by Kevin McLaughlin
Strange thing about masks: they sometimes reveal more than they conceal.
In “Masquerading Melodies,” Studio Espressivo’s latest program, pianists Allison Hillier and Chris Neiner, violinist Zachary Brandon, and tenor Timothy Culver turned to the world of commedia dell’arte with its clowns and lovers, disguises and reversals, and found in it a way of letting characters speak plainly from behind their disguises.
The program, presented on June 7 at the Studio’s gallery in Little Italy, was cleverly assembled. The characters wandered in from different countries and across two centuries, but all belonged to the same unruly comedy troupe.
Neiner and Hillier’s four-hand account of Gabriel Fauré’s Overture from Masques et bergamasques opened the program with style and dispatch. Written late in Fauré’s life for a Monaco entertainment with roots in commedia, the piece looks backward without sounding ancient. The pianists brought out its clean lines and elegance — French wit without caricature, charm without sucre.
What do Colombina, Harlequin, Pantalone, Pierrot, and Pulcinella have in common? They are all characters of the commedia dell’arte. This weekend they will be brought to life musically when Studio Espressivo presents “Masquerading Melodies.”
When Allison Hillier was starting her graduate studies at the Cleveland Institute of Music, she needed to find a place that was within walking distance of the school. While apartment hunting in nearby neighborhoods, Hillier found herself walking through Little Italy. “I heard opera coming from restaurants, and I thought this is a really vibrant community. There’s a lot going on,” she recalled during a recent Zoom conversation.
Composer and conductor Federico Garcia-De Castro was 12, living in his native Colombia, when a left-leaning politician named Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa was shot and killed at an airport in Bogotá.
Classical music concerts in Cleveland usually thin out in July as festivals outside the city get under way, most notably The Cleveland Orchestra’s Blossom season. So it is a welcome turn of events to see a new international summer festival supported by University Circle institutions arrive for two weeks in mid-July. I attended the first weekend of Music in the Circle concerts that brought musicians from around the world to the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Hall on Friday, July 11 and to the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium on Sunday, July 14.
When a festival runs for long enough, it becomes interesting to look back and remember that it wasn’t always a staple of the local culture. At one time, it was entirely new.