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Renée Fleming & Friends at Severance (Oct. 15) 

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  by Peter Feher

“Farewell” was the final word that the audience heard at Severance Music Center on Sunday, October 15. The evening couldn’t have ended in a more fitting fashion, considering the talent that made this performance in Mandel Concert Hall one for the history books.

In 2017, soprano Renée Fleming disputed The New York Times’ intimation that she was retiring from the operatic stage, but the no-nonsense diva has closed a certain chapter in her singing career in order to embark on another. Since turning 60, Fleming has focused almost exclusively on projects to which she has a personal connection, evangelizing on behalf of the composer-friends who have written pieces for her.

Penelope, by the late musical polymath André Previn, is one such work and something of an all-star chamber production. [Read more…]

DIARY: Thursday, April 6, 2023

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by Jarrett Hoffman

IN THIS EDITION:

•Today: Cleveland Orchestra & Oberlin Orchestra 

•Interesting reads: Rachmaninoff at 150

•Job listings: Senior Strategist (Arts, Culture, and Creative Economy) at City Hall, and Conservatory Event Publicity and Marketing Specialist at Oberlin

•Honors for a CWRU composer

•Almanac: Carlos Salzedo, André Previn, Igor Stravinsky, Ray Charles

HAPPENING TODAY:

At 7:30 pm at Severance Music Center, Rafael Payare (pictured) leads The Cleveland Orchestra in Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony and Bernstein’s Second (“The Age of Anxiety”), which features pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet as soloist. Tickets are available here.

And at that same hour at Finney Chapel, pianist Annie Qin, one of the winners of Oberlin Conservatory’s Concerto Competition, will play Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto with the Oberlin Orchestra, led by Raphael Jiménez. The program also includes Pierre Jalbert’s Passage and the world premiere of Michael Frazier’s la flor nopal. It’s free, and you can catch the stream here.

[Read more…]

Diary: Wednesday, April 6, 2022

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by Daniel Hathaway

ON TODAY:

Trinity Cathedral’s Brownbag Concert at high noon today will feature the Amethyst String Quartet – Mary Beth Ions and Carol Ruzicka, violins, Laura Kuennen-Poper, viola, an Kent Collier, cello in a “spring bouquet” of Classical favorites by Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Dvořák & Mozart. The hybrid concert will also be livestreamed and archived for later, on-demand viewing.

NEWS BRIEFS:

On Wednesday, the New York Times announced the appointment of Zachary Woolfe, a freelancer at the paper since 2011, as its classical music critic. In an article in Editor and Publisher, his Times colleagues Gilbert Cruz and Sia Michel wrote

Zack often engages with the major issues confronting the field — editing and writing pieces about the continuing obstacles female conductors face; the lack of diversity in major orchestras and on podiums; the ways classical music should change in an era of racial reckoning; and the field’s complex, fraught relationship with Asian and Asian American musicians. [Read more…]

KLR Trio visits Kent Blossom series as Kulas Visiting Artists (July 31)

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by Daniel Hathaway

The Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson trio, this season’s Kulas Visiting Artists, brought the Kent Blossom Music Festival faculty series to a memorable conclusion on Wednesday evening, July 31 in Ludwig Recital Hall on the Kent State campus. This group qualifies as a legacy ensemble — they’ve played together since Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in 1977 — but they continue to perform with fire and authority. Playing to a large crowd on Wednesday, they no doubt inspired KBMF students as much as they delighted the general public. [Read more…]

Kent Blossom Music Festival features KLR Trio as Kulas Artists

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by Daniel Hathaway

The Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio (pianist Joseph Kalichstein, violinist Jaime Laredo, and cellist Sharon Robinson) will present the last of five faculty concerts in the Kent Blossom Music Festival Series on Wednesday, July 31 at 7:30 pm in Ludwig Recital Hall on the Kent State campus. Named the Kulas Visiting Artists for this year’s Festival, the Trio will perform music by Previn, Ravel, and Mendelssohn. Tickets are available online.

The KLR Trio enjoyed a distinguished debut as an ensemble more than four decades ago, having been invited to perform at the White House in 1977 as part of the inauguration festivities for President Jimmy Carter. (Joseph Kalichstein reminisced about that event in an interview for this publication in October of 2012).

I reached Sharon Robinson and Jaime Laredo by telephone at their home in Cleveland, where they both teach at the Cleveland Institute of Music, to chat about their Kent program. I began by asking them about André Previn’s Piano Trio No. 2, which the ensemble commissioned and debuted during their 2012-2013 season, and which they’ve brought back recently. [Read more…]

Cleveland Opera Theater to present André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire

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by Mike Telin

Previn-LA-Phil-1986Steeped in desire, passion, and deceit, it’s no wonder that Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play A Streetcar Named Desire eventually found its place on the opera stage. On Friday, December 4 at 7:30 pm in Masonic Auditorium, Cleveland Opera Theater will present the Ohio premiere of composer André Previn’s and librettist Philip Littell’s 1995 opera based on Williams’ iconic play. The production will be repeated on Sunday, December 6 at 3:00 pm. (Left, Previn conducting the L.A. Philharmonic in 1986).

COT’s artistic director Scott Skiba recalled his first experience with the work, which was premiered at San Francisco Opera in 1998. “I remember sitting in the Oberlin Conservatory library watching it on a LaserDisc,” he told me over breakfast at a popular Ohio City café. “At first I wasn’t sure what to think of it, but nevertheless I found it interesting.”

The idea of producing Streetcar has been in discussion at COT for a few years, but when a reduction of the orchestra score was completed, taking the number of players down from 70 to 40, it suddenly became realistic to mount a production. [Read more…]

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