by Nicholas Stevens
The question has long troubled poets, playwrights, musicians, and visual artists: how best to activate collective memory through art, especially when the events in question constitute the darkest hour in recorded history? As part of their New Opera Works {NOW} Festival, Cleveland Opera Theater and its collaborating partners recently ventured an answer in the form of a new opera: Verlorene Heimat (“Lost Homeland”) by composer Dawn Sonntag.
by Mike Telin
Although composer Dawn Sonntag was well-versed in writing art song, vocal chamber music, and works for chorus, there was one thing missing from her catalogue of works for the voice — an opera. “I wanted to compose one but I had not found a libretto that I connected with,” the Associate Professor of Music and Chair of the Music Department at Hiram College said during a telephone conversation.
Then one night during dinner with her mother-in-law, that changed. “I knew she had been born and spent part of her childhood in East Prussia, but I didn’t know why she had left. So I asked her and she told me the whole story. And when I was listening to it I thought, this is it!”
On Saturday, January 27 at 7:30 pm at the Maltz Center for the Performing Arts, Cleveland Opera Theater will present the Cleveland premiere of Dawn Sonntag’s Verlorene Heimat (“Lost Homeland”) as part of the company’s {NOW} Festival. Presented in collaboration with the Cleveland Composers’ Guild, the opera is based on the true story of the East Prussian refugee family of Christa Neuber Kuske (1937 – 2012) and the Jewish-Ukrainian girl they sheltered.
by Daniel Hathaway
Warning to all witches: you’re courting danger if you try to turn children into gingerbread in Northeast Ohio. You’ve been punished for that many times recently — at the Cleveland Institute of Music (March 2012), at Youngstown State University (April 2013), at the Oberlin Conservatory (November 2013) and at Baldwin Wallace University (February 2014). The children rebelled once again last weekend at the Barlow Center in Hudson, as Nightingale Opera Theatre staged three performances of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. And once again, the witch didn’t survive the trip through her own oven. I saw the show, which was sung in English, on Sunday, June 29.
It was talented student casts who turned the tables on the sorceress in those previous performances. Nightingale, a company of professional singers, brought an especially high level of vocal prowess and acting experience to Humperdinck’s retelling of the famous fairy tale, while retaining the feel of a community production by casting young human beings as children and angels. [Read more…]
by Guytano Parks
Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in d (“Choral”) stood alone on the program as a symbol of brotherhood and joy in a concert entitled A Celebration of Community at Severance Hall last Friday evening, March 28. Cleveland Institute of Music president Joel Smirnoff conducted the CIM Orchestra with the combined forces of vocal soloists from CIM and the community, Cleveland School of The Arts instrumentalists (Dianna Richardson, department head and director of the orchestral program) and chorus (William B. Woods, choir director), The Singers’ Club of Cleveland (Dr. Melvin P. Unger, choral director) and members of The Antioch Baptist Church Sanctuary Choir.
The free concert drew a capacity audience, and those who were unable to obtain a pass were able to enjoy it over the radio in a live broadcast on WCLV 104.9 FM.