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Danish String Quartet at Cleveland Chamber Music Society (Nov. 14)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Could the prodigiously talented players of the Danish String Quartet all be drinking from some magic source? By now among the world’s finest quartets — perhaps taking the top rung left by the Emerson Quartet after their recent retirement — they perform with such easy excellence and intuitive musical consensus that you wonder: is this the product of hard work and long hours of rehearsal, or some magic potion?

Neither strain nor sweat were visible in the program for the Cleveland Chamber Music Society on November 14 at Disciples Christian Church, which included works by Mozart, Britten, Adès, and their own folk arrangements.

[Read more…]

No Exit: “Surreal Games” (Oct. 14)

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by Mike Telin

To celebrate their 15th anniversary No Exit has created their most ambitious project to date. Their season-long series Surreality encompasses a range of artistic media to present an immersive, multidisciplinary exploration of surrealism as expressed in music, art, film, poetry, literature, and performance art.

The series kicked off with “Surreal Games,” which took its inspiration from the parlor games and thought exercises employed by the Surrealists. The program featured world premieres of musical works interspersed with poetry, as well as a corresponding art installation titled Collaborage, which was on view at Heights Arts. I attended the performance at SPACES on October 14.

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Tuesday Musical: Akropolis Reed Quintet (Nov. 7)

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by Peter Feher

It’s not every concert where the bass clarinetist steals the show. But by now, the five close-knit members of the Akropolis Reed Quintet must look forward to that moment in any program when they start Marc Mellits’ Splinter and those first grainy low notes boom out.

The quirky Detroit-based ensemble opened its November 7 performance for Akron’s Tuesday Musical series with this piece, and it was a way to let the audience at E.J. Thomas Hall in on everything they needed to know.

There’s a reason that Mellits’ 2014 composition has become the surest introduction to this novel type of chamber group. [Read more…]

Generosity and poise at the Rocky River Chamber Music Society (Nov. 6)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Generosity and poise are two qualities a chamber musician would be fortunate to possess. Fortunately for those of us in attendance at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church in Rocky River on Monday, November 6, cellist Keith Robinson and pianist Hyunsoon Whang are endowed amply with both, thus conveying only the pleasure of performance in two difficult cello sonatas — Barber’s early Op. 6 and Prokofiev’s late Op. 116. Whang also lent ease and grace to Brahms’ solo Intermezzo, Op. 118, No. 2, and clarinetist Daniel McKelway lent luster in the Brahms Trio, Op. 114 on the second half.

Poise was tested early, as no sooner had our musicians sat down to begin when a stentorian “Ah-choo!” boomed out from somewhere in the audience. Startled, Robinson nodded in the sneezer’s direction with a good-natured, “You scared me!” [Read more…]

Barbara Hannigan makes a compelling debut conducting the Cleveland Orchestra

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Critically acclaimed Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan has built a separate – though sometimes simultaneous – career as a conductor. She made her conducting debut with the Cleveland Orchestra on Thursday, leading the ensemble in works by Haydn, Strauss Vivier, and Ligeti. Photo: Roger Mastroianni

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com 

by Kevin McLaughlin

Barbara Hannigan, the Canadian dynamo who started singing professionally at 17 and later added separate — though sometimes simultaneous — responsibilities as conductor, has at last made her debut in that role with The Cleveland Orchestra. That she might give soaring accounts of mainstream and contemporary works by Haydn, Strauss Vivier, and Ligeti, was hoped for, even if not surprising, but that she should make such works about mourning, death, and loneliness so compelling and listenable, may be a good reason to have her back.

[Read more…]

CMA: Le Poème Harmonique (Oct. 25) 

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by Peter Feher

If you had stopped by the Cleveland Museum of Art on Wednesday, Oct. 25, you would have experienced an evening fit for a king. Members of Le Poème Harmonique, the French early music ensemble led by Vincent Dumestre, presented a sophisticated concert in Gartner Auditorium that centered around the tastes and decrees of Louis XIV.

