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Re•Views

ChamberFest goes outdoors with “Music on the Path” (June 16)

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by Max Newman

The 2024 edition of ChamberFest Cleveland has already seen a variety of wonderful events since its opening on June 12. However, the June 16 musical celebration of “CFC at the Nature Center: Music on the Path,” was the perfect addition to ChamberFest’s diverse programming and undoubtedly put a smile on the faces of all who attended.

Centered around the parking lot of the Nature Center, the sunlit late-morning event at Shaker Lakes had an inviting, family-friendly atmosphere. [Read more…]

Ohio Light Opera opens 45th season in Wooster with classic Broadway musicals (June 12 & 13)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Titles like Guys & Dolls and The Sound of Music may have been novelties in American lyric theater when they opened on Broadway in 1950 and 1959. But by now, at the age of 74 and 65, respectively, both shows have achieved classic status as successors to the European operetta tradition and no longer seem like interlopers in the repertoire of companies like Ohio Light Opera.

Marking its 45th season as a company and its 40th in Freedlander Theater at the College of Wooster, OLO delivered handsome productions of these venerable shows by the creative teams of Frank Loesser (music and lyrics) and Jo Swerling & Abe Burrows (book) in the case of Guys and Dolls, and Richard Rodgers (music), Oscar Hammerstein II (lyrics), and Howard Lindsay & Russell Crouse (book) for The Sound of Music.

[Read more…]

ENCORE: Voice of the Dunkleosteus (June 15)

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by Stephanie Manning

Perhaps nothing exemplifies a festival themed around “Planet Earth” quite like a concert performed underneath a prehistoric fish. Specifically, the 359-million-year-old Dunkleosteus terrelli, known as “ancient Ohio’s apex predator.” But you can just call him Dunk.

The ENCORE Music & Ideas Festival drew a packed crowd at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History on June 15, and audience members were in for a treat at this concert in the visitor hall. The skeleton of Dunk may have been the closest to the action, but the bright and airy space was filled with other neat creatures for attendees to peruse. (On the left was a reconstruction of Lucy, the most famous human ancestor fossil, and to the right were the bones of Happy, a “reptile hipped” dinosaur.)

[Read more…]

ChamberFest Cleveland: the first taste of “Sacred and Profane” (June 12)

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by Peter Feher

Like any good introduction, opening night at ChamberFest Cleveland this year left you wanting more. The sold-out concert on June 12 at the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Hall was a chance to savor a little of what the 2024 festival has to offer.

The theme behind this year’s programming, “Sacred and Profane,” was front and center for the first concert. So was the overriding idea that guides ChamberFest every season: bringing together great musicians and great music. Wonderfully, these aims aligned on Wednesday in an arresting performance of Claude Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane featuring harpist Bridget Kibbey. It was the shortest work of the evening, but also the standout.

In exploring the fundamental dichotomy between heaven and earth, eternity and reality, the spirit and the body, Debussy was simply trying to demonstrate everything that a modern harp could do. He had been commissioned by a French manufacturer to write a showpiece for the company’s new instrument, yet the resulting work wasn’t strictly contemporary when it premiered in Paris in 1904.

[Read more…]

James Stroud Classical Guitar Competition: next generation shines in the final round (June 9)

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by Max Newman

Every year, the James Stroud Classical Guitar Competition provides audiences with a look at   some of the most talented young musicians aged 13-18 that our nation has to offer. And the competition’s fifth edition did not disappoint.

On the evening of June 9 at the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Hall, the competition’s four finalists went toe-to-toe over the course of an hour that was as much a joyous celebration of music as it was an entertaining competition.

Although Californian Elle Davisson, a 16-year-old native of the Bay Area, eventually came out on top with the grand prize, all the performers showcased astonishing skill and should come away feeling proud. [Read more…]

ChamberFest: an evening of fantastic tales (June 15)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Bridget Kibbey did on Saturday what harpists rarely get to do: she stole the show. No mean feat when sharing the stage with the other bright and esteemed performers who regularly appear as part of ChamberFest Cleveland — particularly during “Fantastic Tales,” the third concert of this year’s season, which took place on June 15 at the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Hall.

