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Akron Symphony shines in Mahler 3 (Apr. 15)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Thinking small was not Mahler’s usual symphonic strategy. “A symphony must be like the world,” he famously asserted to Sibelius in 1907. “It must contain everything.”

But the whole world? Yes — and heaven, too.

The Third Symphony, written between 1895 and 1897, is Mahler’s longest and grandest. Many orchestras pass on it, due to the swollen forces required (lots of winds, brass, and percussion) and the huge lift asked of every section. The Akron Symphony, led by music director Christopher Wilkins, lifted it all very high on Saturday, April 15, sagging only rarely.
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Cleveland Cello Society: music & art with Santiago Cañón-Valencia (Apr. 14)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

On Friday, April 14, a packed LatinUs Theater audience in Cleveland’s Clark-Fulton neighborhood enthusiastically greeted Columbian cellist Santiago Cañón-Valencia. They in turn were treated to an unforgettable evening of music and art in a compelling black box venue.

The concert, titled “Ascenso,” is also the name of Cañón-Valencia’s latest recording — copies of which the cellist graciously signed in the lobby after the performance.

The experience of each of the five musical works was enhanced and enlarged by the projection of paintings onto a wall at the back of the stage. Each picture, rendered by the cellist himself, served as a kind of commentary on, or in some cases, visual representation of the music, done in the performer’s own abstract, mostly black and white style (“I’m not really a painter,” he declared, modestly). Musicians who paint may not be an unheard-of concept — composers Arnold Schoenberg and George Gershwin and cellist Aldo Parisot all painted, as does pianist Stephen Hough — but seeing the artwork on display while the music that inspired it is being performed makes for a special occasion indeed.

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The Cleveland Orchestra: Rafael Payare excites with Shostakovich & Bernstein (Apr. 6)

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by Peter Feher

The Russians won the Cold War, judging by The Cleveland Orchestra’s stirring and subversive program at Severance Music Center earlier this month.

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 and Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2 (“The Age of Anxiety”) went head-to-head in an exciting evening shot through with creative uncertainty. The fact that both pieces could have coexisted on a concert 60 years ago — specifically, the sort of concert Bernstein would have conducted with the New York Philharmonic during their 1959 tour of the Soviet Union — didn’t ease the tension.

Still, The Cleveland Orchestra made an admirable effort at diplomacy, giving stellar performances of both works on Thursday, April 6. Guest conductor Rafael Payare whipped up the conflict, however, creating a sense of real stakes with a program that could have ended predictably.

Every interpretation of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony has made a point of hammering home the finale. Following the piece’s 1937 premiere, the official Soviet line was that those repetitive final measures represented tragedy over triumph, effectively dispelling the darkness that had come in the movements before. The dissenting view, which has become the standard today, is to read the ending as brutal and coercive, and conductors typically communicate this by slowing the tempo to an unbearable degree, leaving little room to doubt what the composer “really meant.”

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MTT makes magic with The Cleveland Orchestra (Apr. 13)

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by Stephanie Manning

Both long-time listeners and recent fans likely found something to enjoy at Severance on April 13. The Cleveland Orchestra’s program that weekend not only included a symphony that could win over many a first-time audience member, but also a work that hadn’t been heard from the ensemble since 1930. In either case, the result was fantastic.

At the podium was conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, who brought a charming and nuanced interpretation to two lesser-known works by Debussy. Jeux; poème dansé, originally written for the Ballets Russes, is lush yet perpetually unsettled. The orchestra responded well to the music’s indecisive shifts, flitting easily from one thing to the next — all underscored by some precise tamborine work from principal percussionist Marc Damoulakis.

With Jeux’s inclusion of a number of auxiliary instruments came the opportunity for featuring moments across the wind and brass sections, a quality also present in the Fantaisie for piano and orchestra that followed. [Read more…]

Storms at Severance Music Center conjured by Sibelius & Adès (Mar. 31)

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by Daniel Hathaway

With apologies to Sir Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, it was a dark and stormy morning at Severance Music Center on March 31, when guest conductor Thomas Adès led The Cleveland Orchestra in a pair of striking atmospheric disturbances, one of his own composition (in The Tempest Symphony), and one by Jean Sibelius (from The Tempest, Op. 109), both originally imagined by William Shakespeare in his play of the same name.

