by Jacob Strauss
On Wednesday July 13, clarinetist Anthony McGill, pianist Daniel Schlosberg, and soprano Colleen Longshaw Jackson gave a masterful performance in Ludwig Recital Hall at Kent State University’s Kent Blossom Music Festival.
The scheduled program by the McGill/McHale Trio was changed due to the unavailability of flutist Demarre McGill and pianist Michael McHale, but there was no change in expectation for the artistry that was going to occur. Anthony McGill is world-renowned, and Daniel Schlosberg is a talented composer and performer who has collaborated with some of our best contemporary musicians.
Jackson began the program with a recitation of Langston Hughes’ poem “Helen Keller” — the first of five poems by Hughes that served as interludes between each piece on the first half. [Read more…]
ChamberFest Cleveland put on a spectacular event on July 1 at The Madison. They proclaimed that it was unorthodox fitting a round into a square in the old luxury faucet plant located at 46th and Payne in Midtown.
The Cleveland Orchestra told a familiar story, but with some unfamiliar faces, on July 9 at Blossom Music Center. The narrative sweep of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade was the highlight of an all-Romantic program that let several excellent young musicians take center stage.
ENCORE Chamber Music held a musical tasting on Sunday afternoon, July 3rd at the Dodero Center for the Performing Arts. “Tales of Travel and Transformation” featured members of the Verona Quartet, artistic director Jinjoo Cho, and other faculty of the summer institute.
Si j’etais vous, I would not trust anyone who tries to solve your problems for you. You have to do it yourself, face up to the bleak black wall looming above and keep standing straight. You succumb if you don’t, and that spells long, regressive rest. Atrophying strength. Decomposition.
Gilbert & Sullivan might be the Ohio Light Opera signature, but the company in residence at the College of Wooster each summer has made other traditions out of its love for lyric theater. One curious case is the 1924 operetta The Student Prince, which OLO reprises for a seventh time in a production running through July 29 at Freedlander Theatre.
Before Austrian composer Franz Lehár hit the Viennese operetta bull’s eye with The Merry Widow, he composed a less well-known show, The Mock Marriage (Die Juxheirat), whose complicated plot, set in America in 1904, gives a nod to such contemporary societal issues as gender identity and the empowerment of women.
The Fantasticks 
If you missed the tail end of ChamberFest Cleveland’s season, don’t be too worried. The highlights from each summer of brilliant, collaborative performances have a way of sticking around — online on the Festival’s YouTube channel and, more recently, on the radio with WCLV. Certainly this year’s finale, on July 2 at the Maltz Performing Arts Center, was full of such memorable musical moments.
Tri-C JazzFest went out with a bang this year. The stages at Playhouse Square got bigger and busier with each act on the schedule for Saturday, June 25. Steady momentum was the theme all around, not least for the Festival itself, which this summer returned to full size, following a detour online in 2020 and the move to a smaller venue, Cain Park, in 2021.