Kibbey was also lively with the microphone, giving an engaging introduction to André Caplet’s 1924 Conte Fantastique (Fantastic Tale). After the performance, she mingled among the crowd — not so much a star gesture as a genuine one that made her performance even more memorable.

Given that André Caplet orchestrated and conducted some of Debussy’s works, many associate the two composers. To say Caplet’s musical language is impressionist-adjacent is partly true but hardly encapsulates his unique, ahead-of-his-time voice.

Kibbey made the most of Caplet’s action-packed work — part harp concerto and part tone poem, based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Masque of the Red Death.

[Read more…]

ChamberFest: small tweaks, big results for “Mystical Reveries” (June 14)

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by Stephanie Manning

Sprinkling a few changes into a chamber concert program can add the perfect amount of variety to an otherwise straightforward evening. Such was the case at ChamberFest Cleveland on June 14 with “Mystical Reveries.” The choice of swapping keyboard for harp in works by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber and C.P.E. Bach, as well as opting for the original horn/piano pairing in the Robert Schumann, injected just enough excitement into this pleasant evening of music.

The Friday night program at Harkness Chapel saved the most traditional selection for last: Johannes Brahms’ Piano Trio No. 2 in C. Pianist Roman Rabinovich, violinist Joseph Lin, and cellist Oliver Herbert gave a spirited performance, taking advantage of the Chapel’s tastefully dry acoustic to accentuate moments of uber-quiet playing.

[Read more…]

ENCORE Chamber Music Institute: two Sunday afternoons at Harkness (June 9 & 16)

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by Daniel Hathaway

ENCORE Chamber Music Institute brought its Music & Ideas Festival —  and its entire student body — to Harkness Chapel at Case Western Reserve University on two adjacent Sunday afternoons, June 9 and 16. Lectures by experts on the natural world’s often overlooked musicians were followed by artist-teacher showcase performances featuring the human participants in this summer’s institute.

On June 9, in a collaboration with the Cleveland Humanities 2024 Festival, bird and insect song was the subject of an engaging, illustrated, half-hour lecture, “The World’s First Musicians” by composer and naturalist Lisa Rainsong. On June 16, in “Earth Makes Us Equal,” the songs of male humpback whales (the females don’t sing!) was the topic of a fascinating talk by David Rothenberg, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, who brought his bass clarinet along to engage in expressive duets with some of his subjects.

[Read more…]

Petra Poláčková dazzles at CICGF with a journey into Czech Music (June 9)

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by Max Newman

You will not hear many classical guitarists with a better feel for emotion, atmosphere, pace, and tone than Petra Poláčková. The talented Czech musician showcased all of these talents and more for the audience at the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Hall on Sunday afternoon June 9.

The performance, the penultimate event of the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival, spanned four exhilarating Czech works. On this particular afternoon, golden sunbeams streaked in through Mixon’s floor-to-ceiling windows, drenching the stage with a light that underscored the otherworldly quality of Poláčková’s playing. One would be hard-pressed to find a more musically exhilarating way of closing out this magnificent series. [Read more…]

Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival: Nicolò Spera plays on ten strings (June 7)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Filling a void in the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival when a scheduled artist developed visa complications, University of Colorado Boulder professor Nicolò Spera stepped in with his 10-string guitar and a stimulating program that was technically and mentally challenging — both for the guitarist and his Mixon Hall audience — on Friday, June 7.

The extra strings on that instrument added range and resonance to Spera’s program, which began and ended with famous works from the passacaglia family, with a contemporary piece at its center.

At the end of his “Mystery” Sonatas — fifteen little suites for violin and continuo based on the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries of Christ represented by the beads on the Rosary — Heinrich Ignatz Franz Biber added a postlude in the form of a passacaglia for solo violin based on a four-bar descending bass figure. [Read more…]

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