ClevelandClassical.com Header
Ad
Ad
Ad

ChamberFest Cleveland: a conversation with percussionist Marc Damoulakis

by

by Daniel Hathaway

DAMOULAKIS-MarcYou’ve seen him performing with The Cleveland Orchestra in back of a hundred of his colleagues, wielding a comically oversized hammer in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, playing stunning mallet duets in Messiaen’s Chronochromie, or providing a rock-solid snare drum cadence for Ravel’s Bolero. But on Thursday, June 25 in Mixon Hall at CIM, TCO’s principal percussionist Marc Damoulakis will be featured in a chamber music performance, when he joins fellow percussionist Scott Christian and duo-pianists Orion Weiss and Roman Rabinovich for George Crumb’s Music for a Summer Evening on ChamberFest Cleveland’s seventh concert of its fourth season.

The five-movement piece forms the third part of the composer’s Makrokosmos, a work that received its premiere at Swarthmore College in 1974 and was last performed in Cleveland in November of 2010 by members of Chamber Music at Lincoln Center on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series. “I’ve played it a number of times,” Damoulakis said in a telephone conversation. “At Tanglewood in the late ‘90s, then with Manny Ax and his wife on the ‘Great Performances’ series in New York, I think in 2001. I find this piece to be one of the greats. It’s a masterpiece like Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony, a piece everyone should hear.” [Read more…]

ChamberFest Cleveland 2015: opening concert at SPACES (June 17)

by

by Timothy Robson

CFC-Artist-MontageIn its first three seasons, ChamberFest Cleveland made itself an indispensable set of summer events that helped satisfy the seemingly insatiable appetite for chamber music in Cleveland. Organized by Cleveland Orchestra principal clarinet Franklin Cohen and Diana Cohen, concertmaster of the Calgary Philharmonic, this year’s fourth festival has expanded to ten concerts over a two-week period in late June, in six venues, some of them traditional concert halls, others, more unusual sites. [Read more…]

ChamberFest Cleveland: a conversation with first-timer (but no stranger) Clive Greensmith

by

by Daniel Hathaway

GREENSMITH-CliveCellist Clive Greensmith last played in Cleveland in November of 2012. That appearance brought him to the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series during the farewell season of the Tokyo Quartet. He will return to town this week to play several works during ChamberFest Cleveland. We interviewed Greensmith in 2012 and caught up again by telephone to ask him about his ChamberFest assignments and his post-Tokyo Quartet activities.

Daniel Hathaway: When we last talked, you were heading off at the end of the Tokyo Quartet’s last season to teach at the Colburn School in Los Angeles. How is everything going for you these days?

Clive Greensmith: Two years on, everything is going wonderfully well. I was very happy with the way we ended as a quartet — we went out on a high. And I’ve just finished two wonderful years at the school now. [Read more…]

ChamberFest Cleveland: an interview with violinist/violist Yura Lee

by

by Jarrett Hoffman

Photo

The first concert in season four of Franklin and Diana Cohen’s ChamberFest Cleveland begins on Wednesday, June 17 at 8:00 pm in SPACES Gallery. This year’s theme is “Crossing Borders” — borders including those of geography, culture, style, mood, and career path. We caught up with violinist/violist Yura Lee, a veteran of the festival, who will be performing on the first five concerts (June 17, 18, 19, 21, 23) as well as the tenth and final concert on July 1. See our interview with the Cohens for details about each concert.

Yura Lee is the winner of the only first prize awarded across the four categories in the 2013 ARD Music Competition in Munich. The recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, she is also currently a member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center as both violinist and violist.

[Read more…]

ChamberFest Cleveland: fifteen minutes with bassist Nathan Farrington

by

by Jarrett Hoffman

Nathan-Farrington pic“It’s pretty crazy, isn’t it?” bassist Nathan Farrington said of Prokofiev’s Quintet for oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, and double bass. “There’s a lot of circus imagery in the piece, and in the second-movement solo, I’m totally the dancing bear.”

