by Jarrett Hoffman
A return to a concerto that brought with it a solo debut. The celebration of a long chamber music partnership and friendship. And one final concerto in a 22-year orchestral tenure.
Those landmarks in the careers of three clarinetists — Randy Klein, Richard Hawkins, and Allan Ware — can be heard across two days, March 3 and 5, in Canton, Oberlin, and Rocky River. On the docket are concertos by John Corigliano and Aaron Copland, and clarinet quintets by Carl Maria von Weber and Johannes Brahms.
The clarinet show begins on Saturday, March 3 at 7:30 pm in Umstattd Hall. Randy Klein will join his Canton Symphony colleagues and music director Gerhardt Zimmermann for the Copland Concerto, in between performances of Stephen Montague’s Snakebite and Mozart’s Symphony No. 40.
“This is my last season in Canton,” Klein said in a recent conversation. “I’m retiring from the orchestra.”
The three works on the February 25 program from the Canton Symphony Orchestra couldn’t have been more diverse in emotive content. The Overture from Camille Saint-Saëns’ light-hearted operetta, La Princesse jaune (The Yellow Princess) ranks among the composers’ most charming if not most often neglected creations. Projecting an infectious exuberance, the orchestra successfully delivered all of the work’s breezy melodies and delightful rhythms imbued with a distinctly Japanese ethereality. 
After playing two rounds with no eliminations, the original pool of 24 young pianists in the Cleveland International Piano Competition’s Young Artists Competition was trimmed to 12. The semifinal round pared that number down to six finalists — three each in the Senior and Junior divisions. The final round with Gerhardt Zimmermann and the Canton Symphony Orchestra, played in front of a sold-out house in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Thursday evening, May 21, would determine who would win first, second and third prizes in each division, as well as who would be awarded the Mozart, Bach and Audience prizes.