by Timothy Robson
Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project is a new non-profit devoted to the creation and performance of new music. Their first annual Re:Sound New Music Festival opened on Thursday evening, June 7 at the Bop Stop, where a large, diverse crowd sat around tables and the bar to hear four equally diverse and alluring ensembles. [Read more…]
by Jarrett Hoffman
Around a decade ago, three Ohio-born musicians met through their studies in the percussion program at Ohio State University, and they just clicked.
After heading to the Eastman School of Music for their masters’ degrees, Matt Evans, Amy Garapic, and Carson Moody found themselves drawn six hours southeast — past Syracuse, Scranton, and Newark, through the Holland Tunnel, and over the Manhattan Bridge.
There, in Brooklyn, they set up a home base for their genre-fluid trio Tigue, whose influences include minimalism and indie rock. Now the group is hitting the road for a two-week tour — including a performance at the Bop Stop on Sunday, June 3 at 7:00 pm — to play music from their recent sophomore album, Strange Paradise. (Tickets are available online.)
Built around Evans’ synthesizer, Garapic’s vibraphone, and Moody’s drum set, the album explores long arcs and slow gradations of change in its 3 tracks over 41 minutes. As a comparison, Tigue’s first album, Peaks, comprised 8 tracks over 34 minutes. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
A year and a half ago, saxophonist Noa Even and cellist Sophie Benn got together to discuss ways to promote new music in Cleveland. They soon brought drummer Stephen Klunk and Bop Stop manager Gabe Pollack into the conversation, and the idea of starting a new music festival in the city was born. Beginning on June 7 and running through June 10, the inaugural Re:Sound Festival of new music will feature twenty-seven musical acts across seven concerts at five venues.
“An aspect of the festival we like to emphasize is just how new the music is,” Noa Even said during a telephone conversation. “All of it is from 2000 or later, so it’s truly a showcase of what people are creating today, improvised and composed. ‘New music’ encompasses so many styles and influences, and hopefully the Festival will capture that diversity.”
The performers were chosen from a pool of over 100 applicants who responded to the organizing committee’s call for proposals. Those included soloists and existing chamber music ensembles ranging from duos to sextets, as well as composer/performers and experimental artists.
by David Kulma
Concerts by CIM’s New Music Ensemble have such startlingly high levels of performance that it’s hard to remember that the musicians are, in fact, students. In their concert on Saturday night, April 7 at the Bop Stop as a part of this year’s NEOSonicFest, the ensemble gave immaculate performances of works selected from their 2017-2018 repertoire. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
Since 2014, the Grammy Award-winning Cleveland Chamber Symphony has sponsored NEOSonicFest, a festival of new music performed by musicians from Northeast Ohio and beyond. The 2018 festival will run from April 5 through 11 (see below for concert dates and times).
Clarinetist Carol Robinson and trumpeter Nate Wooley will kick things off by performing selections from Éliane Radigue’s Occam Ocean on April 5 at MOCA. The composer describes her work as “an ongoing acoustic work with influences ranging from electromagnetic waves, to William of Ockham’s philosophies, to science fiction mythologies.”
The always creative No Exit will return to the Festival on April 6 at Heights Arts. The ensemble was founded by composer Timothy Beyer as an outlet for the commissioning and performance of contemporary avant-garde concert music. No Exit is committed to promoting the works of living composers, particularly the music of young and emerging artists who haven’t yet received either the opportunities or exposure of their better-known counterparts. (Works by Leo Ornstein, Ty Emerson, Per Nørgård, James Praznik, Andrew Rindfleisch & Tristan Murail).
by Mike Telin
Debra Nagy’s latest Les Délices creation, “Dido’s Lament,” will view the famous queen of Carthage from three emotional and musical perspectives. The tragic story of Dido, who was famously deserted by the Trojan warrior Aeneas, is based on Book 4 of Virgil’s classical epic The Aeneid. The program will include excerpts from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Cavalli’s Didone, and Montéclair’s La Mort de Didon.
The concerts, held on Saturday, March 10 at 8:00 pm in Lakewood Congregational Church, and on Sunday, March 11 at 4:00 pm at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights, will feature soprano Clara Rottsolk, harpist Maria Christina Cleary, oboist Debra Nagy, violinists Julie Andrijeski and Scott Metcalfe, violist Allison Monroe, viola da gambist Jaap ter Linden, and harpsichordist Eric Milnes. Tickets are available online.
On Saturday at 3:00 pm at the Bop Stop, the ensemble will present “Instrument of the Angels,” an LD@Play family concert. Registration is recommended.
In an email Debra Nagy said that she is thrilled to bring Maria Christina Cleary from Milan, Italy for these performances.
by Mike Telin
From its inception, Heights Arts Close Encounters Chamber Music series has presented interestingly curated programs in unique spaces. On Sunday, January 21 at the Bop Stop, the series just might have outdone itself with a program titled Rhythms, Rhymes, and the Kitchen Sink. “How many people have ever been to a concert that combines music for English horn, bassoon, and piano with poetry, performed in a jazz club,” English hornist and poet Robert Walters asked the large audience. Needless to say, nobody had. “This may be a first in Western Civilization,” Walters exclaimed. [Read more…]
by Jarrett Hoffman
In a humanities class at the Curtis Institute of Music in the 1980s, professor Joan Landis asked a young Robert Walters to do something he had never done before: read a poem aloud. It was Wallace Stevens’ Sunday Morning, and it changed Walters’ life. “The texture, the language, the rhythm, the assonance, consonance, and rhyme — all the acoustical properties of poetry — I thought, ‘Oh my god, this feels like music.’”
Walters will be armed with his English horn and a stack of original poems this Sunday, January 21 at 3:00 pm at the Bop Stop for “Rhythms, Rhymes, and the Kitchen Sink,” part of the Heights Arts Close Encounters series.
by Daniel Hathaway & Mike Telin
Debra Nagy and her colleagues of Les Délices usually dedicate themselves to bringing the music of 17th- and 18th-century France alive for modern ears. But this weekend, the period instrument ensemble will push the clock back to the 14th century — not an era of powdered wigs and salons, but a time of knights, crusades, courtly love, and increasing secularization.
“This is our third venture into Medieval music,” Nagy said over coffee in a Hingetown café. “We visited the 14th-century avant-garde a couple of years ago, and last year we collaborated with Boston’s Blue Heron on Machaut’s Remede de Fortune. This program, ‘Intoxication,’ is a Les Délices project, but with many of the same wonderful collaborators. Scott Metcalfe is back. Charlie Weaver was the lute player and Jason McStoots the tenor for the Machaut programs. We’re also working with Elena Mullins, a former student of mine who received her doctorate at Case and now directs the early music singers. She’s a beautiful singer and communicator with a real passion for this kind of music.”
by Mike Telin
Over the past eight years, Les Délices has presented well-researched, thought-provoking, and highly entertaining concerts that explore music and topics of the French Baroque.
During recent seasons the ensemble’s founder and artistic director, Debra Nagy, has created imaginative programs such as A Woman Scorned, which explored universal themes of desire, jealousy, shame, and revenge by giving voice to the spurned lovers of antiquity.
She introduced audiences to the famous pair of viola da gamba players of the 18th century, Marin Marais and Antoine Forqueray, during The Angel and the Devil. Nagy’s programs have often highlighted social issues of the time that remain relevant today. We’ve learned that finding ways to circumvent rules has always been a popular pastime. And the ensemble also presented the only area concert in living memory that featured the hurdy-gurdy.