Mike Telin
This past Sunday, guitarist Jason Vieaux became a first-time Grammy Award winner in the “Best Classical Solo Performance” category for his Azica Records CD, Play. On Saturday, February 14, Vieaux will be the featured soloist in Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez with the Akron Symphony under the direction of Christopher Wilkins.
The program also includes Mozart’s Overture to The Marriage of Figaro and Oboe Concerto with ASO principal oboist Terry Orcutt as soloist, as well as Elgar’s Serenade for Strings and de Falla’s El amor brujo. The concert begins at 8:00 pm in the University of Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall.
Composed in 1939, Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez is without a doubt the composer’s best-known work. “It is a popular piece and deservedly so,” Vieaux said during a recent telephone conversation. “The second movement is a masterpiece. As a guitarist, I am a little biased, but I think it’s so cool how the solo line brings the entire concerto to a climax at the end of the second movement cadenza. Rodrigo understood the guitar well enough to make sure it was at its very loudest during those ten-note flourishes.” [Read more…]
Visitors from Boston were the headliners for the Akron Symphony concert at E.J. Thomas hall on Saturday evening. Guest conductor Benjamin Zander and 20-year-old cellist Jonah Ellsworth brought along major works by Antonin Dvořák and Dmitri Shostakovich and gave them compelling performances. 
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. 
The last time violin superstar Joshua Bell appeared on Akron’s Tuesday Musical Series, he caused a major traffic jam outside E.J. Thomas Hall and the audience was so large that the Association ran out of programs. On that occasion in February, 2010, Bell played a recital with pianist Jeremy Denk. He’ll share that same stage with a few more musicians on Friday, November 7, when he plays Max Bruch’s g-minor concerto with Christopher Wilkins and the Akron Symphony Orchestra, a first-ever collaboration between the ASO and the TMA. Better carpool or come early to get a parking space.
Symphony musicians know all too well the feeling of being terrified during a performance. On Saturday night, October 18, in EJ Thomas Hall, the audience had plenty of reasons to share that feeling with the Akron Symphony. 
Two hundred years to the day from the eventful night in Chesapeake Bay when the Baltimore lawyer Francis Scott Key watched the British Royal Navy’s bombardment of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812 and penned the poem that begins, “O say can you see by the dawn’s early light,” the Akron Symphony will mark the birth of the United State’s eventual National Anthem with a program of music by Dudley Buck, Beethoven, Charles Ives and Michael Gandolfi on Saturday, September 13 at 8:00 in E.J. Thomas Hall at the University of Akron.
On Saturday, April 12 the Akron Symphony, under the direction of Christopher Wilkins, will present its final Classic Series Concert of the season with performances of Walton’s Crown Imperial March and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. The concert, which begins at 8:00 in E.J. Thomas Hall also features The Akron Symphony Chorus, Maria Sensi Sellner, chorus director, in Rossini’s Stabat Mater.