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Cleveland Orchestra offers up Tchaikovsky, Dvořák as it continues holiday concert tradition

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by Daniel Hathaway
Originally published on Cleveland.com. Photo by Roger Mastroianni from an earlier Cleveland Orchestra concert

While other organizations are taking time off, The Cleveland Orchestra has continued its admirable tradition of playing concerts on the Friday and Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoon of Thanksgiving weekend at Severance Music Center.

Those Fridays in particular have seen some memorable performances, and the concert on November 24 was no exception. Played to a capacity, multi-generational crowd enlivened by an enthusiastic influx of families and young listeners, led by the insightful Finnish conductor Pietari Inkinen making his debut with the orchestra, and featuring a defining performance of a beloved concerto by one of the most thrilling violin soloists on the international circuit, the experience was simply overwhelming.

From the ovation they gave when Augustin Hadelich merely appeared onstage, Friday’s audience suggested that he was a major factor that drew them to Severance Music Center. [Read more…]

BlueWater Chamber Orchestra: Jinjoo Cho soars in Barber Concerto (Nov. 17)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

In a pre-holiday offering, Bluewater Chamber Orchestra’s audience received gifts simple and somber, with intermittent thrills, on Friday evening, November 17. In an all-American program, the pleasures were many: Cindy McTee’s moving Adagio for strings, Barber’s firework of a Violin Concerto, and Copland’s wise portrait of rural America, Appalachian Spring.

[Read more…]

Arts @ Holy Trinity, Akron: Organist Peter Sykes (Nov. 19)

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by Daniel Hathaway

The last time that Boston-based organist Peter Sykes played at Akron’s Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, his program featured his own arrangement of Gustav Holst’s The Planets.

On Sunday afternoon, November 19, Sykes returned to help celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Arts @ Holy Trinity concert series with an engaging program of miniatures by William Byrd, Max Reger, and Louis Vierne, introduced and concluded by big works by Dietrich Buxtehude and Johann Sebastian Bach.

With a nod to his hosts and a twinkle in his eye, Sykes quipped in his opening remarks that his concert would begin and end with pieces by Lutherans. [Read more…]

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.

[Read more…]

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…]

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