And you couldn’t have asked for a better setting. The dazzling program featured mezzo-soprano Eva Zaïcik and a small group of period instrumentalists in more than a dozen selections that could have been heard during the early years of the Sun King’s reign — when he hadn’t yet moved to Versailles and still kept his court at the Louvre.

The connections with the Museum didn’t stop there. Before the concert, Gabe Pollack, CMA’s Director of Performing Arts, reminded listeners that “French culture is on full display” this fall with the special exhibition Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism. [Read more…]

Cleveland Museum of Art: Omara Portuondo (Nov. 1) 

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by Kevin McLaughlin

At 93, the great Cuban vocalist Omara Portuondo knows a few things. She knows the value of her own experience, though she defies her age in stamina and enduring vocal ability. By now physically frail, on November 1 in Gartner Auditorium she was led to her high-backed wicker chair where she ensconced herself to offer a distillation of a lifetime of music-making.

Her quartet of skilled players — José Portillo, piano, Ramses Rodriguez, drums, Lino Piquero, bass, and Degnis Bofill, Latin percussion — were mindful of the honor, though none was old enough to hear the Cuarteto d’Aida from her Tropicana days, or her Batista-era LPs sold to tourists on the Plaza de Armas in Havana. [Read more…]

Cleveland Chamber Choir & Lakewood High singers: Considering Matthew Shepard at Trinity Cathedral (Oct. 22)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Young Matthew Shepard’s iconic suffering and death in Wyoming 25 years ago have inspired a number of social, political, and artistic initiatives, including Craig Hella Johnson’s “passion oratorio” Considering Matthew Shepard, which was first performed in 2016.

In 2023, some 40 organizations will have performed the nearly two-hour work, among them Gregory Ristow’s Cleveland Chamber Choir, who were joined by the Lakewood High School Symphonic Mixed Choir and an instrumental ensemble from the Local 4 Music Fund in an affecting Sunday afternoon concert at Trinity Cathedral on October 22. (An earlier performance was given the day before in Avon Lake).

[Read more…]

Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring at Oberlin: taking a comic opera seriously (Nov. 2)

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by Daniel Hathaway

In a video interview for Minneapolis Opera, Dame Jane Glover recalled the sage advice her director gave to the cast of Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring when she conducted his only comic opera at Glyndebourne.

Never try to be funny. You have to be real. These people are saying these things because they mean it. It is quite easy to get carried away into something that is caricature and therefore shallow as opposed to real and profound.

Oberlin Opera Theater director Stephanie Havey and her excellent student ensemble obviously concurred on Thursday evening, November 2, staging a production in Hall Auditorium that was delightful and authentic in every respect. The denizens of the fictional village of Loxford all seemed to be playing themselves rather than just animating cardboard figures ordered up from central casting. [Read more…]

Akron Symphony celebrates the organ with Robert Mollard (Oct. 21)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

The sound of an organ in orchestral settings is always an aural thrill. A cornucopia of colors and sonorities on its own, the organ, when mixed with strings, winds, brass, and percussion, more than doubles the pleasure and the fun.

In his welcoming remarks, music director Christopher Wilkins drew attention to the evening’s sonic star and focus — a digital impersonator of sounds, painstakingly prepared by Robert Mollard to sound just like a pipe organ. Putting out fullness and variety, if not always the seismic events associated with cathedral organs, Mollard nevertheless created excitement and beauty in his appearance with the Akron Symphony at E.J. Thomas Hall on Saturday, October 21.

Since the first official work on the program, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Worship: A Concert Overture, takes as its basis the hymn tune Old 100th (“Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow”), two bonuses were in store to orient us. Principal flute Barbara O’Brien played the unadorned tune in gorgeous, silvery tones, and Mollard let loose with Robert Hebble’s Toccata on Old Hundredth, a festival of organ prowess.

[Read more…]

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