by Peter Feher
The guitar is an instrument that can travel anywhere and play just about anything. Listeners got the chance to take in some of that variety at the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival, which returned in person to the Cleveland Institute of Music last weekend. Original arrangements and inventive pairings — pieces with harp, cello, and more — added to the schedule, but a sense of what makes a performance “classical” emerged as well.
Studied expertise might be one answer. It was certainly the quality Duo Melis had in spades playing the Festival’s headlining concert on Saturday, June 4 in Kulas Hall. Husband-and-wife guitarists Alexis Muzurakis and Susana Prieto brought decades of musical knowledge to several cornerstones of the repertoire, while still leaving a little room to explore. [Read more…]
On Thursday June 2 in Kulas Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Drew Henderson (Canada) opened the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival with a program of Baroque and Romantic music.
A particularly gratifying take-away from the May 22 Canton Symphony Orchestra MasterWorks program at Umstattd Hall was that one need not be in an actual rocket ship to experience the beauties and mysteries of the cosmos.
The Cleveland Orchestra worked overtime last weekend, making every note count. The season at Severance Music Center came to a close with final performances of Verdi’s Otello, plus two additional programs that showed just how much repertoire the players can master. These special, one-off concerts, presented under the banner “Breaking Convention,” fit the experimental model the ensemble has established in recent years, trying out tricky music in unconventional formats around the schedule of an opera.
Franz Welser-Möst led the final bows on Saturday night at Severance, like the star of any show should. The Cleveland Orchestra’s music director is in his element presiding over the ensemble’s annual opera production, which this season packs the drama. Verdi’s Otello — in a concert staging that opened May 21 and runs for two more performances (May 26 and 29) — demands big voices, instrumental forces to match, and a conductor who can give it all shape and direction. 
Unless you have been through it, it is impossible to grasp the brutalities of war. You cannot imagine the violence, the hunger, the desperation, the isolation. You cannot reckon the infinite death sowed through the ground. Brutality is the reality. It creates a different kind of human.
Of the three venues that Quire Cleveland’s artistic director Jay White chose for the ensemble’s “Music for Grand Spaces” trilogy, none fits the description quite so aptly as the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in downtown Cleveland. It was there that Quire opened its series of programs designed for churches with a resonant acoustic on Friday, May 13 with a splendid selection of pieces.
An immigrant mother, struggling with her sense of identity, makes a plea to her new homeland in the hopes that her newborn daughter will have an easier time navigating it. This sentiment, presented in musical form, was especially fitting for a concert on Mother’s Day — not to mention one with a high percentage of mothers in the audience.