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Fire, Grace, and Ash at St. Malachi’s April 30

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by Mike Telin

“Music is something that throughout time has developed different flavors around the world,” violinist Edwin Huizinga said during a Sunday morning telephone conversation.

“There are no borders in music. And it’s amazing to me that even centuries ago, music was being shared in houses and pubs. Even then there were people traveling around. I always think of O’Carolan, who was this itinerant Irish harpist.

“He was blind and there are stories of him meeting up with Baroque musicians and composers, and sharing tunes with each other. So one of my passions in life is to share the fact that all music is similar in the way that it’s created. It comes from a rhythmical background, and a community background.” [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: 20 minutes with Spanish violinist Francisco Fullana

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by Daniel Hathaway

Born in Palma de Mallorca, raised in Madrid, and having spent a few summers in Aspen where he learned English, violinist Francisco Fullana was turned loose on New York City at the tender age of 16.

He made the most of that experience. Now 32, and one of the friendliest interviewees you can imagine, he told me in a telephone conversation that he was very lucky to have finished high school early so he could spend six months exploring and taking lessons in New York before his Juilliard School audition in March.

“By chance, I met this wonderful lady in Aspen — we were just sitting near each other and talking,” he said. “Susan Beckerman loved classical music, and ended up hosting me for a year in her beautiful house in New York. I had the most incredible time. I went to concerts and opera with her, but most of the time, since I didn’t know anybody, I went to museums, got into photography, and walked around taking in the whole city and falling in love with it. Then I got to Juilliard where they put you in a dorm with 200 freshmen. I was a bit wild for a little while, but it was a great life experience. No regrets!”

Fullana, who is now artist-in-residence with Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra, will be featured with Apollo’s Fire this week in two local performances of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Violin Concerto in d, on a program that will be repeated in Weill Hall at New York’s Carnegie Hall. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: Israel in Egypt (Feb. 17)

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by Peter Feher   

When it comes to Handel’s oratorios, another repeat isn’t always a welcome thing. But Apollo’s Fire knows how to make an evening exciting, and the group’s reprise performances of the composer’s Israel in Egypt last week — in a streamlined version first presented by the ensemble in 2017 — kept the intrigue factor high.

Artistic director Jeannette Sorrell adapted the Baroque score with certain modern expectations in mind. Her production retains Handel’s solemn opening, achieving a kind of period authenticity, but jettisons much of the repetition and inessential action in the rest of the music. The result is a lean and engaging dramatic arc — less than two hours — that translates 18th-century entertainment for the 21st century.

[Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire captivates with jubilant Messiah (Dec. 8)

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by Stephanie Manning

There’s something so engaging about watching Handel’s Messiah performed live — especially in the capable hands of Apollo’s Fire and Apollo’s Singers. The movement of the instrumentalists, the stage presence of the singers, and the enthusiastic response from the audience all elevate the experience of listening to this familiar music. On the evening of December 8 at Federated Church in Chagrin Falls, guest conductor Nic McGegan led the ensemble in a breathtaking performance of one of Handel’s cornerstone works.

[Read more…]

Nic McGegan makes Apollo’s Fire debut in Handel’s Messiah

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by Mike Telin

Although Nic McGegan has led numerous concerts with The Cleveland Orchestra, he has never conducted Apollo’s Fire. That will change this week when he makes his debut with the acclaimed period instrument ensemble in five area performances of Handel’s Messiah.

On Wednesday, December 8 at 7:30 pm at St. Bernard Catholic Church in Akron, McGegan will lead Apollo’s Fire & Apollo’s Singers and soloists Erica Schuller, soprano, Daniel Moody, countertenor, Thomas Cooley, tenor, and Hadleigh Adams, baritone, in Handel’s celebrated oratorio. Performances run through Sunday, December 12. See our Concert Listings page for locations and times. Tickets are available online.

For the next two weeks McGegan’s musical life will be all about Handel’s oratorio. “I’m doing nine in total — five with Apollo’s Fire and then four with the Chicago Symphony,” the affable maestro said during a telephone conversation from St. Louis, where he was conducting concerts with the St. Louis Symphony. 

[Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: “Violin Fantasy” at St. Paul’s, Cleveland Hts. (Nov. 14)

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by Daniel Hathaway

It’s fun and illuminating to trace outside influences on composers’ changing styles as they make their way through life, standing on the shoulders of their predecessors to see a clearer view of the future.

Sometimes it’s easier to document those influences than others. The subtitle of Apollo’s Fire’s recent program set, “Tracing the Path from Biber to Bach,” implied that the music of Johann Sebastian Bach marked the end point of a stylistic era that more or less developed in a straight line from late-17th century violinist-composers like Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber through Dietrich Buxtehude and Johann Adam Reinken to the Cantor of Leipzig. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire Violin Fantasy to explore influences on Bach

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by Daniel Hathaway

Where did Johann Sebastian Bach come from? What influenced the mature musical style of one of the greatest composers of the Baroque period? Or to put it as co-director and violin soloist Alan Choo does in his recorded introduction to Apollo’s Fire’s Violin Fantasy programs, “Who were Bach’s role models?”

Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra will set out on a musical journey this weekend to document some of those influences, introducing the Hapsburg composer Johann Schmeltzer (1623-1680), touching base with Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644-1704) and Johann Pachelbel (1653-1706), investigating the expressive techniques of late 17th-century German composers like Johann Adam Reinken (1643-1722) and Dieterich Buxtehude (1637-1707), and ending with a curious vocal work by a composer half Bach’s age that the Leipzig master thought highly enough of to copy out and slightly alter in 1746. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: Four Seasons rediscovered at the Cleveland Museum of Art (Oct. 24)

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by Daniel Hathaway

At the top of their program at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Sunday afternoon, October 24, Apollo’s Fire founder and artistic director Jeannette Sorrell told the full house that the Baroque orchestra was opening its 30th season with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons rediscovered, returning to a piece that the ensemble has featured every year since 1991.

It might seem that there’s not a lot left to discover after three decades of experience with the Red Priest’s charming and evocative score, but this performance boasted a secret weapon: the young Spanish violinist Francisco Fullana, now the Orchestra’s artist-in-residence, whose affecting personality and easy virtuosity raised the solo part a quantum leap above the merely extraordinary. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: “Bach, Vivaldi, and Friends” (July 10)

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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.

[Read more…]

DIARY: Tuesday, July 13, 2021

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by Stephanie Manning

TONIGHT IN-PERSON AND ONLINE:

The Oberlin-Como Piano Festival begins tonight at 7:00, presented online as part of Oberlin’s Stage Left Series. The Day 1 program, Piano Concerti of Beethoven and Brahms, will include an interview with Yefim Bronfman followed by performances and master classes with Anastasia Vorotnaya, Xiaoyu Liu, Leonardo Pierdomenico, and Yangrui Cai. Tune in here, and learn more about the festival in this preview article.

And at 8:00 in Cleveland Heights, Apollo’s Fire will feature harpsichordist Jeannette Sorrell and violinists Olivier Brault, Alan Choo, and Emi Tanabe in an energetic program of Bach, Vivaldi, and Telemann. Tickets are available here.

IN THE NEWS:

The Cleveland Institute of Music is welcoming three new members to the conservatory faculty (pictured). They are violinist Philip Setzer of the Emerson String Quartet and two Cleveland Orchestra musicians: assistant concertmaster Jessica Lee and principal horn Nathaniel Silberschlag. All are recruiting students for 2022-23, and Silberschlag will co-teach with CIM’s head of the horn department and Cleveland Orchestra principal horn emeritus, Richard King.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg was obsessed with the number thirteen — notable, then, that he died on this day in 1951, a Friday the 13th, at the age of 76 (7+6 = 13). For a concise introduction to his life and works, check out this ten-minute YouTube video by Samuel Andreyev.

Schoenberg is best known for his use of a compositional technique called twelve-tone serialism, which can create a dissonant or “scary” sound. Learn more about this system and its evolution in this article in The New York Times. Even before he finalized the technique, Schoenberg embraced atonality in his earlier works, such as Pierrot Lunaire. Listen (and watch) a fantastic performance by the Israeli Chamber Project on YouTube here.

Despite Schoenberg’s lasting association with serialism, many of his works also incorporated classical forms and techniques. A great example is his Piano Concerto, which soloist Kirill Gerstein performed with The Cleveland Orchestra in 2017. In our preview for that performance, we interviewed Gerstein, who explained that “there’s a lot of dance in the concerto. There’re some waltzes, some gavottes, and some marches — really traditional musical references.”

The Cleveland Orchestra will perform Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto again on February 24-26, 2022 — this time with pianist Mitsuko Uchida. Franz Welser-Möst will conduct the program, which also includes Brucker’s Symphony No. 9.

Just like Schoenberg’s music itself, the story behind the Piano Concerto is complicated. He was commissioned to write it by one of his students at UCLA, Oscar Levant, who thought it would be a short composition — but Schoenberg fleshed it out into four movements, charging Levant an exorbitant sum which he then refused to pay. Though Levant eventually relented, it was another student of Schoenburg, Eduard Steuermann, who premiered the work in 1944.

Photo of glass armonica

And on this date in 1762, Benjamin Franklin announced the creation of a new instrument (pictured). Inspired by the sounds produced by swirling a wet finger around the rim of a wine glass, Franklin worked with a glassmaker to create a series of spinning glass bowls he named the armonica. The instrument became so popular that it was featured in compositions by Beethoven, Mozart, and Donizetti, but it was largely forgotten by the 1820s.

Franklin ultimately made no money from the construction of more than 5,000 armonicas, because he refused to patent or copyright any of his inventions. He explained the reason why in his autobiography:

“As we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.”

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