By Daniel Hathaway | Cleveland Classical
This article was originally published on Cleveland.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio — Virtuosity was abundantly on display at Severance Music Center on Thursday evening, May 2, not only in the persona of pianist Lang Lang, but also in the music and orchestrations of 19th-century French composers Camille Saint-Saëns and Hector Berlioz — as well as in performances by their modern interpreters, Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra.
In general use since the mid-18th century and meaning “a person with great skill, one who is a master of the mechanical part of a fine art,” the term virtuoso only begins to describe Lang Lang. In addition to his skills on the keyboard, he’s the classical equivalent of a rock star, capable of drawing sold-out crowds to his performances, as he did in Cleveland on Thursday. And worthy of both a private audience with the Pope and — just last month — a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And he’s an international advocate for the piano whose “101 Pianos” extravaganza will visit Cuyahoga Community College on Friday.
Cuban-Canadian singer-songwriter Alex Cuba has been described in many ways over the course of his career, from his “sugarcane-sweet melodies” and “pop-soul hooks” to “powerful guitar riffs that relinquish a conventional stereotype that exemplifies much of the Latin music landscape.” When he performed on the Tiny Desk concert series, 
It is one of Cleveland’s persistently good things that outlets for fresh new music — played by some of the area’s best musicians — continue to thrive. On Sunday, April 28, we were reminded of this again at Cleveland Chamber Collective’s presentation of Ty Alan Emerson’s 
The Cleveland Composers Guild found an ideal partner in the Factory Seconds Brass Trio (Jack Sutte, trumpet, Richard King, horn, and Rick Stout, trombone), who, along with other performers, assembled a recital program of the first order at Rocky River’s West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church on Sunday, April 21.
For the recent set of concerts in their season-long celebration of the surreal, No Exit turned to two pivotal events in the history of dadaism for inspiration — the 1920 Festival Dada and the 1923 Soirée du Coeur à Barbe. This program, “Piano Dada,” included works of poetry, theater, and music that were performed at those historic Paris festivals. I attended the performance on March 16 at Heights Arts.