by Daniel Hathaway
While many American orchestras were just beginning to stir again after the holidays, Franz Welser-Möst and the Clevelanders were busy pulling off one of the most impressive programs in recent memory. A neglected Dvořák symphony, a darkish Mozart piano concerto featuring Yefim Bronfman, and a standout among Janáček’s few orchestral works served up sequential delights on Friday, January 10. [Read more…]
by David Kulma
In Paris, 1534, Pierre Attaingnant published a book of motets that utilized the aptly named “O Antiphons.” His Motettorum Liber Book 7 includes six Advent antiphons, which are traditionally sung at Vespers from December 17 through 23, one per evening. Derived from the prophecies of Isaiah, each begins with “O” and names a specific attribute of the Messiah — Sapientia (Wisdom), Adonai (Lord), Radix Jesse (Root of Jesse), Clavis David (Key of David), Oriens (Daystar), Rex Gentium (King of Nations), and Emmanuel (God with us). They are best known in the hymn “O Come O Come Emmanuel,” which brings them all together to create one beautiful Christmas carol.
by Daniel Hathaway
In 1735, Johann Sebastian Bach’s congregations in the two principal churches of Leipzig were treated to six new cantatas between Christmas Day and Epiphany, at a rate of one per feast day. In 2019, Apollo’s Fire’s audiences got to hear two-thirds of those pieces in one sitting, as guest conductor Julian Wachner led Cantatas Nos. 1, 2, 5, and 6 of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio in five venues around the city. I heard the performance on Friday, December 13 in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Countering the widespread practice of giving a half-hearted nod to Hanukkah during December choral concerts, Cleveland Chamber Choir dedicated an important chunk of this year’s “Holidays Old and New” programs to the Jewish Feast of Lights, which included this latest pair of annual commissions. At First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights on Saturday, December 7, Scott MacPherson and his 24 professional singers interleaved Hanukkah music by Andrew Rindfleisch, Baruch J. Cohon, Samuel Adler, Judith Clurman, David Chase, and chorister Corey K. Rubin with pairs of old and new versions of Christmas pieces. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Departing slightly but refreshingly from the time-honored pattern of classical era quartet + modern piece + major romantic work, the Dover Quartet brought a challenging but engaging contemporary quartet by David Bruce to the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series at Plymouth Church on December 3, prefacing it with an evanescent Britten quartet and following it with dependably sturdy Brahms. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Stevens
Mass media can make it feel as though the true color of the holiday season is a uniform Federal Reserve-issue sage, barely veiled by the colors of different proud traditions. The same ten songs blare in every grocery aisle. Yet on the ground, people find ways to wring something vital and unique out of a month when every icon of cheer feels somehow recycled. CityMusic Cleveland, prone to giving end-of-year concerts packed with music that knows no season, has found a way to reconcile seasonality with a respite. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Stevens
Opera has long dwelled on the point where love and suffering converge. When poets and composers made their first stabs at reconstructing Greek tragedy and created this genre instead, they retold myths of women who transformed to dodge lecherous gods, or of men duped into losing a lover twice. Artists have reiterated the idea of unhappy love for four centuries, each new opera of loss and longing a vertebra in the genre’s spine. Last week, I flew to Germany to hear a new opera as fixated on the consuming pressures of love as anything in the canon, yet also radical in its attention to the hearts, brains, and senses of ordinary, modern-day mortals. [Read more…]
by Peter Feher
“Holiday Concert” doesn’t do justice to the Cleveland Philharmonic Orchestra’s December program. The ensemble staged an orchestra concert proper, followed by a festive coda, on December 14 at Cleveland State’s Waetjen Auditorium (the first of two performances). A certain Renaissance flair marked the evening’s two big pieces, selections from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet and Poulenc’s Gloria. [Read more…]
by Peter Feher
The best children’s music, like the best children’s literature, has something in it for the adults. Wisely, the Suburban Symphony Orchestra put together a family concert on December 8 at the Maltz Performing Arts Center that could appeal to young and old alike. Ravel’s delicate, miniature Mother Goose Suite made up the brief first half of the program, but Lemony Snicket’s The Composer is Dead, with music by Nathaniel Stookey, was the real family fare for the afternoon. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Stevens
On Sunday, November 24 at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the audience in Gartner Auditorium clustered to the left, embracing the asymmetry typical of a piano recital. Yet if one shape came to mind repeatedly during the program, it was the ultimate figure of symmetry: the circle. Soloist Soyeon Kate Lee would come full circle that day, playing Mozart sixteen years after winning the Mozart Prize at the 2003 Cleveland International Piano Competition. [Read more…]