by Daniel Hathaway
Sooner or later, every orchestra has to come to terms with the Most Famous Symphony of Them All — Beethoven’s Fifth — and for Daniel Reith and the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra, that moment arrived at Severance Music Center on Sunday afternoon, November 12.
The challenges begin right at the beginning with the famous four-note motive that sounds so straightforward, but getting a stage full of musicians to play it together with the precise stops and starts that the composer writes into the score is anything but easy. “Just make any gesture at the beginning,” one conductor counseled a student, advice that works like magic the first time around, but then things get complicated. [Read more…]
Accent’s holiday concert at the Cleveland Museum of Art on December 8 was a hometown affair, even if the six members of this all-male a cappella ensemble had collectively traveled thousands of miles to be there.
Maybe it was the time of year, the familial ties of the visiting conductor and pianists, the anticipation of a new work, or maybe all of it, but somehow a rosy glow enveloped the Cleveland Orchestra concert on Thursday, December 7.
Oberlin Conservatory’s jazz department has a storied and star-studded history, with alumni such as pianist Sullivan Fortner, trumpeter Theo Croker, and violinist Jenny Scheinman, as well as a faculty that includes saxophonist Gary Bartz, an NEA Jazz Master and two-time Grammy winner. There is clearly a pipeline of talent here that has not ended, as heard at the Oberlin Small Jazz Ensembles concert on November 19. 
