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Review: Canton Symphony Orchestra — a marriage of passion and perplexity (March 23)

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by Tom Wachunas

ZIMMERMN-GerhardtIf there is a single idea that remains maddeningly entangled with my overall sense of the March 23 program by the Canton Symphony Orchestra, it is that love is a many splintered thing. For it was largely a theme of love, in wildly diverse applications, that united the three works on the program: Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3, Canti guerrieri ed amorosi (Songs of War and Love) by American composer Claude Baker, and Symphony No. 5 by Dmitri Shostakovich. The evening was a stormy orchestral journey, some of it difficult to navigate, but ultimately richly rewarding.

Not surprisingly, the performance of the Beethoven overture was utterly entrancing. With inspiring clarity, the orchestra wholly embraced the work’s intense pathos and urgent drama of undeserved suffering and the resolute power of heroic love.

The second selection of the evening was the much touted world premiere of Claude Baker’s Canti guerrieri ed amorosi, which was commissioned through Meet the Composer’s Commissioning Music/USA program, and written specifically to commemorate the CSO’s 75th Anniversary. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Chamber Music Society: Takács Quartet with Garrick Ohlsson at Plymouth Church (March 19)

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by Daniel Hathaway

TakacsQuartetSmReferring in a recent interview to the Brahms-Haydn-Brahms program the Takács String Quartet cooked up for their March 19 Cleveland Chamber Music Society concert with Garrick Ohlsson (and repeated the following evening at Lincoln Center), violist Geraldine Walther exclaimed, “Who would have thunk it! But it actually does work and it’s a really satisfying concert to hear.”

The unusually large crowd in Plymouth Church last Tuesday evening agreed enthusiastically with that assessment as the Takács and their distinguished piano colleague dug deeply into the structure and substance of Brahms’s Quartet in a, op. 51, no. 2, Piano Quintet in f, op. 34 and Haydn’s Quartet in B-flat, op. 76, no. 4, sculpting performances that rank among the most distinguished and compelling of the CCMS season to date.

The two Brahms works are fascinatingly dissimilar — the quartet lyrical but abstract, the quintet craggy and visceral. The Haydn — especially in the magical hands and bows of the Takács — provided a delicious entremet and made for just about as much fun as you could possibly have at a chamber music concert. [Read more…]

Review: Classical Guitarist Gideon Whitehead at Happy Days Lodge (March 17)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Gideon WhiteheadA classical guitar concert of mostly Russian music held on St. Patrick’s Day in a rustic lodge in a national park —with stuffed bison heads staring down at you! Disconnects sometimes make for really successful concerts, as they did last Sunday when guitarist Gideon Whitehead performed at Happy Days Lodge in Cuyahoga Valley National Park under the joint auspices of Music by Nature and the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society.

Whitehead, a Michigander who studied at CIM and is now pursuing an artist diploma at the Curtis Institute with Jason Vieux and David Starobin, appeared as part of CCGS’s Local Artists and Rising Stars Series.

Each half of his cleverly-constructed program began with a suite (Sylvius Leopold Weiss’s real baroque Partita in g and Paul Lansky’s witty modern knock-off, Semi-Suite), proceeded to an evocative set of variations, Sergei Rudnev’s on The Old Lime Tree, or a narrative work, Nikita Koshkin’s Usher Waltz, and ended with a tone poem, Grigori Korchmar’s White Nights Serenade and Agustin Barrios Mangoré’s La Catedral. [Read more…]

Review: The Newberry Consort: “Celestial Sirens” at the Church of the Covenant (March 20)

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by Nicholas Jones

Celestial-Sirens-ChicagoThe overlapping musical talents and resources of Cleveland’s early music community were in full multi-tasking mode at the Church of the Covenant last week — with some help from Chicago and Tennessee.

The occasion was one event in celebration of the church’s magnificent new tracker organ, modeled on north German 17th-century organs. The organ was built by the Tennessee firm of Richards, Fowkes and Company and installed only this January. It replaces a small gallery organ in the back of the church. A stop-action video documenting the organ’s installation is online at YouTube.

The organ is still being adjusted, but from what I heard, it has a lively delicacy that suits both early solo music and the accompaniment of singers. Boston-based organist Frances Fitch played it to great effect. [Read more…]

Review: CMA VIVA! & Gala: Ana Mauro, Fado of Portugal (March 22)

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by Nicholas Jones

MouraFado, the music sometimes called the “Portuguese blues,” is a relatively conservative genre. But recently, fado, like the Portuguese navigators of the Renaissance, has begun to explore the globe, and Ana Moura has been at the forefront of that exploration.

Ana Moura’s concert Friday at Gartner Auditorium in the Cleveland Museum of Art showed an enthusiastic audience — a nearly packed house — how the sad ballads of fado can cross over into jazz, blues, and folk.

