by David Kulma
It was a flute bonanza for Urban Troubadour’s concert on Sunday, November 24 at Akron’s Blu Jazz. The focus of “Big, Bad Flute” was on composer and flutist Ned McGowan, his engaging music, and his astounding playing of the pillar-sized contrabass flute.
by Nicholas Stevens
Strange things happen to art amid mass violence. During World War II, Beethoven’s Ninth resounded at festivals in honor of mass murderers, who were proud to count the composer as a compatriot. Yet elsewhere, Allied soldiers were using the opening motif of Beethoven’s Fifth — three short notes, one long: Morse code for the letter V — to signify victory. So it was that, in 1943, the Nazis forced the musicians of the Theresienstadt concentration camp to perform Verdi’s Requiem for an audience of human rights inspectors, before shipping them off to gas chambers at Auschwitz. So it is that last week, CityMusic Cleveland honored the memory of those musicians and all of those lost in the Holocaust, with a performance of that very piece. [Read more…]