by Kevin McLaughlin
At a charged turning point in Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, the arrival of D major brings release: upper strings turn glassy and weightless, a sound like snowfall. It was a memorable sonority, one of several that lingered in “Fantasies of Aino Sibelius,” the second concert of ENCORE’s Music & Ideas Festival, presented on Saturday, June 6, at Federated Church in Chagrin Falls.
The program centered on Ainola, the house in Finland where Jean Sibelius and his wife Aino lived for half a century. Artistic Director and violinist Jinjoo Cho reminded us in her welcoming remarks that home is “not simply an address, but a set of conditions — rooms, landscapes, and people that make belonging possible.”
Fantasies treated Ainola as a symbol of creative life sustained by discipline, domestic warmth, and solitude. It was not hard to imagine the Sibelius household in its own absorbed quiet: work, family, silence, and the discipline of composing at home. The program moved from solitude toward community with music by Jörg Widmann, Jean Sibelius, and Arnold Schoenberg.
Widmann’s Étude No. 1 asks the player to make an unaccompanied argument out of fragments — gestures that flare, snap off, return, or pause and listen. Cho gave it a nervous, dramatic shape, letting its technical demands register as thought under pressure. The result was a precise, spare, and unsentimental curtain-raiser.
Sibelius, who once hoped to be a violinist, wrote the Five Pieces for Violin and Piano, Op. 81 between 1915 and 1918. At first, the set invokes an old-world salon with candlelight, elegant manners, and polished surfaces. But these pieces are not merely charming. With their melodic invention and virtuoso turns, they are closer in spirit to Fritz Kreisler’s occasional pieces. Cho and Hyunsoo Kim brought out the music’s flamboyance without smoothing away any of its laugh lines.
Performed in its original string sextet version, Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht brought unabashed passion into the room. Cho prepared the audience with a reading in English of Richard Dehmel’s poem about a moonlit walk, a woman’s painful confession, and a lover’s answer that transforms shame and fear into compassion. Violinists Cho and Min-Jeong Koh, violists Ettore Causa and Mathieu Herzog, and cellists Max Geissler and Valentin Radutiu delivered a concentrated, ecstatic performance that kept Schoenberg’s intricacies easy to follow.
Each musician played a distinct role in the drama, shaping lyrical and contrapuntal lines while clarifying the lovers’ private exchanges. Cho, Herzog, and Radutiu contributed vividly to the music’s surges of feeling, but the performance drew its force from the full ensemble’s balance and shared intensity. As the final transformation arrived, the sextet let the D-major radiance bloom, then recede into quietness.
Published on ClevelandClassical.com June 19, 2026
click here for a printable copy of this article
