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Faust at the Cinematheque: an intriguing combination of silent film and metal music (Sept. 27)

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by Stephanie Manning

Horror movies and metal music seem a natural fit. Too bad that F.W. Murnau’s Faust isn’t really a horror movie.

The late-night showing of the 1926 German Expressionist film, presented at the Cleveland Cinematheque, promised a spooky atmosphere with a score to match. This enticing premise didn’t always deliver, especially after the film’s plot veered off course. But the packed screening on September 27, which closed out this year’s Cleveland Silent Film Festival and Colloquium, provided other moments of synergy between screen and sound.

Live metal act The Silent Light — guitarist and synthesist Michael Formanski and drummer Matt Hardy — artfully set the scene as the opening credits rolled. [Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra opens 108th season with heroic U.S. premiere of Deutsch’s ‘Urworte’ (Sept. 26)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND — On Friday evening, Sep. 26, before The Cleveland Orchestra opened its 108th season, Music Director Franz Welser-Möst joined President and CEO André Gremillet onstage for a conversation previewing the next ten programs. With a reenergized music director, an impressive slate of repertoire, soloists, and guest conductors, the Orchestra’s 2025-26 season looks especially bright.

Austrian composer Bernd Richard Deutsch has become a familiar figure here in Cleveland under Welser-Möst. During his tenure as the Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow from 2017 to 2020, the Orchestra introduced his organ concerto “Okeanos” and later, his large orchestra work “Intensity.” On Friday came a third U.S. premiere, “Urworte” (2024). Such partnerships nourish everyone: the composer gains a champion, the orchestra fresh music, and the repertoire welcome enrichment.

[Read more…]

Oberlin Chamber Orchestra with cellist Nathaniel Abreu (Sept. 25)

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by Max Newman

For sheer polish of performance, under the direction of Raphael Jiménez, the Oberlin Chamber Orchestra is an ensemble that can scarcely be faulted. On the crisp fall evening of September 25, the Orchestra kicked off its 2025-26 season at Finney Chapel in a familiar vein: the well-rounded performance of three pieces, monumental in sound and cinematic in narrative. The Orchestra was able to simultaneously create the sensation of enormous musical objects and patchworks of delicate moments.

Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Rissolty Rossolty (1939) was a stirring rollercoaster ride of an opener. Its first moments were a guided journey through a pastoral, woodwind-dotted landscape, with staccato bassoon, clarinet, flute, and oboe tangents framed by earnest strings. [Read more…]

Great Lakes Theater: Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George (Sept. 27)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Great Lakes Theater opened its fall season at the Hanna Theatre with Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George. I saw the performance on September 27. In a house of just over five hundred seats, the show feels almost purpose-built for intimacy: audiences sit close enough to hear breaths behind every phrase and to see the small adjustments of light and posture that bring French Neo-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat’s world into focus.

Winner of the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Sunday resists conventional structure. Its first act imagines the years Seurat spent creating his pointillist landmark, La Grande Jatte. Sondheim and Lapine do not present the artist as genial or approachable. He is exacting, self-absorbed, forever chasing the perfect dot of color at the expense of his personal relationships. The cost is clear: his model and lover, another Dot, leaves him, unable to compete with the canvas.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Silent Film Festival opens with 1925 Phantom & live orchestra (Sep. 14)

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by Daniel Hathaway

The 2025-2026 Cleveland Silent Film Festival and Colloquium got off to an impressive start with the screening of one of the icons of the pre-talkies era: Universal Pictures’ Phantom of the Opera in a restoration of its original version of 1925.

Presented before a large crowd in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Sunday afternoon, September 14, the screening was accompanied by an orchestra score itself restored from the original piano score — mostly existing photoplay selections, plus three original cues by one G. Hinrichs orchestrated by Larry Moore. [Read more…]

James Ehnes and Orion Weiss open Cleveland Chamber Music Society season (Sept. 16)

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by Peter Feher

If James Ehnes ever decided to launch a fan club, one of the first chapters would undoubtedly be formed in Northeast Ohio.

The esteemed Canadian violinist has made occasional concerto appearances with The Cleveland Orchestra over the years, but local audiences have come to know him best through chamber performances that offer an unparalleled experience of his artistry.

This feeling of intimate familiarity united Ehnes and an enthusiastic crowd at Disciples Christian Church on Tuesday, Sept. 16, for the opening concert of the Cleveland Chamber Music Society’s 2025–26 season. [Read more…]

Akron Symphony plays Mahler 1 (Sept. 20)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

The Akron Symphony opened its season Saturday night, September 20 at E.J. Thomas Hall, with a program that combined geniality, youthful cheek, and grand ambition. Under the direction of Christopher Wilkins the orchestra sounded happy to be back and playing before an excited house.

Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture is a thank-you note written to honor a university that gave him an honorary degree. As Wilkins reminded us, Brahms never went to college, but here he donned the cap and gown like a puckish undergrad, weaving together student songs more often heard in beer halls than lecture halls. Under Wilkins, the piece carried both dignity and delight. The opening had the sincerity of ceremony, then the tunes tumbled in like students fresh from hijinks on the quad. The orchestra answered with warmth, rhythmic lift, and good humor. When the final tune arrived, it rose like an alma mater — or a sudsy cheer — echoing fondly across the years. [Read more…]

Folk quartet adds Oberlin to the fabric of their American Patchwork (Sept. 13)

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by Stephanie Manning

Once you’ve listened to the American Patchwork Quartet, you might not hear your favorite folk songs the same way. Take the group’s September 13 version of “Shenandoah,” which began with an introduction that held the Oberlin audience spellbound.

Accompanied only by a drone, Harini (“Rini”) Raghavan’s voice spun out a searching melody in the South Indian Carnatic style, an improvisation of pure sound and syllable. But before long, she took a breath and seamlessly began the words to “Shenandoah,” the rest of the group then picking up the familiar, bittersweet song.

Interactions like that are at the heart of the American Patchwork Quartet — a group that combines different cultural and musical traditions to perform folk music in a distinct and dynamic way. Their Saturday night performance in Finney Chapel marked the group’s debut on the Oberlin Artist Recital Series.

[Read more…]

Omar Sosa Trio at CMA (Sept. 10)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Omar Sosa has a way of turning concerts into ceremonies. Before sitting down to play on Wednesday, September 10 at the Cleveland Museum of Art, he invoked Elegguá, the Afro-Cuban deity of the crossroads, snapping the irukére — a Yoruba horsetail whisk — to clear the space, invite protection, and “open the way.” The gesture set a ritual tone, reminding listeners they were at a spiritual gathering as much as at a musical performance.

Sosa brought his new trio, Outside the Box, to Gartner Auditorium for its Cleveland debut. The group includes his longtime collaborator Yosvany Terry on saxophones and young drummer Julian Miltenberger, whom Sosa introduced as “a 25-year-old from Philly — the next generation.”

Terry’s early contributions on soprano saxophone were so compelling that he temporarily shifted the group’s center of gravity. [Read more…]

Pianist Polina Osetinskaya dazzles in her Cleveland debut at Severance (Sept. 12)

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by Daniel Hathaway

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio – A small but wildly enthusiastic crowd showed up at Severance Music Center on Friday to hear a recital by Russian pianist Polina Osetinskaya that marked her Cleveland debut and that of Domus Virtuosa, a new artist agency and production initiative founded by Clevelander Svetlana Stolyarova.

Not your usual piano recital, Osetinskaya’s program was entirely devoted to transcriptions — or arrangements — of music by Johann Sebastian Bach and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

[Read more…]

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