by Daniel Hathaway
Themed symphony orchestra programs — often cooked up by marketing departments — can be gimmicky. But Akron Symphony music director Christopher Wilkins’s “Four Rivers” program at E.J. Thomas Hall on Saturday, March 14 took three European rivers and one American one that lives only in the realm of metaphor, and made them tributaries that flowed beautifully together into a larger stream. [Read more…]
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…]
by Daniel Hathaway
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. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Among the more appealing attractions of the classical music genre is its ability to wrap the talents of multiple generations into a single performance. In the next two weeks, young musicians will be showcased alongside their more seasoned colleagues in concerts by the Akron Symphony, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and The Cleveland Orchestra.
On Saturday, January 10 at 8:00 pm in E.J. Thomas Hall, Akron Symphony music director Christopher Wilkins will yield his baton to one of his mentors, the distinguished British-born conductor Benjamin Zander (Wilkins played oboe with the Boston Philharmonic under Zander after graduating from Harvard). Zander, in turn, has invited one of his young mentorees, cellist Jonah Ellsworth, to play the Dvorak concerto with the orchestra (above, Ellsworth with Zander after their performance of Strauss’s Don Quixote in May, 2014). [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
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. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
“I love this concerto so much, I almost don’t know what to say,” pianist and Akron Symphony Associate Conductor Levi Hammer told us during a recent conversation. “It’s one of those pieces that’s been with me for most of my life, and I’m so happy to be able to play it again.”
On Saturday, November 22 at 8:00 pm, in the University of Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall, Levi Hammer will perform Ravel’s jazz-inspired Piano Concerto in G major with the ASO under the direction of Christopher Wilkins. The concert will also include Fauré’s Pavane, Mozart’s Symphony No. 34 in C and his “Coronation” Mass in C, featuring the Akron Symphony Chorus.
Ravel composed the G-major concerto between 1929 and 1931 following a 1928 concert tour of the United States during which he met George Gershwin, who introduced him to Harlem jazz clubs. During the same tour, Ravel visited New Orleans, where he also took in that city’s vibrant jazz culture. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
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.
One of the most unpretentious and accessible artists on the professional concert circuit, Joshua Bell has been interviewed on many occasions. One of the most recent and engaging looks inside Bell’s life and career was provided by Cleveland pianist Zsolt Bognár in a 44-minute video interview with the violinist in his New York apartment. The sixteenth episode in Bognár’s series, “Living the Classical Life,” you can view that conversation here. [Read more…]
by Jane Berkner
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. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Akron Symphony music director Christopher Wilkins enjoys putting together themed programs that go well beyond what other orchestras put out to the public. On Saturday evening in E.J. Thomas Hall, with the help of Francis Scott Key, Dudley Buck, Ludwig van Beethoven, Charles Ives (via William Schuman), Michael Gandolfi, the Akron Symphony Chorus, One City Choir and Miller South Choir, Wilkins and the orchestra brought the spirit of 1814 vividly back to life through a canny choice of repertory.
by Daniel Hathaway
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.
Though Quire Cleveland pointed up some of the history of The Star-Spangled Banner in its “American Choral Gems” programs last April (treating the audiences to all four verses of Key’s expressive poetry), hardly anyone gives the anthem a second thought after standing for its ritual performance at the beginning of sporting events. As Akron Symphony music director Christopher Wilkins admitted in a telephone conversation, “it had never occurred to me to get all that excited about The Star-Spangled Banner other than just having regretted some of its militaristic words and the fact that the tune was written by an Englishman, anyway.”
That all changed when Wilkins talked with composer Michael Gandolfi, who was involved in writing his Chesapeake, Summer of 1814. [Read more…]