by Nicholas Jones
ChamberFest Cleveland’s “Grab Bag!” concert on Tuesday was informal and eclectic, as the title implies. Seated fairly comfortably in Lee Road’s Wine Spot, the capacity audience was treated to a stimulating mix of instruments and musical styles — as well as a free glass of wine or beer. ChamberFest organizers Diana and Frank Cohen served as gracious hosts, giving impromptu commentaries between numbers. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Music for four hands on one piano has usually been a parlor game rather than the subject of public performance. Composers dabbled in that genre to satisfy an enthusiastic market of amateurs who wanted to amuse themselves and friends at home — and arrangers made versions of chamber and orchestral music so that musicians could study repertoire before the advent of sound recording. But Orion Weiss and Anna Polonsky’s refreshingly informal performance of music by Dvořák, Debussy, Schumann, Ravel, and Fauré at Dunham Tavern on Sunday afternoon, June 28 made a terrific case for four-hand music as a recital vehicle in its own right. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Pianists Anna Polonsky and Orion Weiss share a marriage as well as busy performing careers. Mirroring the way their lives play out, Polonsky and Weiss will play duo-piano, join in a concert of music for one-piano-four-hands, and perform with other musicians during ChamberFest Cleveland’s fourth season. We spoke to them separately by telephone (they were in different cities at the time) to ask about their appearances.
Cleveland-born Orion Weiss is involved in multiple ChamberFest assignments. “It’s like a twelve-course meal with many different dishes,” he said. “I’ll be playing Thomas Adès’s Darknesse Visible; a concert with Alexi Kenney at the Cleveland Public Library; the Mozart E-flat piano quartet; George Crumb’s Music for a Summer Evening with Roman Rabinovich; the little g-minor Rachmaninoff trio; Gershwin’s An American in Paris with Anna; then the four-hand concert.” [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
On Wednesday, July 1 at 7:00 pm, ChamberFest will pull out all the stops when it caps off its season with a concert at the Blackstone Pipe Organ Residence in Bratenahl. The concert, titled “Stars and Stripes,” will feature Todd Wilson on the home’s custom-built organ in a performance of Ives’s Variations on a National Hymn, “America.” The prize-winning Echo Saxophone Quartet will play Terry Riley’s Tread on the Trail, and the concert will conclude with Dvořák’s String Quintet No. 3, Op. 97. At 6:15 pm, festival speaker Joel Smirnoff will present a prelude talk, and a picnic on the lawn will follow the performance.
At the suggestion of bassoonist Fernando Traba, the concert will also include Ned Rorem’s rarely-performed Winter Pages for clarinet, bassoon, violin, cello, and piano. “Frank Cohen asked me to let him know if I hear any great piece that hasn’t been played at the Festival,” Traba recalled during a recent telephone conversation. “I often visit YouTube and Spotify to try to find pieces that I don’t know. I came across a performance of this one, and it immediately struck me that it should be played at ChamberFest. I sent Frank the link, and he got back to me saying that he had actually played the piece shortly after it was premiered. I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t know a lot about Ned Rorem. He is 91 years old now, and he’s mainly known as a composer of art songs.”
by Nicholas Jones
“Who’s Romantic?” may sound like the title of a reality TV show, but it’s actually the tagline for the third concert of ChamberFest’s 2015 season on Sunday, June 21 in the warm acoustics of Case Western Reserve University’s Harkness Chapel. Let’s take the question seriously: who is Romantic? ChamberFest presented Mozart’s E-flat Piano Quartet, K. 493, as its first case study. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
An evening of string quartet music can be a beautiful thing, but with a whole cast of musicians in residence, ChamberFest Cleveland enjoys the luxury of being able to field a variety of different ensembles on a single program. On Thursday, June 25 in CIM’s Mixon Hall, a concert that began with a Haydn quartet took on new sonorities with a Britten piece for oboe and three strings, expanded to include more strings plus harmonium and piano for a Johann Strauss Jr. waltz, then involved two pianists, two percussionists and a stage full of sound-generating devices in George Crumb’s Music for a Summer Evening. It was an amazing program. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
Still 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, and he was the recipient of top prizes at the Yehudi Menuhin International Competition, the Mondavi Center Competition, and the 2013 Kronberg Academy master classes. On Saturday afternoon, June 20 at the Main Branch of the Cleveland Public Library, Kenney, who is this season’s ChamberFest Cleveland Young Artist, demonstrated exactly why he is deserving of these and many other accolades, during a recital that featured the music of Westhoff, Schubert, and Strauss. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
You’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…]
by Timothy Robson
In 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…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Cellist 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…]