by Peter Feher
Apollo’s Fire is making the most of the summer. Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra is easing audiences back into live performances this month with a program, “Bach, Vivaldi, and Friends,” that satisfies all musical expectations. The group followed up a terrific first concert on Saturday, July 10, at the Avon Lake United Church of Christ with two more local performances and one on tour at Tanglewood.
by Daniel Hathaway
You’d be fortunate enough these days to be able to field three sopranos who could successfully channel the celebrated singing of the Three Ladies of the Court of Ferrara, but to find a trio of singers who all happen to be named Amanda would really be pushing your luck.
Jeanette Sorrell did just that for Apollo’s Fire’s “Allure” programs earlier this month, and the results are stunning. Sopranos Amanda Forsythe and Amanda Powell and mezzo-soprano Amanda Crider deliver the kind of jaw-dropping performances of virtuosic works that might well have landed them jobs at the 17th-century Ducal court.
by Daniel Hathaway
After the novel coronavirus brought live concerts to a standstill in March, Apollo’s Fire was among the first of Cleveland’s performing organizations to formulate a clear plan for 2020-2021. Cleveland’s Baroque orchestra proposed a hybrid subscription season that would permit in-person audiences at its various venues — at 15% of capacity — but alternatively, promised professionally-produced videos for viewing by subscribers about a week after the live performances.
The first such video, capturing the October 20 performance of Resilience at First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights, delivered handsomely on that promise. Erica Brenner’s sensitive videography and audio mixing preserved brilliant performances of music that illuminated two troubled periods in history: the plague of London in 1665, and the outbreaks of cholera and dysentery that dampened but failed to defeat the human spirit at the end of the American Civil War two centuries later. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Stevens
For all its fantastic variety of styles and scenes, the Baroque era has left us with only a few household composers’ names. History is cruel. However, thanks to ensembles like Chatham Baroque, music that has fallen through the cracks breathes anew. Pieces by Legrenzi, Bertali, Buxtehude, and especially Kapsberger stood as highlights in a recent program, which also included music by Handel, Vivaldi, and Monteverdi. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Though the composer wasn’t around to blow out the candles on his 333rd birthday cake in March, Johann Sebastian Bach’s music lives on in both traditional and surprising ways. The Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival, whose 86th edition will be celebrated in Berea on April 20 and 21, will touch both the historic and the innovative poles of all things Bach, hosting a period instrument ensemble as well as a saxophone quartet.
“Chatham Baroque sits at the center,” Festival director Dirk Garner said in a telephone conversation. “They’ll be doing their own concert of music by Bach and earlier composers on Friday night, and they’re sharing their expertise by helping prepare the orchestra for Saturday evening’s performance of the St. John Passion.”
This year, the Bach Festival has hired a professional orchestra for the major Bach work. “Chatham’s Andrew Fouts will be the concertmaster, Scott Pauley is playing lute, and Patricia Halvorsen viola da gamba. They’re great musicians and really cool people,” Garner said. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Jones
As Apollo’s Fire heads out on a real tour across North American, last weekend’s set of concerts gave us a virtual tour of some of the top orchestras across Europe—all without leaving our seats. Talk about not leaving a carbon footprint!
As simply and quickly as on Google Earth, listeners swooped from one musical capital to another — from Hamburg on the North Sea, south to Venice on the Adriatic, and across what we now used to call East Germany, from Cöthen and Leipzig to Dresden.
Each of the sojourns featured one of the composers who lived and worked in that town – Telemann in Hamburg, Vivaldi in Venice, and Bach in Leipzig and Cöthen. Dresden—one of the grandest of the orchestras and the pride of the Elector of Saxony—was represented by the little known Johann David Heinichen.
The theme, “virtuoso orchestra,” led music director Jeannette Sorrell to feature concertos in which Apollo’s Fire’s soloists could step forward and dazzle us as their counterparts 300 years ago must have done. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
After I congratulated her on launching her ensemble’s twenty-second season, Apollo’s Fire founder and artistic director Jeannette Sorrell said, “We’re into adulthood now, and we’re in a really fantastic place regarding our artistic reputation.” Cleveland patrons don’t need to be reminded of the high quality of playing their resident baroque orchestra turns in on a regular basis, but a wider audience is now sitting up and paying attention.
One indication of Apollo’s Fire’s “grown-up” status: the ensemble has recently been picked up by Columbia Artists Management Inc. (CAMI), “a big stamp of approval”, Sorrell said. “We’re the first period instrument orchestra to appear on their roster, and after twenty-one years of honing our craft and trying to perfect our art, it’s great to be getting global attention.”
We reached Jeannette Sorrell via Skype last weekend to chat about the multiple performances of seven programs that local audiences will enjoy in area church venues this season. It all begins with “Virtuoso Orchestra”, which opens on Thursday, October 10 at First Methodist in Akron and will be repeated on October 11 and 12 at Fairmount Presbyterian in Cleveland Heights and on October 13 at Rocky River Presbyterian.
Sorrell promises that the program will live up to its name with dazzling performances including Vivaldi’s concerto for four violins, Bach’s fourth Brandenburg Concerto and a novelty for local audiences, a concerto by J.D. Heinichen. [Read more…]