by Nicholas Stevens
E.J. Thomas Hall looms and soars, cradling audiences in a colossal yet cozy acoustic shell. The mechanism that allows for adjustments in the ceiling height — a system of suspended counterweights — dominates one lobby like a giant’s carillon. The hall hosts performances of all sizes, but truly comes alive when a given theatrical or musical production offers art of comparable scale, scope, and solidity, spanning the spectrum from soft speech to symphonic swells. The Akron Symphony offered just such a program earlier this month. [Read more…]
“Verdi and Wagner together represent the pinnacle of the high Romantic age in music, and both were masters of drama,” Akron Symphony music director Christopher Wilkins says in a 
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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. 