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CD Review
The Cleveland Orchestra: A New Century, Vol. 3

by Jarrett Hoffman

A shared sense of the epic ties together the final two works of A New Century, the three-part live album from Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra that is also the ensemble’s inaugural release on its own record label.

We begin with the world premiere recording of Okeanos, Bernd Richard Deutsch’s concerto for organ and orchestra, featuring Paul Jacobs as soloist. The title refers not only to the Titan of Greek mythology, but also “to an idea of immense (and sometimes unfathomable) greatness and breadth, which conjures up in my mind the thought of the organ,” as Deutsch writes in his notes. [Read on…]

CD Review — Jory Vinikour
L’Unique: Harpsichord Music of François Couperin (Cedille)

by Daniel Hathaway

If you haven’t already warmed up to French Baroque clavecin music, Chicago-based keyboardist Jory Vinikour’s L’Unique: Harpsichord Music of François Couperin should make a strong impression on your musical tastes. The most prominent member of a musical dynasty second only to the German Bachs, François Couperin left a large treasure trove of keyboard works, 234 in all, arranged in 24 suites or Ordres. [Read on…]

Colin Davin & Jason Vieaux in a live online recital (June 6)

by Daniel Hathaway

After weeks of watching online streams of archived concerts and ad hoc performances from quarantined musicians’ living rooms and bedrooms, it was thrilling to be able to advertise, preview, and report on two real-time webcasts last Friday and Saturday that embraced high production values and addressed the persistent issue of how to compensate musicians for online services. Saturday afternoon’s joint recital by Colin Davin and Jason Vieaux was sponsored by the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival, whose 2020 iteration, scheduled for that weekend at the Cleveland Institute of Music, vanished in the wake of the pandemic. [Read on…]

Mark Kosower begins Trinity livestream series with Bach cello suites (June 5)

by Jarrett Hoffman

Cellist Mark Kosower has long believed that the music of J.S. Bach can bring people together. His live-streamed performance from Trinity Cathedral on Friday, June 5, revealed how deeply he feels about that: perhaps what was most healing was his passion itself. This was the first in a pair of concerts that Kosower will give at Trinity this summer with no audience present, covering all six of the composer’s solo cello suites under the banner of his project “Bach for Humanity.” On Saturday, he brought the odd-numbered works, playing from memory and starting with No. 5. Full of agony and desperation, its Prelude was a fitting way to begin. The Allemande stood out for its poetic flexibility, while the second Gavotte ran smooth, Kosower’s technique flowing easily.

[Read on…]

Stephanie Lamprea’s Unaccompanied: Tiny Works for Quarantine, Vols. I & II

by Nicholas Stevens

“I am sitting in a room,” intones the composer Alvin Lucier, announcing the title of the composition he is recording before clarifying: “…different from the one you are sitting in now.” As stay-at-home orders arose in March 2020, music-lovers on social media noted that Lucier’s half century-old audio piece could serve as an unlikely quarantine anthem.

Enter the soprano Stephanie Lamprea, last heard in Cleveland during the 2019 Re:Sound Festival, making some of the lockdown era’s most vivid new music through an approach that inverts everything that defines Lucier’s piece — except, of course, for the isolation.

[Read on…]

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