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Jason Vieaux to open CICGF with solo recital June 9

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Vieaux-(Tyler-Boye)Needing an encore for a concert the next day, guitarist Jason Vieaux woke up in Boston to a mild earthquake, turned on the TV to an Obama-Romney presidential debate, and thought to himself: Everybody Wants to Rule the World.

Ten minutes later, his guitar-accordina arrangement of Tears for Fears’ popular song was born. He and Julien Labro would rehearse it the next morning for fifteen minutes before performing it on WGBH and again that night in Roxbury. “We thought, it’ll really get it ready for the concert if we play it live on the radio,” Vieaux said with a laugh during a recent conversation. “It was kind of crazy, but things happen that way. It came out of professional necessity.”

The arrangement would go on to close out the duo’s 2014 Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival performance and cap off their 2016 album Infusion — which also includes works by Piazzolla, Metheny, and Brouwer.

For the 2017 edition of CICGF, the Grammy Award-winning Jason Vieaux is taking things in a different direction. On Friday, June 9 at 7:30 pm at the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Hall, he will open the Festival with a solo program of Sor, Bach, Ponce, Ginastera, and Morel.

[Read more…]

Factory Seconds Brass Trio gears up for concerts at BW, Bop Stop, and on the Rocky River Chamber Series

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Daniel Hathaway

Factory-SecondsThe amusingly-named Factory Seconds Brass Trio — all second-chair players in The Cleveland Orchestra — will have a busy schedule in February. Trumpeter Jack Sutte, hornist Jesse McCormick, and trombonist Richard Stout will start out the month with two different concerts on Sunday, February 12.

At 3:00 pm, the Trio will play a faculty concert in Gamble Auditorium at Baldwin Wallace titled “Well-Tempered Hindemith: Modernist, Traditionalist, Pragmatist, Artist.” Pianist Christine Fuoco will join each of the players for a solo sonata by Paul Hindemith, and pianist Christina Dahl will take over the bench for Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis, “a counterpoint homage to J.S. Bach.”

At 7:00 pm on the 12th, Factory Seconds will be the featured performers at the Bop Stop as the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival presents its latest edition of Bach Haus and Brews. The music will include bluegrass, broadway, jazz, and — of course — Bach. [Read more…]

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Review: Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom: Mozart with Matthew Halls (August 9)

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by Robert Rollin

HALLS-MatthewOn Saturday evening, August 9, the Blossom Festival presented an exemplary Cleveland Orchestra Mozart concert under the gifted young British conductor, Matthew Halls, making his debut with the group. The Oxford-educated musician first became known as a keyboard player and conductor of early music. Since then he has come to prominence as Director of the Oregon Bach Festival and through appearances with major professional orchestras and opera companies in Europe, Australia, and North America.

The entire concert was a delight, thanks to the orchestra’s wonderful talent and to Halls’s remarkably colorful dynamics and sensitive control of tempi. Notwithstanding his youthfulness, Halls showed mature and outstanding interpretive skills, lending grace and beauty to the entire concert. [Read more…]

Preview: Organists Bálint Karosi and Christopher Houlihan both come to town on April 19, but no need to choose

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by Daniel Hathaway

Karosi-Houlihan

When it rains, it pours, and in April that’s a good thing. Two stellar concert organists are set to play very different recitals in Cleveland on Friday, April 19, and happily, fans of organ music can catch both of them. 34-year-old Hungarian-born Bálint Karosi opens the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival at 4 pm at Berea United Methodist Church with music by J.S. Bach’s predecessors and the master himself, and 25-year-old Christopher Houlihan performs Vierne and Liszt at Fairmount Presbyterian Church in Cleveland Heights at 7:30 in a recital jointly sponsored by Fairmount Church and the Cleveland Chapter of the American Guild of Organists.

How different can two organists and two recitals be? With centuries of repertory to explore, “a longer history than any other instrument,” Houlihan reminds us in a phone call from his home in New York, there can be plenty of differences. The instruments, for one thing. Karosi will play a baroque-style tracker instrument built by Rudolf Janke in Germany in 1974, while Houlihan will perform on the eclectic, 100-rank electro-pneumatic instrument built by Ohio’s Schantz Co. in 1966 (incorporating elements of an earlier Holtkamp organ). For another thing, the two players come from different backgrounds and were inspired by very different influences. [Read more…]

Preview: April concert highlights — emphasis on Spring

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by Daniel Hathaway

Carmina-Burana-MSApril’s showers may not inspire Northeast Ohioans to go on pilgrimages, as Chaucer famously noted, but especially this year, concert planners’ thoughts have turned to another Spring rite: Stravinsky’s ballet Le sacre du printemps, which received its infamous debut on May 29, 1913 by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes at the Champs-Élysées Theatre in Paris.

On April 13 at E.J. Thomas Hall, the Akron Symphony will team up with David Shimotakahara’s GroundWorks Dance Theater for a fully-choreographed performance of Rite involving 100 musicians, eight professional dancers and fifteen members of a student ensemble. Later, on April 20, Gerhardt Zimmermann will lead the Canton Symphony in Stravinsky’s famous work in Umstadt Hall. In between, on April 16, you can hear the work in its pre-orchestration version for two pianos played by Gerald Evans and Margarita Denenberg on the Lorain County Community College Signature Series.

