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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…]

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…]

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