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Ohio Light Opera: Pirates of Penzance (July 7)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Ohio Light Opera has expanded its repertoire beyond the Savoy operas that originally defined the company, but it still finds room to produce one or two shows every season by the brilliant team of William Schwenck Gilbert and Arthur Seymour Sullivan, who found so many ways to poke fun at the cozy conventions of Victorian England.

This season’s G&S show, Pirates of Penzance, subtitled “The Slave of Duty,” spins its plot around young Frederick, sung by the clear-voiced tenor Spencer Reese, who does double duty as choreographer of the show’s athletic ensemble numbers.

[Read more…]

Splendid Sibelius, Stratospheric Tchaikovsky from the Canton Symphony (June 25)

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by Tom Wachunas

“Music begins where the possibilities of language end.” —Sibelius

The first selection on the June 25 “Triumphant Tchaikovsky” program from the Canton Symphony Orchestra (CSO) was Jean Sibelius’ Symphony No. 3 in C Major.

With this work, premiered in 1907, Sibelius offered a bold departure from the explosive emotionalism so prevalent in late-Romantic era music. This symphony was a renewed embrace of Classicism’s purity of form and melody, and one that, oddly enough, left many initial audiences of the day somewhat bewildered. [Read more…]

Tri-C JazzFest finds its groove at Playhouse Square (first of three reviews) 

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by Jacob Strauss

With food trucks lined up on E. 14th Street by the Strassman Insurance Stage on Euclid, Tri-C JazzFest was hitting its groove on Friday, June 24.

Cats on Holiday, a swamp pop band from Cleveland wearing Hawaiian shirts, was playing on the outdoor stage when I arrived. There was an accordion player with a crawdad printed on the bellows, and a man playing spoons on a washboard, who, in a moment of poetry, said there is redemption and grace and love in carrying pain, and that is why the perseverance of the people of Cleveland is special.

After eating a Po’boy from The Dawg Bowl Cajun food truck, I caught the first half of Brian Culbertson’s show in The Connor Palace Theatre. [Read more…]

ChamberFest Cleveland:
“Timeless Explorations” (June 25)

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by Daniel Hathaway

The first piece of business at ChamberFest Cleveland’s June 25 concert in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music was rearranging the order of the program. “Timeless Explorations” was to have begun with a new piece, but probably for practical reasons involving a prepared piano, Yevgeniy Sharlat’s Dumka-22 and Beethoven’s Piano Trio, Op. 70, No. 2 traded places.

Violinist Diana Cohen, cellist Jonathan Swensen, and pianist Andrius Žlabys launched the sixth concert of ChamberFest’s tenth anniversary season with an effervescent performance of Beethoven’s least-performed trio. Bedecked with sparkling runs and ensemble flourishes and set in the gemütlich key of E-flat, the piece made an attractive opener and served as a lovely vehicle for the musicians to express their unassuming virtuosity.

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ChamberFest Cleveland: Color X Expanse (June 24)

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by Daniel Hathaway

At the Cultural Arts Center at Disciples Church on Friday, June 24, the repertoire was indeed both colorful and expansive as the excellent musicians of ChamberFest Cleveland explored works ranging from the sentimental (Fritz Kreisler’s Three Pieces for Piano Trio) to the evanescent (Gabriel Fauré’s Piano Quintet No. 1), from the stark and compact (George Walker’s Piano Sonata No. 5) to the delightfully verbose (Zoltán Kodály’s Duo for Violin and Cello, Op. 7).

Violinist Alexi Kenney, cellist Jonathan Swensen, and pianist Andrius Žlabys raised the curtain with three light pieces arranged by a virtuoso violinist famous for his encores. Kreisler’s takes on The Old Refrain, Farewell to Cucullain (a.k.a. Londonderry Air or Oh Danny Boy), and Miniature Viennese March worked equally well as preludial bon-bons. [Read more…]

Cleveland Opera Theater:
La Casa de Bernarda Alba (June 10)

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by Peter Feher

Cleveland Opera Theater saw the payoff of several years’ work when La Casa de Bernarda Alba premiered earlier this month. The production, fully realized on the mainstage at Baldwin Wallace University’s Kleist Center for Art and Drama from June 9-12, didn’t just spring out of nowhere. The company nurtured the piece through its New Opera Works Festival beginning in 2017 with a series of public readings of the source material.

And Federico García Lorca’s 1936 play is a good place to start. La Casa de Bernarda Alba makes for highly effective theater in that the simplest elements (a chair, a door, an offstage character) generate all the drama. Even in this operatic adaptation, Scott Skiba’s direction and Jeff Herrmann’s set design emphasized the essentials and communicated much of the action silently.

[Read more…]

Ohio Light Opera: Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella (June 18)

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by Jacob Strauss

In youth, everybody has dreams of becoming someone larger than they are, to drastically change the circumstance of their life. It is a story as old as drama itself and has been told continuously through thousands of generations by all people. The story is about hope in a wish, about dreams coming true not through fate or destiny, but by acting on the few opportunities we have in life.

Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella was originally produced for television in 1957 — seven years after the animated Disney film was released — and starred Julie Andrews. According to the Rodgers & Hammerstein website, it was viewed by over 100 million people. [Read more…]

Ohio Light Opera: Hello, Dolly! (June 23)

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by Daniel Hathaway

On June 23, Ohio Light Opera rang up the curtain on the second production of its 43rd season in Freedlander Theatre at The College of Wooster. Following on the heels of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella, the company’s first-ever staging of Hello, Dolly! continued the inclusion of Broadway in OLO’s repertoire.

The story line has its origin in an 1855 play and an 1842 farce that Thornton Wilder mined for his 1938 play The Merchant of Yonkers. When that turned out to be a flop, in 1954 Wilder made the crucial decision to re-center the show around the character of the legendary marriage broker Dolly Gallagher Levi and renamed it The Matchmaker. [Read more…]

Signum Quartet at ENCORE (June 10)

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by Jacob Strauss

On Friday, June 10 the Signum Quartet, coming all the way from Germany to ENCORE at Gilmour Academy, played an eclectic program spanning the era of Schubert to rock classics by Led Zeppelin and Radiohead. The theme of this concert was war and politics, and the programming illustrated the revolutionary nature of the music.

The Dodero Center for the Performing Arts at the Gilmore Academy in Gates Mills is one feature of an impressive campus. The auditorium is shallow, the stage is deep, and the ensemble played without a shell. Throughout the program, the sound, especially in instruments’ lower registers, tended to disappear. [Read more…]

RE:Sound: Warp Trio and Robin Blake Sound Experiment (June 9) 

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by Jacob Strauss

On Thursday June 9, the Re:Sound Festival kicked off with two dynamic sets from the New York-based ensemble Warp Trio, and Cleveland’s own Robin Blake Sound Experiment.

Warp Trio took the stage as a quartet and began Duke Ellington’s Black and Tan Fantasy. Josh Henderson’s bow biting the strings of his electric violin sounded like a Bartók sonata infused with the blues. It sneered and bared its teeth. It was abrasive, and after the angst, the blues caught the collar of the snarling beast and calmed it. [Read more…]

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