Another extravagant celebration of Spring — perhaps not so self-consciously primitive but lusty enough in its own right — is Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, based on songs by medieval wandering scholars collected at the Bavarian abbey of Benediktbeuern (a page pictured above). [Read more…]

Picks of the Season: Daniel Hathaway

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With over 1,500 concerts to choose from, it’s not easy to make a short list of performances that really stood out head and shoulders above the others — most of which were of very high quality themselves. So here’s a medium-short list: twenty-five outstanding performances I covered for ClevelandClassical.com with a few quotes from concert reports about each event. I’ll put them in chronological order. If you have a highlight to nominate that’s not on this list, please leave a comment below!

Chanticleer’s High School Choral Festival in Akron (October 7). In conjunction with the male chorus’ appearance on the Tuesday Musical Series, the singers coached six local choirs all day and joined them for an evening concert culminatng in a 250-voice massed choir. “This was an impressively organized day that must have made a lasting impression on all participants. It left us feeling quite happy about the future of choral music. It’s in good hands in the Akron area!”

Organist Olivier Latry (Notre-Dame, Paris) at Holy Trinity, Akron (October 9). “This was everything an organ concert should be – astonishing yet completely tasteful playing, great repertory and sometimes just plain fun”.

The Rose Ensemble at St. Stanislaus in ‘Il Poverello: the life and deeds of St. Francis of Assisi’ (October 11).  “In an era accustomed to sensory overload, when stage productions are hard put to compete with the technological wizardry available to film makers, it’s refreshing to spend a couple of hours in a vivid world created simply through the interaction of words and music.”

Jennifer Koh on the Oberlin Artist Recital Series (October 29): “…as close to perfect violin playing as one is likely to hear. Jennifer Koh drew a capacity audience into the special world of solo violin music on Thursday evening with her gracious stage presence, gorgeous tone, flawless intonation, right on interpretations and virtuosity deployed only in service to the music. One left Finney Chapel knowing that this had not been an everyday experience”. [Read more…]

An interview with St. Olaf Choir conductor Anton Armstrong, Part 2

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In part two of my telephone interview with St. Olaf Choir director Anton Armstrong, we continued to discuss the program the choir will sing at Severance Hall on February 1.

Daniel Hathaway: The next section begins with Finzi, who is one of my favorite composers — but tell me about Ola Gjeilo.

Anton Armstrong: Ola Gjeilo is a Norwegian composer who has come to this country to do more advanced work on the east coast. He started coming to the forefront three or four years ago when Gunilla Luboff, Norman Luboff’s widow, who owned Walton Music (she’s Swedish) started publishing some of Ola’s music. My colleague Sigrid Johnson commissioned him to write a piece for our first year singers — the Manitou Singers — for Christmas two years ago. Then I stumbled across many of his compositions. He came to St. Olaf for a visit, and he has been featured in the Twin Cities. We’re always trying to find young contemporary voices, and also, as you mentioned early on, we still have very strong ties to Norway. And so it’s not just music of Grieg and Nysted and other who have been revered and highly lauded over the years, but it’s also new voices of Scandinavia and especially Norway that I’m always trying to include in some way, shape or form in our programs. And this whole section is more of the social consciousness section. [Read more…]

DIARY, Friday, November 1, 2024

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by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING TODAY: 

Tonight at 7, Cleveland Orchestra clarinetist Daniel McKelway (pictured) will be featured in the Mozart concerto with the Baldwin Wallace Symphony Orchestra in Gamble Auditorium.

Four events all begin tonight at 7:30:

Cleveland Jazz Orchestra celebrates Sean Jones in “The Sean is You” (Maltz PAC),

The Cleveland Orchestra led by Lawrence Loh marks Hallowe’en with a screening of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (Severance Music Center),

The Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, Timothy Weiss, conductor, presents harpist Rosanna Moore, cellist Nick Photinos, percussionist Ross Karre, and the Oberlin Percussion Group in works by Han Lash, Pamela Z, Christopher Stark, and Carlos Carrillo (Warner Concert Hall, live stream available), and

The Resonance Project hosts mezzo-soprano Kameryn Lueng and pianist Irwin Shung in “Dreams and Disillusionment: Songs of Love” (Forest Hill Presbyterian Church).

For details of these and other upcoming events, visit our Concert Listings.

NEWS BRIEFS: 

The Violin Channel reports that soprano Renée Fleming has been named director of Cincinnati’s 2025 May Festival. The article includes the interesting news that since its founding in 1873, “…choral works that have premiered at the Festival include J.S. Bach’s Magnificat, Mahler’s Symphony No. 3, and Britten’s Gloriana. [Read more…]

DIARY: Wednesday, October 30, 2024

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by Stephanie Manning

HAPPENING TODAY:

We’re halfway through the week, with two concerts to celebrate. At 12:00 noon, hear organist Shane Brandes perform at Trinity Lutheran Church for Music Near the Market.

Or, at 6:00, hear students from the CIM Guitar Studio perform at the Cleveland Museum of Art (pictured). This free concert takes place in Gallery 212, Baroque Painting and Sculpture.

For more information, visit our Concert Listings.

ANOTHER NEW DISCOVERY:

First Mozart, now Chopin — it’s been a big year for unearthing music by long-dead composers. That’s right — a previously unknown waltz by Frédéric Chopin has emerged from the collection at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City. The brief, though complete, manuscript is said to be from when the composer is in his early 20s. Read more about it and hear a performance from the pianist Lang Lang here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

by Daniel Hathaway

On this date in 1864, American music patroness and composer Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge was born in Chicago. [Read more…]

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