by Jacob Strauss
On Sunday, July 24 the piano team of Yaron Kohlberg and Bishara Haroni — Duo Amal — kicked off Piano Cleveland’s PianoDays @CLE in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Kohlberg and Haroni, who first performed together at a peace conference in Oslo in 2011, began their concert with a pillar of the piano four-hand repertoire, Schubert’s Fantasie in f. With Haroni playing the lower part and Kohlberg the upper, they negotiated the keyboard with nimble choreography, highlighting their adroit musicianship and amicable collaborative spirit.
Some music never goes out of style. The famous first bars of Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto opened the program on August 6 at Blossom Music Center with a flourish. And the brilliance hardly let up after that, with The Cleveland Orchestra sounding superb in a pair of works that put symphonic tradition front and center.
The crowd at Blossom Music Center on July 16 received two concerts for the price of one. The Cleveland Orchestra went in a jazzy direction with the program’s first half, before turning to the dazzling symphonic repertoire that this ensemble does best.
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.
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.