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Apollo’s Fire: “A Harlequin Romance” — Julie Andrijeski & Steven Player talk about dance

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by Daniel Hathaway

Player-AndrijeskiWhen Apollo’s Fire presents four performances this weekend of “A Harlequin Romance,” its final show of the season, Julie Andrijeski and Steven Player, who have made brief appearances as dancers with the orchestra in the past, will play a more central role in exploring both noble and popular forms of baroque movement to corresponding music by Georg Philipp Telemann.

“This is the rare occasion when I’ll be dancing in more than a cameo role,” said Andrijeski, who can usually be spotted playing violin in Apollo’s Fire. We spoke by telephone during a break in her rehearsals with Player last week.

“Steve and I will mostly be dancing this time but also playing violin and guitar a little bit. There’ll be two different type of dances: a set of the more noble dances to Telemann’s Don Quixote Suite in the first half, then in the second half we’ll be dancing to the Overture Burlesque, which is more of a commedia dell’arte presentation. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: Bach’s St. John Passion at First Baptist Church (March 4)

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by Nicholas Jones

StJohnTrinityMar2016Like all great drama, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Passions — his settings of the gospel accounts of Jesus’s crucifixion — present conflicting points of view. We see the Passion through so many characters in the story — the disciple Peter, who denies knowing Jesus; the conflicted Roman governor Pilate, who finds no guilt in Jesus and yet sends him to the cross; the angry crowd, which demands his crucifixion; and Jesus himself, suffering and yet transcending his suffering. At every point, Bach demands our involvement with the conflicting ways in which each of these actors interpret the crucial event of the Christian story. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire’s St. John Passion:
a chat with tenor Nicholas Phan

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by Daniel Hathaway

PHAN-NicholasWhen Apollo’s Fire presents its four area performances of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. John Passion later this week under the direction of Jeannette Sorrell, the burden of storytelling will fall to tenor Nicholas Phan.

Although Bach assigned individual parts to singers who will take the roles of Jesus, Pilate, and other individual characters, Phan will narrate the Passion of Jesus Christ from the Gospel According to John. Bach’s two extant Passion settings are the closest the composer came to writing opera, and Apollo’s Fire promises to offer an especially dramatic version of the St. John.

[Read more…]

CD Review: Apollo’s Fire — Sephardic Journey

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by Julian Ring

AF Sephardic CDMusicians touring foreign lands might absorb traces of a region’s musical vocabulary. But Sephardic Jews didn’t have much of a choice after their expulsion from what is now Israel around 700 BCE and from Spain in 1492. Encountering hostility everywhere they settled, Spain’s Jews spent centuries searching for a new home. They carried their prayers and songs with them as they traveled across the Iberian Peninsula, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. [Read more…]

Understanding Spiritual Nationality: Apollo’s Fire — Sephardic Journey (Feb. 5)

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by Christine Jay

sephardic_group_700One of the most remarkable elements of mankind is its ability to endure. History is filled with stories of people struggling, failing, succeeding, and surviving, but few have endured the centuries of exile and forced displacement experienced by the Jews. Performing an inspired program devised by artistic director Jeannette Sorrell, soprano Nell Snaidas, baritone Jeffrey Strauss, and cellist René Schiffer, Apollo’s Fire gave a sensational concert on February 5 at St. Paul’s Church in Cleveland Heights. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire to reprise Sephardic Journey and release new CD
of the production

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by Christine Jay

sephardic_group_700“It seemed like this was the next challenge,” said Apollo’s Fire artistic director Jeannette Sorrell before the orchestra’s 2014 debut performances of Sephardic Journey: Wanderings of the Spanish Jews. “Our Celtic program in particular made me ready to tackle something new.”

Reprising the popular show from two years ago, Apollo Fire will present four performances of Sephardic Journey, culminating in two public CD release parties after the February 5th and 7th performances. The ensemble’s ‘Sephardic Week’ will begin on Thursday, February 4th at 7:30 pm at Fairlawn Lutheran Church, with subsequent concerts at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights (February 5), the Maltz Performing Center at Cleveland’s University Circle (February 6), and at Baldwin Wallace’s Gamble Auditorium (February 7). [Read more…]

Akron Symphony:
Keep Calm and Play Bach —
a chat with violinist Olivier Brault

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by Christine Jay

BRAULT-OlivierHow do you follow a celebrated performance of Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons? Christopher Wilkins, Music Director of the Akron Symphony, created this fabulous conundrum when he invited Olivier Brault, concertmaster of Apollo’s Fire (and other historically informed ensembles across the globe), to lead Vivaldi’s iconic work in January 2014. Brault excelled and left the audience with a Vivaldian fire in its veins — but what next after Brault’s maiden voyage with the Akron Symphony two years ago?

Keep calm and play Bach.

Both friends and lovers of Bach, Wilkins and Brault devised a program of their favorite repertoire — teeming with the usual hyper-caffeinated Vivaldi and fervent complexity of Bach — for a program entitled “Vivaldi and Bach: Inspired Connection” with the Akron Symphony on January 16, 2016 at 8:00 pm in the E.J. Thomas Performing Arts Hall. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire Christmas Vespers: Music of Michael Praetorius (Dec. 18)

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by Nicholas Jones

AF-Praetorius-2015-1Apollo’s Fire gave the first program of its Christmas Vespers ten years ago, a program that has continued to draw crowds through several reiterations. And no wonder: skillfully selected from the extensive publications of the early seventeenth-century Lutheran composer Michael Praetorius, these vespers have all the Christmas spirit one could wish for, with never a hint of Franz Gruber or White Christmas. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire in Sacrum Mysterium (December 12)

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by Timothy Robson

AF-Sacrum-MysteriumApollo’s Fire, Cleveland’s Baroque orchestra, opened a two-night revival of their Christmas show Sacrum Mysterium: A Celtic Christmas on Saturday, December 12, at the First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights. It was an unseasonably warm December evening, with every window in the church open to cool the capacity audience. [Read more…]

Vocal/Choral CD Reviews: Apollo’s Fire, Kendra Colton, Liz Huff, Quire Cleveland & Joan Ellison

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The Power of Love: Arias from Handel Operas. Amanda Forsythe, soprano, with Apollo’s Fire, Jeannette Sorrell, conducting (Avie).

AF-Forsythe-Power-of-LoveStart with the second track of this excellent survey of George Frideric Handel’s expertise in writing for the soprano voice and its realization through the supple vocal chords of Amanda Forsythe. “Geloso tormento,” from Almira, the 19-year-old composer’s first opera, shows how ravishingly Handel and Forsythe can depict both rage and lament in the course of a single aria. (The soprano stunned audiences with such vocal prowess in the role of Edilia in the same opera during the 2013 Boston Early Music Festival.)

Arias from nine operas are featured in this collection, plus four wildly contrasting orchestral movements from Terpsichore (Il Pastor fido) — a graceful chaconne, a skittering entrée depicting jealousy, a delightful air, and a ballo for recorders and violins. Those interludes give Forsythe a virtual breather between her exhausting representations of the many emotions of a soprano in love (now she’s like a butterfly hovering around a lamp, now she’s a calculating temptress, now she’s a cruel traitor, finally, she’s a shattered ship reaching safe harbor). [Read more…]

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