by Daniel Hathaway
At the end of a long concert season, the final performance in a series may be a happy or a bittersweet moment. For the Mosa String Quartet — violinists James Thompson and Brian Allen, violist Christine Wu, and cellist Anna Hurt — the last Arts Renaissance Tremont concert on Sunday, May 7 at Pilgrim Church was just about the last appearance the group would make as a quartet, for Wu and Allen are off to graduate studies at Juilliard and the University of Michigan, respectively.
by Carlyn Kessler
On Sunday, May 7 at 3:00 pm, bassoonist Barrick Stees and the Mosa Quartet will present a program of chamber music by Schubert, Ravel, and Miguel del Aguila as part of the Arts Renaissance Tremont series. A freewill offering will be received.
Barrick Stees, Assistant Principal Bassoon of The Cleveland Orchestra, teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Kent/Blossom Music Festival. An esteemed educator, he received the U.S. Secretary of Education’s Presidential Scholar Teacher Recognition Award. He has released several albums and has performed extensively both nationally and internationally.
The Mosa Quartet — James Thompson and Brian Allen, violins, Christine Wu, viola, and Anna Hurt, cello — includes current students and alumni of the Cleveland Institute of Music who have studied with Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Jones
Arts Renaissance Tremont opened its twenty-fifth anniversary season Sunday with an ambitious and satisfying program of two masterpieces of the piano trio repertoire: Beethoven’s Opus 97 in B-flat (“Archduke”) and Shostakovich’s Opus 67 in e-minor. Performing were the members of the Autana Trio (Venezuelan violinist Rubén Rengel, cellist Anna Hurt — originally from Utah — and South Korean pianist Yuri Noh), who are participants in the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Advanced Piano Trio Program, directed by noted cellist Sharon Robinson. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
Many times in life an event sparks the beginnings of an idea. For Groupmuse founder Sam Bodkin, that event was his first hearing of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, Opus 133 in December of 2008. “I had never seriously listened to classical music before, and the piece shattered all of my preconceptions about what the genre was. It opened up an entirely new universe that had existed beside my own for so long but that I had never accessed, despite the fact that both my parents have always been classical music lovers.”
Once he got hooked on classical music, Bodkin fell in with a group of musicians studying at the New England Conservatory who would regularly put on house concerts. “Obviously this type of event has been happening for as long as there have been houses,” he said, “but it is such a departure from how most people experience classical music.
“For me, and for so many people, music isn’t just about the sound — it’s about the social scene that goes along with it. Anyone can have a string quartet perform in their home because you don’t need amplification, all you need are four chairs. Push the coffee table aside and you can have great masterpieces performed in just about any apartment in any city. [Read more…]