by Daniel Hathaway
After a Wednesday evening concert in Dublin, near Columbus, CityMusic Cleveland opened its new season at Lakewood Congregational Church on October 15 with the first of four area concerts featuring violinist Sayaka Shoji. On Thursday, she turned in a tidy reading of the Brahms concerto, and the orchestra itself delivered an impressive, highly polished performance of Robert Schumann’s first symphony led by music director Avner Dorman. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
Without a doubt, Johannes Brahms’s Violin Concerto is one of the greatest works in the instrument’s concerto canon. Filled with lush melodies and Gypsy dances, the work is nonetheless formidable, placing many technical demands on the soloist. Lasting around forty minutes, it also tests the performer’s stamina.
This week CityMusic Cleveland, under the direction of music director Avner Dorman, will present five performances of the concerto featuring violinist Sayaka Shoji. The all-German program will also include Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 1 in B-flat, Op. 38 (“Spring”).
Following a performance in Dublin, Ohio on Wednesday, the CityMusic musicians will return to Cleveland for four concerts, beginning on Thursday, October 15 at 7:30 pm with a performance in Lakewood Congregational Church. See our Concert Listings page for additional times and locations. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
On Thursday, May 28 at Masonic Auditorium, CityMusic Cleveland, under the direction of Avner Dorman, presented the first of two performances featuring a percussion concerto on the first half and a selection of show tunes on the second. What do these two musical styles have in common? Perhaps nothing, but in the words of Duke Ellington, “if it sounds good it IS good,” and from beginning to end, this was one good concert. The performance was presented as part of CityMusic’s “Wishes and Dreams: A Homeless Children Project.” [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
“One day my husband put an article on my desk about the plight of homeless children in New York City,” Eugenia Strauss, executive director of CityMusic Cleveland recalled during a recent telephone conversation. “I read the article and was astonished by the facts, so I began to make some telephone calls to find out what the situation is here in Cleveland.” What Strauss learned from those telephone calls became the seed that grew into CityMusic’s most recent project devoted to heightening community awareness of a social issue.
On Thursday, May 28 and Friday, May 29 at 8:00 pm in Masonic Auditorium Performing Arts Center, CityMusic Cleveland, under the direction of Avner Dorman, will present Wishes and Dreams, a Homeless Children Project. The concert will feature the Grammy- and Tony Award-Winning singer Heather Headley (pictured above). The program will also include Dorman’s Spices, Perfumes, Toxins! featuring percussionists Luke Rinderknecht and Haruka Fuji. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
CityMusic Cleveland presented the first concert in its current five-program set on Wednesday, October 15 to a good-sized crowd at Lakewood Presbyterian Church. Under the direction of music director Avner Dorman, the chamber orchestra played symphonies by Mozart and Haydn and gave the Cleveland premiere of Dorman’s Saxophone Concerto with Timothy McAllister as soloist. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
“The saxophone is a very versatile instrument. It’s powerful, it’s expressive, and very close to the human voice. Still, it’s not an instrument we’re used to hearing in concert halls,” composer and CityMusic artistic director Avner Dorman said during a telephone conversation. On Wednesday, October 15 at 7:30 in Lakewood Congregational Church, Dorman will conduct the Cleveland premiere of his Saxophone Concerto featuring Timothy McAllister as soloist. The concert, the first of five performances in different venues around Cleveland through October 19, will also include works by Mozart, Haydn and Dvořák. See our Concert Listings page for times and locations. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
CityMusic Cleveland will present four programs during 2014-2015 in multiple venues around metropolitan Cleveland, three of them conducted by the chamber orchestra’s artistic director and composer Avner Dorman, one by CWRU’s Peter Bennett.
Dorman will be featured as a composer in concerts from October 15 through October 19, when his Saxophone Concerto will be played by Timothy McAllister in performances in Lakewood, Cleveland, Willoughby Hills and University Heights, along with Mozart’s Symphony No. 35 (“Haffner”) and Haydn’s Symphony No. 45 (“Farewell”).
The late Argentine composer Ariel Ramírez’s Misa Criolla (1964) will be at the center of the second series of concerts. Incorporating South American folk instruments, the piece will be sung by the choir of Sagrada Familia Church on Cleveland’s west side in performances in Cleveland, Cleveland Heights, Willoughby Hills and Lakewood from December 3-7 conducted by Peter Bennett. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Quire Cleveland joined CityMusic Cleveland for a brisk, expressive performance of a gorgeous late Schubert work led by CityMusic music director Avner Dorman at Fairmount Presbyterian Church in Cleveland Heights on Wednesday, May 14. This was the opening concert of five that the two ensembles will present around the metropolitan area this week. (Rehearsal pictured above.)
Schubert’s Mass No. 6 in E-flat, written during the last month’s of the composer’s life, rarely gets heard these days. That’s a great pity. Though ill, Schubert found alluring and often surprising ways to set ancient liturgical texts, and applied his recent lessons in counterpoint to some of the most inventive fugues since J.S. Bach’s. The E-flat mass offers a long sequence of gorgeous melodies, innovative textures, arresting harmonies and enthralling conversations between chorus and orchestra. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
“I always knew that Bach was my favorite composer,” said CityMusic artistic director Avner Dorman, “but these days I think it’s Schubert. That’s how much I like this piece!”
The work Dorman was referring to in a recent telephone conversation is Franz Schubert’s Mass in E-flat, written in 1828, the last summer of the composer’s life, on commission from the choirmaster of the Alserkirche in Alsergrund, a suburb just north of Vienna’s Innere Stadt. That church was the venue for Beethoven’s funeral the year before (Schubert served as a torch-bearer).
Alas, the composer didn’t live long enough to hear the last of his six masses performed; its premiere ultimately took place in October of 1829 under the direction of his brother, Ferdinand. This week, Avner Dorman will lead CityMusic and Quire Cleveland in five performances of the E-flat Mass around the metropolitan area, beginning on Wednesday, May 14. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
CityMusic Cleveland celebrated the beginning of its tenth season with the debut of its new music director, Avner Dorman, on Wednesday evening, October 23 at Fairmount Presbyterian Church in Cleveland Heights. Dorman skillfully led the 40-piece chamber orchestra in nuanced and nearly flawless performances of his own Concerto Grosso, Vivaldi’s Concerto for two oboes and two clarinets, Schubert’s Symphony No. 3, and the first of five different Mozart concertos with guest violinist Rachel Barton Pine.
Dorman noted both in written and oral notes that he intended to show off the talents of members of the orchestra as much as possible in his first concert, and that principally meant the ensemble’s wind section, whose excellence runs both deep and wide. The Vivaldi concerto boasted pairs of soloists — oboists Rebecca Schweigert Mayhew and Daniel Rios and clarinetists Daniel Gilbert and Ellen Breakfield Glick — who matched each other’s elegant tone perfectly, yet each pair provided cheerful sonic contrasts as oboes tossed phrases off to clarinets. As always, Vivaldi was infinitely resourceful within his time-honored formulas, and he snuck in a strangely arresting rhythmic pattern at the beginning of the last Allegro. Harpsichordist Peter Bennett added stylish decorations to the keyboard accompaniment. [Read more…]