by Jarrett Hoffman
Last summer, according to Cleveland Orchestra violinist Isabel Trautwein, musicians from the Orchestra played 90-100 outdoor events. “These were driveway concerts and porch concerts with friends and students,” Trautwein said by telephone from her farm in Geneva (where she recently put on a program called Barnegie Hall.) “We thought, why don’t we give that a name, so that it has more of an impact, and so we all know we’re part of something larger.”
That something larger has become MusiCLE Yours, an initiative by a group of Orchestra members to share solo and chamber music — particularly but not exclusively by under-represented composers — with a range of communities throughout the area.
They started with recordings posted on YouTube, including a few that were filmed at the Crawford Auto Aviation Museum at the Cleveland History Center, with vintage cars visible in the background.
The next undertaking from MusiCLE Yours takes place at another venue off the beaten path, this time live, outdoors, and themed around social justice. “I can’t help with all the woes in our world, but I think we musicians — we must tackle the social justice issues surrounding our art form, especially classical music,” Trautwein said.
Italian-born pianist Roberto Plano, who won first prize in the 2001 Cleveland International Piano Competition, will play the next recital in CIPC’s Concert Series on Saturday, June 8 at 8:00 pm in Kulas Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music.
As any brass, woodwind, or low-string player in an orchestra may confess under mild pressure, it can feel profoundly liberating to play music that draws the spotlight away from their colleagues in the violin section, especially for extended periods. Rare though this repertoire may be — Stravinsky favored winds and percussion, and Glass wrote a whole opera without violins — pieces that foreground these parts of the classical instrumentarium do appear at the heart of the canon. Filling the stage for its 60th-Anniversary Gala concert, the Rocky River Chamber Music Society placed conductor James Feddeck at the helm for an event featuring 21 musicians — violists, cellists, bassists, and wind players.
Among the more important activities during the four-month Violins of Hope Cleveland project are the extensive educational activities being offered to schools and students by a number of area institutions. On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday (December 2 – 4) at 10:10 am and 12:10 noon, associate conductor Brett Mitchell and The Cleveland Orchestra — in conjunction with graduate students from the Case Western Reserve University / Cleveland Play House MFA Program in Acting — presented six engaging, hour-long concerts that unflinchingly presented the events of the Holocaust in music, mime, and words.