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Re•Views

SalonEra: “Folk Influences” (Nov. 16)

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by Mike Telin

Any talk show worth its weight possesses three qualities: a host who is knowledgeable of the subject matter, guests who are engaging conversationalists, and a feeling that by the end of the program, you’ve learned something.

With the onslaught of newly created online content designed to entertain the stay-at-home audience, SalonEra is a standout. Produced by Cleveland-based early music ensemble Les Délices and hosted by Debra Nagy, each show is centered around a single topic and features guest artists who bring the subject du jour to life. [Read more…]

Oberlin Opera Theater:
The Telephone & La voix humaine (Nov. 6)

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by Jarrett Hoffman

It’s not an easy time for opera, to state the obvious — any new production is an achievement in itself. Immense creativity is required to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and as a result, things are bound to look and feel different from the norm.

That was the case with Oberlin Opera Theater’s pre-recorded double-bill of Gian Carlo Menotti’s comedy The Telephone and Francis Poulenc’s tragedy La voix humaine, which brought together impressive performances with sometimes inventive, sometimes puzzling decisions from director Jason Aaron Goldberg. The production, which premiered on November 6 on the Oberlin Stage Left series, remains available to watch through November 13.

[Read more…]

CD Review
The Cleveland Orchestra:
Schubert & Křenek

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by Jarrett Hoffman

The latest entry from Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra on the ensemble’s own record label brings another high contrast into view. Franz Schubert’s spirited and expansive “Great” Symphony in C (1826) sits alongside the ten miniatures that make up Ernst Křenek’s atonal and highly atmospheric Static and Ecstatic (1972). In brilliant performances captured live at Severance Hall just before the coronavirus shutdown in March, each work packs quite an artistic punch, though they both require a measure of patience from the listener.

[Read more…]

CD Review
Collage Project: Off Brand

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by Jarrett Hoffman

There’s a fascinating and colorful gray area between jazz and contemporary classical music, as evidenced by this past summer’s album Off Brand from the Collage Project. Joining bassist Aidan Plank, electric guitarist Dan Bruce, and guitarist Daniel Lippel are three guests — drummer Nathan Douds, saxophonist Noa Even, and trombonist Chris Anderson — together harvesting a bounty of unique and compelling combinations of sound.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra In Focus 2: Bronfman & Beethoven (Oct. 29)

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by Daniel Hathaway

The Severance Hall team made just a few tweaks to the video production of Episode 2 in its In Focus Series that debuted on October 29. Instead of the colorful lighting that gave a bluish tint to Respighi and bathed Tchaikovsky in red for Episode 1, the walls of the stage were washed in a subtle peach hue. And instead of standing for a silent ovation from an empty hall, players remained in their seats for a fadeout at the end of both works on the program. What remained the same was the high level of playing from the well-distanced string section, and the superb quality of the sound. [Read more…]

2020 University of Akron “Collage” streamed online (Oct. 28)

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by Nicholas Stevens

Apologies for mentioning elections in what is ostensibly a review documenting the accomplishments of local musicians. But art must come from somewhere, and someone must have the time, space, and tools to make it. Decades of budget cuts have devastated public higher education across the nation. Undaunted, students, faculty, and staff at these institutions continue to prove themselves and their work vital to communities’ cultural lives. Northeast Ohioans recently had a chance to hear how much musical energy pours forth from the University of Akron School of Music in a live-streamed concert. In an election season, it afforded space and time to contemplate which public treasures we keep, lose, and still have a chance to preserve. [Read more…]

Road Trip —Michigan Opera: Yuval Sharon stages Twilight: Gods in its parking garage (Oct. 20)

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by Nicholas Stevens

Michigan Opera Theatre’s Twilight: Gods, an adaptation of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, rends the Ring Cycle’s proto-cinematic fog to render six scenes differently, but no less powerfully. Critics have hailed it as a relief from 2020’s live-performance drought, also singling out specific ways in which it transfigured its staging site, the Detroit Opera House’s parking garage, into an otherworldly horizon without sacrificing relevance to our tired-yet-twitchy American moment. The performance under review took place on Tuesday, October 20, and assured this reviewer that opera-lovers in Northeast Ohio will find future MOT productions more than worth the drive. [Read more…]

Music From The Western Reserve: Silberschlag & Friends (Oct. 11)

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by Nicholas Stevens

For this reviewer, concerts these days seem always to have a single moment of emotional breakthrough. Chalk it up to pandemic-era life’s tendency to congeal into numbing routine, but even familiar material can take on new significance when heard live-streamed through earbuds during an otherwise undifferentiated mass of homebound time. All this to say that when Music From The Western Reserve returned with a stream by Cleveland Orchestra principal horn Nathaniel Silberschlag and his friends and family last month, the most soul-stirring moment arrived suddenly and decisively. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: Resilience, filmed at First Baptist, Oct. 20

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by Daniel Hathaway

After the novel coronavirus brought live concerts to a standstill in March, Apollo’s Fire was among the first of Cleveland’s performing organizations to formulate a clear plan for 2020-2021. Cleveland’s Baroque orchestra proposed a hybrid subscription season that would permit in-person audiences at its various venues — at 15% of capacity — but alternatively, promised professionally-produced videos for viewing by subscribers about a week after the live performances.

The first such video, capturing the October 20 performance of Resilience at First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights, delivered handsomely on that promise. Erica Brenner’s sensitive videography and audio mixing preserved brilliant performances of music that illuminated two troubled periods in history: the plague of London in 1665, and the outbreaks of cholera and dysentery that dampened but failed to defeat the human spirit at the end of the American Civil War two centuries later. [Read more…]

Rocky River Chamber Music Society: Diamond Brass streamed (Oct. 12)

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by Daniel Hathaway

The Diamond Brass Quintet opened Rocky River Chamber Music Society’s new season on Monday, October 12 with nobody in the pews at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church. Like most performances these days, the concert was only attendable online. The players were widely-spaced on the stage, plexiglass shields were in place to cut down on aerosol transmissions, and the quintet took two intervals to go outdoors and let the air in the sanctuary refresh itself. (Rehearsals had been held outside as well.) [Read more…]

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