Trittico-IIThis past weekend in the Gordon Square Theatre at Cleveland Public Theatre, the always resourceful Opera Per Tutti completed its cycle of the three operas comprising Puccini’s “Il Trittico” with engaging productions of Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi, skillfully directed by Scott Skiba. The company performed the first opera of the Triptych, Il Tabarro, in October 2010.

Watching other people’s dysfunctional families unravel before your eyes has been a source of entertainment since, well probably since there have been people. And in opera, while there is plenty of dysfunction to go around, the family of deceased Buoso Donati, could easily rival, if not outdo the Kardashians in their unbridled attempt to secure their share of the family fortune. A fortune which Buoso Donati has left to the monastery. [Read more…]

Review: Akron Symphony’s Rite of Spring (April 13)

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by Mike Telin

ASO-RiteAlthough Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is now recognized as one of the most important musical scores of the 20th century, the story of its premiere in May of 1913 is now a legend. And the question of whether or not it was Stravinsky’s music or Nijinsky’s choreography that caused the near-riot reaction from the Parisian audience is still the subject of debate. On Saturday, April 13 at Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall, the Akron Symphony Orchestra and Cleveland-based GroundWorks DanceTheater along with guest dancers — both professional and amateur — presented an enthralling new production of Stravinsky’s mammoth ballet score.

During the past few years The Akron Symphony has presented some outstanding performances resulting from community-based projects (think Porgy and Bess) and Saturday’s performance did not disappoint. Stravinsky said, “What I was trying to convey in The Rite was the surge of spring, the magnificent upsurge of nature re-born,” and GroundWorks’s artistic director David Shimotahakara’s imaginative choreography brilliantly served the composer’s wishes. And a cast of dancers that included GroundWorks’ five members, three other professionals and an ensemble of 15 Akron area students performed with style and conviction. [Read more…]

Review: Soaring Wagner, Savage Stravinsky from the Canton Symphony (April 20)

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by Tom Wachunas

Yekel-AmyThe Canton Symphony Orchestra enlisted Thomson Smillie, the acclaimed opera producer, stage director and lecturer, as guest speaker for its April 20 season finale concert at Umstattdt Hall. His observations before and during the first half of the program, consisting of three selections from Wagner operas, were delightfully astute and witty, and it’s difficult to imagine a more excited champion of Wagner’s impactful genius.

In retrospect, Smillie’s directive to the audience on how to best embrace the first work of the evening, Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, and the third selection, Brünnhilde’s Immolation scene from Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), seems somewhat curious if not counterintuitive. Smillie posited that the dramatic thrust of these works cannot be wholly appreciated via the inadequate (and perhaps even silly) words in the libretto, but rather through the cascading orchestral surges he compared to musical orgasms. While we hear the singer with our ears and see her with our eyes, he explained further, we must listen to the orchestra with our hearts to experience what words on their own could never impart. [Read more…]

Review: Organist Christopher Houlihan in symphonic works by Vierne and Liszt at Fairmount Presbyterian (April 19)

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by Timothy Robson

Houlihan-ChristopherChristopher Houlihan, a rising star in the classical organ world, made his second Northeast Ohio appearance on Friday, April 19, at Fairmount Presbyterian Church in Cleveland Heights (he played last November at Stambaugh Auditorium in Youngstown). The concert was jointly sponsored by Fairmount and the Cleveland Chapter of the American Guild of Organists. His program contained just two works, the Symphony No. 3 in F-sharp Minor, Op. 28, by Louis Vierne, and Franz Liszt’s monumental Fantasy and Fugue on “Ad nos, ad salutarem undam.” It was a heavy-weight program that required all of the ingenuity of the performer and all the resources of the church’s large Schantz pipe organ.

Louis Vierne, born nearly blind in 1870, studied organ at the Paris Conservatory, then served as assistant to his teacher Charles-Marie Widor at Saint-Sulpice. He became the organist at Notre Dame Cathedral in 1900, a post he held until his death in 1937. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Orchestra with Franz Welser-Möst and Frank Peter Zimmermann (April 18)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Welser-Most-MastroianniLooking fit and energized after his recent back problems, Franz Welser-Möst returned to Severance Hall on Thursday evening, April 18 to lead one of the most exciting and highly-polished Cleveland Orchestra concerts of the season. And one of the most varied: the first performance of Sean Shepherd’s Tuolumne shared the program with Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 with Frank Peter Zimmermann out in front, and Dvorak’s Symphony No. 6. One might quarrel with the ordering of the pieces, but the elements that made up this weekend’s musical triptych were smart choices and the performances were winners.

