by Stephanie Manning

Both parking and seating were at a premium for ChamberFest Cleveland’s June 27 concert, which concluded this year’s festival right where it began less than three weeks earlier. Kulas Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music hosted the culmination of the fourteenth season with its optimistic program, titled “Convergence.”

ChamberFest finales often feature a seminal small ensemble work — last year it was the Brahms’ Piano Quintet in F minor, this year it was Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet. Ultimately, the final concert of 2026 leaned more traditional, a choice that felt a bit anticlimactic after a season that otherwise concentrated a good deal of energy on contemporary works.

Still, the Saturday evening performance did include one piece by a living composer: Olli Mustonen’s Nonet II. As Donald Rosenberg’s program notes reminded us, the three pieces on tap were all generally sunny and upbeat, and the players came dressed in colors to match: yellow, pink, purple, and cream, to name a few.

[Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

ChamberFest Cleveland’s concert in Mixon Hall on Thursday. June 25 offered the audience many points of departure in a program of wildly different chamber ensembles. The program was introduced (if not fully explained) in an enjoyable pre-concert lecture by University of Akron geology professor Ira Sasowsky.

Michelle Barzel Ross’s string quartet Birds on the Moon nudged closest to the evening’s theme of “Flights of Fancy.” Written in memory of the late Juilliard String Quartet violinist Roger Tapping and performed by violinists Michelle Barzel Ross and Steven Copes, violist Teng Li, and cellist Jay Campbell, it’s a captivating piece that draws you in from the beginning with its kaleidoscope of colors, allusions, and quotations from other works and doesn’t let up until the end.

Some of the material arose from Ross’s “wild, imaginative” improvisations, some from remembered snatches of poetry by Wallace Stevens. Fanciful notions like the avians that gave the work its title dwell deep in the subconscious (are there birds on the moon?)

[Read more…]

by Kevin McLaughlin

ChamberFest Cleveland’s Saturday, June 20 program at Federated Church, “Summer Music,” brought together works by Karen Ouzounian, Samuel Barber, Benjamin Yusupov, and Franz Schubert. The title suggested ease and warmth, but the music had other plans, ranging from restless rhythms and shifting colors to high virtuosity and broad lyricism.

Ouzounian’s Songs of the Sap opened the program, with the composer herself as solo cellist. A Toronto-born musician of Lebanese-Armenian heritage, Ouzounian draws on folk material not as a tourist, but through personal inheritance. The music uses Anatolian dance rhythms, though the performance never treated them as mere display.

“Tamzara” moved with restraint and concentration. Left-hand pizzicato made one cello sound like two. Fossnes’s entrance from the balcony gave the viola a smaller, fainter sound, answering the cello from a distance as if from long ago. “Curcuna” was quicker and more physical. Ouzounian gave its symmetrically divided 10/8 rhythm a clear, driving pulse while leaving room for freer, more rhapsodic passages. The result was tightly controlled but never dry.

[Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

While it’s unusual to see two composers taking credit for a single composition, the 18th-century Catalonian brothers Josep Pla and Joan Baptista Pla are an exception, having jointly crafted many works including trio sonatas.

On Wednesday, June 17 in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music, ChamberFest Cleveland opened their concert “Appalachian Spring” with a terrific performance of the Pla brothers’ Trio Sonata in D minor for oboe (Izaiah Cheera), violin (Julia Schilz), cello (Julie Albers), harpsichord (Adam Golka), and percussion (Jeff Stern).

Throughout the engaging piece, Cheeran produced a beautiful oboe tone while making the sonata’s many (and long) technical passages sound easy. During the lighthearted opening movement, extended lyrical lines were expertly traded between the players. And yes, there was percussion. Stern’s rhythms on the cajon were inspired, adding a new dimension to the Baroque era composition.

[Read more…]

by Kevin McLaughlin

“Finding Resonance,” ChamberFest Cleveland’s program on June 12 at Harkness Chapel began ferociously, grew wilder, then deepened into passion.

The connection between the concerts in this summer’s series, Continental Drifts, is sometimes contrived, but a group of exciting and well-made pieces provided much to write home about. And Kevin McBrien’s pre-concert remarks provided useful bearings for the evening.

Jörg Widmann’s 180 beats per minute made for a bracing opener. The music has a Rite of Spring-like brutality with its stamping pulse, sudden shocks, and disciplined convulsion. Violinists Kerson Leong and Diana Cohen, violists Njord Fossnes and Pearl de la Motte, and cellists Raman Ramakrishnan and Bryan Cheng, played with fierce precision. They made the tempo feel dangerous rather than merely fast.

[Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

The 2026 edition of ChamberFest Cleveland opened with a “Global Fanfare” on Wednesday, June 10 in Kulas Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Each composer on the program represented a different continent —  highlighting this summer’s Festival theme of “Continental Drifts.” The program was also all about rhythm.

Ghanaian-born musician Weedie Braimah, a virtuoso on the Djembe (West African drum), immediately established a global feel by drawing a plethora of mesmerizing rhythms and an expansive color palette from the Djembe, a single drum with many voices.

American composer Steve Reich’s Piano Phase followed immediately with Evren Ozel and Juho Pohjonen at two interlocking grand pianos, their playing seamlessly growing out of the Djembe rhythms that still lingered in the hall. Starting in unison and gradually moving out of synchronization and back again, Ozel and Pohjonen showed remarkable concentration and physical stamina during the relentlessly pulsating work. Gobo lighting added a bit of theater to the performance. [Read more…]