Franklin and Diana Cohen’s ChamberFest Cleveland, beginning its fourth season on June 17, welcomes back bassist Nathan Farrington, who debuted with the festival last summer. A 2006 graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, Farrington has appeared as soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Columbus Symphony, and the Minnesota Sinfonia. He appears regularly in the bass sections of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony, Columbus Symphony, and the East Coast Chamber Orchestra. An avid chamber musician, Farrington has completed three summers at the Marlboro Music Festival. [Read more…]

ChamberFest Cleveland: a conversation with violinist Alexi Kenney

by

by Mike Telin

KENNEY-AlexiStill in his early twenties, violinist Alexi Kenney has already amassed an impressive résumé. In 2013 he won the Concert Artists Guild Victor Elmaleh Competition at the age of nineteen. He has given recitals at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., and Napa’s Festival del Sole, and he has been featured on NPR’s “From the Top.” He is the recipient of top prizes at the Yehudi Menuhin International Competition, the Mondavi Center Competition, and the 2013 Kronberg Academy master classes. He attends the New England Conservatory, where he will enter its Artist Diploma program this fall, studying with Donald Weilerstein and Miriam Fried.

I spoke to the Palo Alto, California native by phone and began by asking him how his position as ChamberFest’s Young Artist came about. [Read more…]

ChamberFest Cleveland Season Four: Franklin & Diana Cohen on “Crossing Borders”

by

by Mike Telin and Daniel Hathaway

COHEN-Frank-&-DianaHaving expanded its June season from five concerts in 2012 to eight in 2013, Franklin and Diana Cohen’s ChamberFest Cleveland grew again in 2014 to encompass ten events. Ten seems now to be the magic number for this enterprising festival, which offers everything you can imagine in the category of chamber music, played by an all-star cast of musicians who come to Cleveland from far and wide.

We caught up with Franklin and Diana Cohen to gather their thoughts about the season, first asking how they arrived at the theme, “Crossing Borders.”

“Someone had suggested the idea a few years ago,” Diana said. “I think they called it ‘Foreign Exchange.’ We toyed around with the idea and it just sort of evolved.” [Read more…]

Chamberfest Cleveland plans ten concerts in its fourth season from June 17—July 1

by

by Daniel Hathaway

COHEN-Frank-&-DianaHaving expanded its June season from five concerts in 2012 to eight in 2013, Franklin and Diana Cohen’s ChamberFest Cleveland grew again in 2014 to encompass ten events. Ten seems now to be the magic number for this enterprising festival, which offers everything you can imagine in the category of chamber music, played by an all-star cast of young musicians who come to Cleveland from far and wide. The ten concerts scheduled for the 2015 festival will begin on Wednesday, June 17 at Spaces and conclude on Wednesday, July 1 at a new venue, the Blackstone Organ House in Bratenahl.

Operating under the theme of “Crossing Borders,” the festival events will move about from venue to venue during those two weeks, as they explore the theme of travels and journeys. [Read more…]

Link to a follow-up article about ChamberFest Cleveland

by

Bowlin-FarringtonClevelandClassical’s Young Writer Fellow, Daniel Hautzinger, has wrapped up ChamberFest Cleveland’s third season in an article for the national website of the Music Critics Association of North America. Read his piece, “Cleveland ChamberFest in 3rd year has convivial vibe” on Classical Voice North America.

Review: ChamberFest Cleveland — Ghost Opera at Kulas Hall, CIM (June 28)

by

by Mike Telin

GO-Dancers

Ghosts from the past, the present and the future were brought to life on Saturday, June 28 in Kulas Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music. But these were not the ghosts made famous by Charles Dickens but rather, through a 4,000 year-old Chinese tradition, where humans, spirits of the past and future and nature communicate with one another. All of this happened during ChamberFest Cleveland’s spectacular production of Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera for String Quartet and Pipa, [Chinese lute] with Water, Stones, Paper and Metal. Commissioned by the Kronos Quartet nearly 20 years ago, ChamberFest added another dimension to the haunting work with the world premiere of inventive and stylistically sensitive choreography by Groundworks Theater artistic director David Shimotakahara. [Read more…]

Follow ClevelandClassical.com

Contact us