Listed in the First Folio as the first of his comedies, Shakespeare’s magical allegory has recently spurred the invention of a new critical category: romances, although no attempt to file the work under a single heading — or to simplify its plot — has been successful.

Sibelius wrote his incidental music to The Tempest in 1925 on commission from the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen for a lavish production that required 34 separate musical cues. Adès extracted the movements of his symphony from the opera he wrote for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, that debuted in 2004. [Read more…]

Canton Symphony pays tribute to Wm. Blair III (Apr. 2)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

In a moving tribute to the recently deceased Canton Symphony board member and Northeast Ohio arts advocate William Blair III, Gerhardt Zimmermann and the Canton Symphony offered a varied program on Sunday, April 2, an evening full of musical depths and satisfying performances. Organist Heather Cooper, the Orchestra’s near constant companion onstage, sparkled as soloist.

The presence of organ at this concert was in honor of Blair, an organist himself, but it also brought a wonderful expansion to the orchestral palette. Cooper was featured, whether as soloist or as added texture, in nearly every piece. Her playing was consistently first rate. The only downside may have been a decreasing sense of the instrument’s specialness as the concert progressed. [Read more…]

McGill, Huang & Perroni sing at Cleveland Chamber Music Society (March 28)

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by Peter Feher

Clarinetist Anthony McGill brought star power to the Cleveland Chamber Music Society on March 28. In a concert that was all about singing — that, in fact, included two pieces with soprano — McGill stood out as the most prominent voice.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the clarinetist, who, since taking the principal chair with the New York Philharmonic in 2014, has cultivated the kind of celebrity career more often reserved for singers, string players, and pianists. McGill’s penchant for vocal music is no secret either. He previously served as principal clarinet of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and the style and sound he picked up in the pit are still present in his playing today.

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Composers Guild & Cleveland Chamber Choir join forces (Apr. 2)

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by Daniel Hathaway

When the Cleveland Composers Guild added the requirement of writing a vocal piece to its collegiate composition contest in 2019 and generated only a single entry — impressive as that piece was — the idea was born for dedicating an entire year to vocal music.

The choral side of that theme came to fruition on Sunday, April 2 in Drinko Hall at Cleveland State University, when the Guild collaborated with Cleveland Chamber Choir in a program designed and led by CCC acting director Gregory Ristow that successfully combined new pieces by Northeast Ohio composers with existing works, and in one case brought a new wrinkle to a well-known choral cycle.

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Oberlin Opera: Candide
(March 12)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Oberlin Opera’s wonderful mid-March production of Candide combined several layers of brilliance.

First, the source: the anonymous 1759 novella Candide, or the Optimist. Later owned up to by the French Enlightenment philosopher François-Marie Arouet — better known by his nom de plume, Voltaire — it was a deliciously wicked send-up of the absurd teachings of optimist philosophers like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who taught that everything was for the best “in this best of all possible worlds.”

Then in 1956 came the first staged version of Candide as a comic opera with a witty libretto by Lillian Hellman and a high-spirited score by Leonard Bernstein — originally conceived by Hellman as a play, but Bernstein’s intentions of making it an operetta won out. [Read more…]

CD Review — Weiss’ Arc II,
an exploration of loss & grief

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by Nicolette Cheauré 

There may be nothing more unifying than humanity’s response to loss. Where words fail to describe feelings as complex as those associated with death and grief, music takes over — and it’s hard to imagine anything ringing more true in that regard than pianist Orion Weiss’ latest album, Arc II, released in November of 2022.

The recording opens with Ravel’s atmospheric Le Tombeau de Couperin, and the six movements provide Weiss the opportunity to express the many facets of his musical personality. The Prelude was dreamlike and flowing, saturated with traditional Ravel color changes, while the Fugue was full of constant motion before a quiet conclusion.

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