Canton Symmphony Archives - Cleveland Classical

Review: Canton Symphony Orchestra — Making Ives Palatable, Grieg Rhapsodic, Elgar Triumphant (November 24)

November 26, 2013 by Special to ClevelandClassical.com

by Tom Wachunas

Alexander Schimpf: finals of the 2011 Cleveland International Piano Competition with The Cleveland Orchestra (Photo: Roger Mastroianni)

This work could hardly be called a warm, festive mood-setter. In fact, it’s downright listener-unfriendly unless you’ve acquired some appreciation of Ives’ aesthetic explorations in polytonality, polyrhythms and other departures from traditional symphonic form. Toward that end, Maestro Gerhardt Zimmermann prefaced his unusually lengthy introduction of the work by saying that he considered Charles Ives to be “…the most authentic American composers there is.” [Read more…]

Review: Canton Symphony Goes for Baroque with Erin Cooper Gay (November 3)

November 11, 2013 by Special to ClevelandClassical.com

by Tom Wachunas

If not performed in a properly balanced fashion, Baroque-era music is often a more cerebral encounter than an emotionally alluring one to the listener. Musicians can get so caught up in delivering the music’s characteristically frothy ornamentation (which does allow for some exciting virtuosity on the part of soloists) that their technical prowess overshadows its intended “spiritual” affect, which can range from dramatic urgency and melancholy to reverential majesty and unfettered joy.

Fortunately, the Canton Symphony Orchestra (CSO) avoided that shortcoming during its all-Baroque concert on November 3 in Umstattd Performing Arts Hall. Not surprisingly, in performing the nine works on the program (four by Handel, and one each by J.S. Bach, Jeremiah Clarke, Arcangelo Corelli, Johann Pachelbel and Antonio Vivaldi), the orchestra was technically faultless. Most important and inspiring, though, was the pure expressivity of textures and moods conveyed by the musicians. [Read more…]

No Exit: Sounds of Despair at SPACES Gallery (Apr. 29)

by Jacob Strauss

Unless you have been through it, it is impossible to grasp the brutalities of war. You cannot imagine the violence, the hunger, the desperation, the isolation. You cannot reckon the infinite death sowed through the ground. Brutality is the reality. It creates a different kind of human.

On April 29th at SPACES gallery in Hingetown, No Exit’s program gave the audience music of total anxiety and horror, melancholic hope, and of life’s long continuity without much meaning.

The cimbalom was the feature of the show, an instrument capable of taking on many personas. Its performer, Chester Englander, has shaped his career around the instrument, and has inspired composers to write more repertoire for it, some of which was presented on the program. [Read on…]

Quire Cleveland: “Resonant Glory” at St. John’s Cathedral (May 15)

by Daniel Hathaway

Of the three venues that Quire Cleveland’s artistic director Jay White chose for the ensemble’s “Music for Grand Spaces” trilogy, none fits the description quite so aptly as the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in downtown Cleveland. It was there that Quire opened its series of programs designed for churches with a resonant acoustic on Friday, May 13 with a splendid selection of pieces.

You wouldn’t expect that acoustic from a glance at the nave, which is wide and long, but not especially lofty. But when I guest conducted a local amateur choir and professional orchestra in Beethoven’s Mass in C there a few years back, during the first rehearsal we released the final chord of the “Gloria” and listened in astonishment for the next several seconds. The sound continued to roll down the space like the big wave that surfers dream about. [Read on…]

The Cleveland Orchestra performs Schubert: light and dark collide (May 12)

by Stephanie Manning

Many musicians will remember exactly what they were rehearsing in March of 2020, when the music suddenly stopped. For The Cleveland Orchestra, that unlucky piece was Schubert’s Symphony No. 9, which at the time was only heard by a private audience of staff members. More than two years later, the Orchestra finally gave the work the live performance it deserved on May 12 — and the seats at Severance Music Center were plenty full.

Conducted by Franz Welser-Möst, the Orchestra was in their element for the popular symphony, also known as “The Great” — a nickname born not out of a value designation, but to differentiate it from a shorter work of Schubert’s also in C Major. Clocking in at just under an hour in total, the four demanding movements are a test of endurance, which prompted the woodwind section to enlist some assistant players.

[Read on…]

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