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Cleveland Orchestra with Pintscher & Gerstein (Nov. 1)

November 6, 2018 by Daniel Hathaway

by Daniel Hathaway

Only two works made up the program for Matthias Pintscher’s guest appearance with The Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall on Thursday, November 1, but they were big ones. Pianist Kirill Gerstein — always worth a few surprises — brought a breezy, fresh interpretation to Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto, and Pintscher and the Orchestra labored mightily to make the music of Bartók’s infrequently performed ballet The Wooden Prince work as a symphonic poem without dancers. [Read more…]

Oberlin Artist Recital Series: The Cleveland Orchestra (Sept. 21)

September 25, 2018 by Daniel Hathaway

by Daniel Hathaway

Last Thursday evening at The Cleveland Orchestra’s season opener in Severance Hall, music director Franz Welser-Möst was honored with the Orchestra’s twenty-third annual Distinguished Service Award. On Friday, an uncommonly hot evening for September, he deserved a medal for leading the ensemble in full concert dress while his colleagues played in shirtsleeves in Oberlin’s steamy Finney Chapel, surely one of the only major concert halls in Northeast Ohio not to offer climate control. (Photo from an earlier performance). [Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra Prometheus Project I: Eight Beethoven symphonies in four concerts

May 22, 2018 by David Kulma

by David Kulma

Severance Hall was filled to the brim with Beethoven lovers for the first four installments of The Cleveland Orchestra’s 100th-season-capping festival. Framed as an exploration of Ludwig van Beethoven’s nine symphonies through ancient Greek myth, The Prometheus Project began with dazzling performances of the first eight symphonies and four overtures led by music director Franz Welser-Möst from Thursday, May 10 through Sunday, May 13. [Read more…]

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Cleveland Chamber Music Society: Isidore String Quartet with Jeremy Denk (May 19)

by Kevin McLaughlin

Presented by the Cleveland Chamber Music Society at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium on May 19, the Isidore String Quartet — violinists Adrian Steele & Phoenix Avalon, violist Devin Moore, and cellist Joshua McClendon — offered a program that moved from Haydn through Ligeti to Brahms with the addition of pianist Jeremy Denk.

Haydn’s Op. 76, No. 4 (“Sunrise”) begins with a first-violin line unfurling over softly lit inner voices as the quartet waited for daylight. But when Haydn quickly broadened the texture into something fuller and more forceful, the quartet’s delicacy came at the expense of expressive weight.

The second movement opened almost inaudibly, the players hardly breathing, as if afraid of being discovered. By the Menuetto, the ensemble had loosened up, swaying with Haydn’s unexpectedly intricate rhythms, not waiting to be asked to dance. In the finale’s fugue, lines passed so smoothly from one player to the next that the seams disappeared, leaving only music. [Read on…]

Baritone Edward Vogel creates a sentimental “Palace in the Wild” (May 11)

by Stephanie Manning

Plenty of concerts trace a kind of journey, using music to tell a story. But Edward Vogel’s recent recital with the Rocky River Chamber Music Society felt particularly personal.

The baritone, who has lived and performed in Cleveland for five years, announced to the audience at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church that he and his husband would be relocating to Tennessee the very next day. Thankfully, before that happened, we got to hear “A Palace in the Wild: Journeys in British Art Song,” the beautiful program he brought to Rocky River on May 11.

Together with pianist Jenny Parker, Vogel guided the listeners through the five-part evening, contributing oral program notes throughout. The selections celebrate the “beautiful and underrated” genre of art song, specifically from British composers — a combination Vogel noted is less-often heard in the U.S. The structure followed the path of a life, from youthfulness, to seeking adventure, to grappling with a changed meaning of home.

Welser-Möst, Josefowicz, Struble, Cleveland Orchestra explore Courage in ‘Hero’s Song’ at Severance (May 22)

by Daniel Hathaway

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — In 1897, a year before Richard Strauss wrote his shamelessly autobiographical tone poem, Ein Heldenleben, Antonín Dvořák completed his Heldenlied (Hero’s Song), a more generalized ode to Courage that ended and gave its title to The Cleveland Orchestra’s program at the Mandel Opera and Humanities Festival at Severance Music Center on May 22.

The Dvořák work joined Adolphus Hailstork’s Epitaph for a Man Who Dreamed, Grażyna Bacewicz’s Symphony No. 4, and the world premiere of Jüri Reinvere’s Concerto for Violin, Harp, and Orchestra on a brilliantly played, fascinating playlist of rarely performed works that invited introspection and earned their performers the kind of wild ovations usually reserved for old warhorses.

Hailstork wrote his Epitaph in 1979 in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights hero who was assassinated in Memphis in 1968. It takes its title from Dr. King’s I Have a Dream Speech, delivered during the March on Washington in 1963. [Read on…]

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