by Mike Telin
“It’s been nineteen years since the Verdi Requiem has been performed in Akron, and we’re pulling out all of the stops, which is the only way to do it,” Akron Symphony music director Christopher Wilkins said during a telephone interview. On Saturday, May 5 at 8:00 pm in E.J. Thomas Hall, Wilkins will lead the ASO, the Akron Symphony Chorus, and the Summit Choral Society Masterworks Chorale along with soprano Dina Kuznetsova, mezzo-soprano Nancy Maultsby, tenor John Pickle, and bass Adam Cioffari in Verdi’s masterpiece. Tickets are available online.
Saturday’s performance will mark the sixth time that the ASO has performed the work since its inaugural season in 1953 — the first was in 1961 under the direction of Evan Whallon. Subsequent performances were led by John MacDonald (1968), Robert Shaw (1978), Alan Balter (1987), and Paul Polivnick (1999).
A couple of weeks ago, The Price Is Right host and former Clevelander Drew Carey urged long-suffering Cleveland Browns fans to stop attending (expletive) Browns games and instead go see the (expletive) orchestra. This prompted the Akron Symphony Orchestra to champion the comedian’s cause by offering to exchange a Browns ticket stub for a free ticket to their annual holiday pops concert, “Home for the Holidays,” on Friday, December 11 at E.J. Thomas Hall. 
The Akron Symphony appropriately celebrated Saint Cecilia’s Day 2014 with a concert of music by the divine Mozart and the sainted Fauré, but also took the opportunity to elevate the jazzy music of Ravel to the Empyrean. To a neglected symphony and an infrequently performed mass by Mozart, music director Christopher Wilkins added a lovely Fauré bonbon and a wonderfully cheeky Ravel piano concerto, creating a program that showed the patron saint of music to be a woman with wide aesthetic tastes. 