Moura’s deep contralto voice, throaty and intense, evoked the saudade—meaning, roughly, “yearning” — that is at the heart of fado.

Backed up by a five-man band, she gave her concert in a single set of about ninety minutes. [Read more…]

Review: CMA VIVA! & Gala: Naseer Shamma and Al-Oyoun Ensemble (March 15)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Shamma-NaseerNow that United States forces have ended their occupation of Iraq, oud virtuoso Naseer Shamma has returned to touring in this country after a ten-year, self-imposed absence. He brought his excellent Al-Oyoun ensemble to the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium on Friday, March 15 for a remarkable performance on its VIVA! & Gala series that included one dramatic testimony to the events of the last decade during an 11-piece set that otherwise treated the large audience to both strange and familiar sounds and a wide range of musical forms.

Once a rarity, the expressive voice of the oud has become better known in the West — it recently evoked the Arabic music of Spain in the late fourteenth century during a performance by the Broken Consort at St. John’s Cathedral. In the hands of Naseer Shamma, it speaks eloquently both as a solo instrument and as a member of the traditional Iraqi takht or ensemble, which in Gartner last Friday included the Qanun, an 81-string zither, the Nay or end-blown flute in several sizes, the Riqq or Arab tambourine, a bass viol and two violins (19th century latecomers from Europe). [Read more…]

Review: Cathartic moments from the Canton Symphony Chorus (March 15)

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by Tom Wachunas

CSO-Chorus-Cable-March-2013The Canton Symphony Orchestra “casual series” concerts presented in Cable Recital Hall are generally chamber music affairs featuring small instrumental ensembles – duos, trios, quartets or quintets. For scaled-down concerts of this sort, the acoustics in this modest hall, which can seat an audience of approximately 140 listeners, are more than suitable.

So the first surprise about the concert on March 15 was that it featured a full chamber orchestra – some 30 pieces – as well as the superb 53-member Canton Symphony Chorus. One might have reasonably anticipated a sound far too deafening for this intimate venue. Surprise number two: Orchestra and chorus, both separately and together, delivered a deeply satisfying aural experience that was clear and balanced in every way. [Read more…]

Review: Tuesday Musical: Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma at E.J. Thomas Hall (March 14)

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by Nicholas Jones

Silk-Road-EnsembleThe Silk Road, the ancient trade route between China and the western world, was active for two millennia from before Alexander to the late Middle Ages. Across that highway traveled not only silks and spices but also inventions from gunpowder to printing and ideas from mathematics to Buddhism.

The Silk Road Ensemble, founded by American cellist Yo-Yo Ma over a decade ago, takes that East-West route as a metaphor for cultural exchange today, bringing western and non-western musicians into a vibrant, innovative, and deeply collaborative musical experience. The result is an evening of strange and wonderful sounds that might have delighted Marco Polo or Genghis Khan. [Read more…]

Review: Contemporary Youth Orchestra’s “Singer/Songwriters” — an embarassment of riches (March 16)

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by Timothy Robson

CYO-SS-031613Sometimes good ideas run amok, despite the best of intentions and excellent execution. Such was the case with the Contemporary Youth Orchestra’s “Singer / Songwriters” concert at CSU’s Waetjen Auditorium on March 16. The orchestra’s brilliantly inventive music director Liza Grossman hit on the idea of having singer/songwriters present their songs in full orchestral arrangements commissioned by the orchestra.

The performer/composers participated in a competition to have their songs chosen. There was a wealth of talent from Cleveland, Michigan, New York, Connecticut and California. And there’s the flaw: fourteen performers (some soloists, some groups) were chosen to perform two songs each. Then there was set up time and spoken commentary in between each performer. The concert was more than three hours long, and many in the audience fled long before the end, which was regrettable, because there were fine performances right through to the end of the evening. [Read more…]

Review: Apollo’s Fire: The Intimate Bach, Part II at Fairlawn Lutheran Church (March 14)

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by Guytano Parks

AF-Intimate-BachApollo’s Fire presented the first of four performances of “The Intimate Bach, Part II” as part of a series entitled The “Fireside” Concerts at Fairlawn Lutheran Church on Thursday, March 14. Three of the ensemble’s principal players, violinist Olivier Brault, flutist Kathie Stewart, cellist René Schiffer and the ensemble’s director, harpsichordist Jeannette Sorrell, performed music by Bach and Telemann.

The principal players of Apollo’s Fire were of one mind and spirit and their rapport was apparent as they opened the program with Telemann’s Paris Quartet No. 12 in e minor. Phrases were delivered sensitively with nuance and expressive ornamentation. The interplay between the performers in sequential sections and the echoing of phrases in others sounded personal, much like a conversation. Improvisatory writing in the Prelude plus sections of lyricism within the other movements nicely offset the lively nature of this work. [Read more…]

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