by David Kulma
Tuesday, October 22 was my second opportunity to hear the Jerusalem Quartet. This was their eighth appearance on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society’s concerts at Plymouth Church, and it’s no wonder they keep getting invited back. In an invigorating program of Mozart, Korngold, and Shostakovich, violinists Alexander Pavlovsky and Sergei Bresler, violist Ori Kam, and cellist Kyril Zlotnikov showed off this elegant quartet’s power and maturity. [Read more…]
by David Kulma
Five Novembers ago, David B. Ellis organized a lecture-concert with six string-playing friends. Its focus was Arnold Schoenberg’s decadent 1899 tone poem Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4. This experience bore fruit a year later with the birth of Earth and Air: String Orchestra. On Friday, November 1 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights, Ellis opened its fifth season with Schoenberg’s 1917 string orchestra version of Transfigured Night in a program titled “Splendor Falls on Everything Around.” Giving this obsessive piece context, he paired it with music by Gustav Mahler and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. [Read more…]
by Robert Rollin
On Friday evening November 1, Youngstown’s Calvin Center for the Arts hosted a concert featuring sarangi virtuoso Harsh Narayan of Mumbai, India, accompanied by tabla artist Joe Culley of Kent, Ohio. The concert took place in the Yoga room, an intimate space that provided a warm atmosphere for the small but enthusiastic audience. Narayan explained that the sarangi dates back to 6th Century India, when at first it accompanied the human voice, even imitating vocal ornaments and slides. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Stevens
Tell a classical fan that you recently heard an ensemble play a piece from the 1920s that features a solo snare drum, and their mind might snap to any of a number of dubious ultramodern experiments of that era. A late October program by The Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall, at once offbeat and logical in its selection of delights, short-circuited stereotypical associations of the idiosyncratic with the avant-garde. Ovations for percussionist Marc Damoulakis and clarinetist Afendi Yusuf capped a concert devoted to Romanticism in all its strangeness. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Conductor Scott MacPherson had two things in mind when choosing repertoire for Cleveland Chamber Choir’s first pair of concerts this season. The program had to reflect this season’s concentration on music by women composers, and the works needed to flourish in the lively acoustic of venues in Cleveland and Akron. The first performance, on Friday, November 8 at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, scored high on both counts. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Stevens
Spare a thought for Fretwork: a recent tour of North America hit a snag when an airline cracked one of their violas da gamba. Instruments of this family constitute the entire toolbox of the group, a viol consort that presents the fraternal twin to the violin as though it had never lost its cachet. For many Northeast Ohioans, warm feelings for the group remain fresh after a late-October concert, part of a tour that pitted them against all too modern perils. In a careless, rushing world, their meticulous musicianship and willingness to let music unfold feel less like dusty artifacts than like emblems of a future worth fighting for. [Read more…]
by David Kulma
If anyone is worried about the future of opera, all they have to do is attend a college production to calm the nerves. There are numerous highly-skilled young people ready to take up the genre’s mantle, as was clear from the Cleveland Institute of Music Opera Theater’s production of The Juniper Tree in Mixon Hall on Halloween weekend. I attended opening night on Thursday, October 31, which was dedicated to the memory of the late Cleveland arts icon A. Grace Lee Mims. Artistic director Dean Southern chose a relatively recent work composed in 1984 by Philip Glass and Robert Moran. With a libretto by Arthur Yorinks, The Juniper Tree takes its plot from a grim tale by the Brothers Grimm. [Read more…]
by David Kulma
We live in an age where opera, no longer restricted to theaters and concert halls, is happening in every place imaginable. This was the case when Baldwin Wallace Opera Theater presented two performances of Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at RED Space in downtown Cleveland. I attended on Thursday, October 24. Lasting about an hour and with roles that you can divide up between seven women and two men, Dido is perfect for female-dominated college voice programs. But how do you make it work in a cement box? [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
No longer just a French Baroque ensemble, Les Délices has recently branched out into earlier and later musical periods and crossed national borders. In the latest development, founder, artistic director, and oboist Debra Nagy invited fortepianist Sylvia Berry and three period wind instrument colleagues — clarinetist Colin Lawson, bassoonist Wouter Verschuren, and hornist Todd Williams — to join her in well-known quintets from the Viennese Classical period.
by Daniel Hathaway
The special, spatial music of the Gabrielis and their early Baroque successors at San Marco in Venice has been famous for a long time. But until modern performers took up and mastered the instruments and playing style of the mixed wind and string ensembles that held forth from the galleries of that Byzantine basilica, replicating the timbres of 17th-century polychoral music that drew Northern composers like Heinrich Schütz to the Most Serene Republic just wasn’t possible. [Read more…]