In February, Daniel R. Lewis Young Composer Fellow Sean Shepherd completed his impressions of three Yosemite National Park scenes captured by American photographer Ansel Adams, the final commission of Shepherd’s two-year residency with the orchestra. The composer is quick to point out that the piece is not a musical representation of the Adams images but “a kind of response to that set of three black-and-white photographs… a meditation on and celebration of both the place and the images” — exactly what the French Impressionists had in mind a century ago. [Read more…]

Review: Les Délices — Four Seasons at William Busta Gallery (April 20)

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by Nicholas Jones

Les-Delices2As I write this, Ohio seems to be stuck in an endless winter of discontent. But the ungiving weather was more than a little mollified by the warm elegance and sprightly eccentricity of this weekend’s seasonal program by Les Délices. The group, founded and directed by baroque oboist Debra Nagy, is now completing its fourth season, and specializes in the music of the French Baroque.

The centerpiece of the program was a substantial cantata titled L’Hyver (Winter), one of a cycle of four cantatas on the seasons by the early-18th-century composer Joseph Bodin de Boismortier. With appropriate Baroque word-painting, Boismortier depicts winter’s horrors—bare trees, mountain storms, and frost-stricken buds—then shifts to winter’s pleasures—dances, feasts, and plays. Winter’s destructive fury turns out to be a foil to the delights of a Parisian salon, well heated and well stocked with wine and music.

The presiding muse of those delights was the masterful soprano Clara Rottsolk, who was featured on Les Délices’ recent CD, Myths and Allegories. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Orchestra: Bach and Orff with Walters and Feddeck (April 11)

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by Daniel Hathaway

WALTERS-RobertPatrons who packed the four sold-out houses last weekend at Severance Hall came to hear Carl Orff’s spirited medieval cantata Carmina Burana, but they were also treated to the bonus of an elegant curtain-raiser in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Concerto in A for oboe d’amore and strings with Robert Walters on the solo line.

Bach — that great recycler — turned several wind concertos from his days as court composer at Köthen into harpsichord concertos for his coffee house concerts with the Leipzig University Collegium Musicum between 1729 and 1741. Though the originals have been lost, they can be reconstructed by clever musicologists, as an uncredited arranger did for BWV 1055.

James Feddeck, stepping in for Franz Welser-Möst last weekend, led a string section pared down to eight first violins, six seconds, five violas, four cellos and two double basses, creating an admirable balance between soloist and orchestra [Read more…]

Review: Youngstown Symphony plays Rimsky-Korsakoff & Brahms (April 13)

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by Robert Rollin

FLEISCHER-RandallCraigSaturday night’s Youngstown Symphony concert in Powers Auditorium was an absolute delight, as the Symphony performed two contrasting masterpieces: Nikolas Rimsky-Korsakoff’s Scheherazade, Op. 35, and Johannes Brahms’ Symphony No. 2 in D Major. Op. 73. The many differences between the two works made the evening, the last of the season, especially memorable.

Scheherazade is a marvelous programmatic piece with four episodes in the Sultana’s succession of a thousand and one tales which enthrall the Sultan so much that he forgets to execute her as he had all other wives after their wedding nights. Through her guile and storytelling skill, Scheherazade survives and becomes his permanent bride. The composer used the concertmaster’s solo violin to portray Scheherazade’s story-telling ability and as a means of uniting all four movements, not only with musical timbre, but also with Scheherazade’s theme. [Read more…]

Review: Organist Ken Cowan on the E.M. Skinner at Stambaugh Hall, Youngstown (April 7)

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by Daniel Hathaway

StambaughAuditoriumIn the first three decades of the twentieth century, E.M. Skinner’s instruments were the Cadillacs of organs, establishing themselves in the most prestigious churches and concert halls in the United States. A wave of restoration projects has renewed many of Skinner’s instruments in Northeast Ohio, notably at Severance Hall, Morley Music Hall at Lake Erie College in Painesville and most recently at Stambaugh Auditorium, an impressive, 2,500 seat, Graeco-Roman hall built in 1926 that crowns a hill near Youngstown State University.

Stambaugh has launched an organ series to celebrate the restoration of its distinguished 58-rank organ, which is divided behind the proscenium on both sides of the stage and speaks with a fine presence through grillwork into the hall. Canadian-born organist Ken Cowan, who now teaches at Rice University in Houston, played an eclectic program of Wagner, J.S. Bach, John Ireland, Rachel Laurin, Healey Willan, Saint-Saëns and Sowerby on Sunday afternoon, April 7 which brilliantly showed off the Skinner’s many capabilities. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Classical Guitar Society — Marcin Dylla at First Unitarian, Shaker Heights (April 5)

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by James Flood

Dylla-IMG_5703The young Polish guitarist, Marcin Dylla, delivered the final concert of the Cleveland Classical Guitar Socety’s Master’s Series on Friday, April 5 at First Unitarian Church in Shaker Heights. Dylla has been sweeping competitions around the world, earning 19 first-place awards with his exceptionally refined playing.

Dylla opened the program with Manuel Ponce’s Sonata Romantica, an homage to Franz Schubert. The work showcases Ponce’s compositional talent in writing a substantive work imitating the style of Schubert, with undulating melodies and, at times, rich chromaticism. Marcin Dylla’s playing is eminently smooth. His touch is gentle. Even his physical gestures bespeak the approach he takes, his arms and hands very fluid and relaxed. [Read more…]

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