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Preview: Cleveland Chamber Music Society anticipates a thrilling season

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by Daniel Hathaway

CCMS-Logo-64The lineup for the sixty-fourth season of the Cleveland Chamber Music Society has its board members buzzing with enthusiasm. “Yes, there are world famous string quartets,” said Melvin Arnoff, “but also three pianists, a guitarist, a soprano, clarinets, flutes and percussion. And the composers range from Bartók, Beethoven and Britten to Dean, Dessner and Parry. This promises to be a “WOW” season.”

Anthony Addison agrees and mentions his favorites. “All six Bartók quartets and a return of eighth blackbird are the high spots of the season, as far as I am concerned. Cuarteto Casals with Manuel Barrueco on guitar, and Pavel Haas playing Janáček, Britten and Beethoven are a very close second. It’s a fascinating season.”

CCMS’s season begins at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights on Tuesday, October 15 at 7:30 with a program of salon music from the British Isles, Russia, France, Germany and Italy performed by soprano Susanna Phillips, pianist Anne Marie McDermott and violist Paul Neubauer.

Barbara Green is especially enthusiastic about the first concert in the series. “I first heard Susanna Phillips when she was still a student at Juilliard and a participant in the Art Song Festival. She had a lovely voice, a fine command of the texts, and that certain quality which I can only describe as ‘presence’. I have followed her career for many years and was delighted to read the review of her performance [at the Metropolitan Opera] in today’s New York Times. How exciting it will be to hear her again!” [Read more…]

Review: Heights Chamber Orchestra with violist Jeffrey Irvine at Grace Lutheran (February 17)

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by Daniel Hathaway

IRVINE-JeffreyNortheast Ohio abounds in avocational, community orchestras — more it would seem than most regions of the country can boast. One such ensemble, Heights Chamber Orchestra, now celebrating its thirtieth anniversary (with seven of its founding members still active and featured on its program cover), gave the third concert of its season on Sunday, February 17 at Grace Lutheran Church in Cleveland Heights. The imaginative program, conceived and conducted by music director Anthony Addison, was built around Lionel Tertis’s adaptation of the Elgar Cello Concerto, with CIM viola professor Jeffrey Irvine as soloist. The concert was dedicated to the late Edward Ormond, former first assistant principal violist with the Cleveland Orchestra, who played with HCO after his retirement.

Instrumentalists are fond of poaching each others’ sonatas and concertos — think of César Franck’s Violin Sonata, which has been successfully appropriated by cellists (and perhaps less convincingly by flutists). In this case, the translation from cello to viola by the foremost British violist of his era was vetted and approved by Elgar himself. [Read more…]

Preview: Heights Chamber Orchestra conductor’s notes: Tertis’s viola version of Elgar’s Cello Concerto

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by Anthony Addison

Special to ClevelandClassical

AnADDISON-Anthony old adage suggested that violists were merely violinists-in-decline. That was before Lionel Tertis! He was born in 1876 of musical parents who had come to England from Poland and Russia and, at three years old, he started playing the piano. At six he performed in public, but had to be locked in a room to make him practice, a procedure that has actually fostered many an international virtuoso. At thirteen, with the agreement of his parents, he left home to earn his living in music playing in pickup groups at summer resorts, accompanying a violinist, and acting as music attendant at a lunatic asylum.

When finances permitted, he studied at Trinity College of Music, taking violin as his “second study,” but concentrating on the piano and playing concertos with the school orchestra. As sometime happens, his violin teacher showed little interest in a second study pupil, and even told his father that he was “better fitted for the grocery trade.” With such encouragement, Tertis decided he had to teach himself. Fate intervened when fellow students wanted to form a string quartet. Tertis volunteered to play viola, borrowed an instrument, loved the rich quality of its lowest string and thereafter turned the old adage upside down: a not very obviously gifted violinist becoming a world class violist. [Read more…]

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