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Akron Symphony launches concert season with “Beethoven, Price, Ellington”

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by Stephanie Manning

The opening of a concert season is always a festive occasion, and there’s a lot to celebrate this year for the Akron Symphony. “We’ve actually emerged from the pandemic stronger in a lot of ways than we went into it,” music director Christopher Wilkins said in a recent interview. On Saturday, November 13 at 8:00 pm, the orchestra will return to E.J. Thomas Hall with a program of works by Dvořák, Perry, Ellington, Price, and Beethoven.

Over the past year, the Symphony’s “Interlude Season” kept the ensemble playing while their main concert hall was shuttered. “It was a big success, because we did a lot of things we hadn’t done before,” Wilkins said. “We partnered with a lot of new organizations, we got into the neighborhoods more, and we played in small groups which meant different repertoire, which was a good thing.”

Among the ASO’s cancellations in 2020 was a performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in celebration of the composer’s 250th anniversary year. But that’s not the only reason the orchestra will mark its return with this iconic symphony.

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Akron Symphony announces
Interlude Season for 2020-2021

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by Staff

This past Monday, the Akron Symphony Orchestra revised its plans for the coming year. The previously announced 2020-2021 concert season has been moved forward to  2021-2022, and the Orchestra will instead present the ASO Interlude Season — Akron Symphony’s Gift to the Community, designed to share free music throughout  Northeast Ohio.

“I’m tremendously excited about the Interlude Season,” ASO Music Director Christopher Wilkins said in a press release. “I do mourn the loss of a full orchestra season. But ironically, it gives us the chance to do a great many things we’ve always wanted to do. Our greatest asset is the creativity of our musicians, and this new plan allows us to utilize their skills in an extraordinary variety of ways.”

During the season, which will run from August 2020 through May 2021, ASO musicians will provide free performances with numerous collaborative partners, including the Akron Art Museum, the Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank, Akron Public Schools, Akron-Summit County Public Library, the Akron Zoo, International Institute of Akron, Jilly’s Music Room, Love Akron, Mustard Seed Market & Café, Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens, Summa Health, the Summit County Historical Society, and Tuesday Musical Association. [Read more…]

Akron Symphony & Chorus: Mozart’s Requiem (Feb. 22)

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by Peter Feher

The history of classical music sometimes borders on mythology. The music on the Akron Symphony’s Saturday, February 22 program has taken on this fabled, quasi-historical quality — Mozart’s Requiem, Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, and Beethoven’s over-finished Leonore Overture No. 3. Fortunately, in performance the music more than lived up to the story. [Read more…]

Gospel Meets Symphony in Akron: talking to new choirmaster Jonathon Turner

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by Jarrett Hoffman

If you heard about someone sneaking into a rehearsal, you might be forgiven for asking, “Don’t you mean out?” But twelve years ago, a program called Gospel Meets Symphony came across the radar of 16-year-old Jonathon Turner, and he was curious. He asked his uncle to drive him and a friend, Dinareo Hill, to a church on the west side of Akron.

“We kind of snuck in the back, sat in the last row of the sanctuary, and just listened,” Turner, 28, said during a recent phone call. “It was like, oh my God. We had never heard a sound like that, with both gospel music and classical music.”

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Akron Symphony in Mahler 5 (Jan. 18)

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by Peter Feher

There was an unspoken tension between the composers on the Akron Symphony’s January 18 concert. Gustav Mahler’s hour-plus Fifth Symphony dominated the one-night-only program at E.J. Thomas Hall, which also featured an uncharacteristically short work by Richard Wagner — no slouch when it comes to profundity and grand gestures in his own music. Yet Wagner’s somewhat humble place on the program provided a conceptual key to Mahler’s self-contained, sometimes overwhelming symphony.

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Akron Symphony: Christopher Wilkins talks Mahler 5

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Programming a concert is like working out a puzzle. And if one of the pieces is Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, a better comparison might be a Rubik’s Cube.

“It’s challenging to program the Fifth Symphony because it’s 70 minutes, so that could be a full evening,” Akron Symphony music director Christopher Wilkins said during a phone call. “But I think most conductors are reluctant to just open the doors, let people get settled in their seats, and boom — have 70 minutes of music. It’s of course tough for latecomers. And the first and second movements are meant to be played without pause, so you don’t even get to relax until you’re a good twenty-plus minutes into the piece.”

How about starting with a short piece? That’s worse. Either the audience gets an oddly early intermission, or they have to sit still for maybe an hour and a half.

For the Akron Symphony’s concert this Saturday, January 18 at 8:00 pm at E.J. Thomas Hall, Wilkins has opted to precede Mahler’s Fifth with a pair of short pieces: Mozart’s Overture to The Marriage of Figaro and Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan and Isolde. In a way, all three works are about love — but more on that later.

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Akron Symphony to feature Brunfelt & Guegold in Vivaldi & Strauss

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by Jarrett Hoffman

This weekend, the Akron Symphony will spotlight two of its own. Concertmaster Tallie Brunfelt will take on the quadruple challenge of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, and principal horn Meghan Guegold will play Richard Strauss’s early Concerto No. 1 on Saturday, November 16 at 8:00 pm at E.J. Thomas Hall.

When Guegold was an 18-year-old student at the University of Akron, she was determined not only to learn the Strauss, but to play it memorized on that uncommon and ambitious event: the freshman recital.

“I thought, you know, I want to perform for a living, so I might as well jump right on in,” the hornist said during an interview.

That work, a pillar of the horn repertoire, wasn’t a surprising choice. “It’s definitely one of the best concertos we have,” Guegold said, adding that it might be the best from the Romantic era. The lyricism and the heroic quality of the writing attracted her. “I think it was the start of my real love of Strauss’s music.”

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Brunfelt, Guegold, and Wilkins on Akron Symphony’s “Stand Beside Her”

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by Jarrett Hoffman

The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in August of 1920, and leading up to the 100th anniversary of that event, the Akron Symphony is highlighting six women composers through a project called “Stand Beside Her.”

I spoke to concertmaster Tallie Brunfelt and principal horn Meghan Guegold — who will both be featured as soloists in the Orchestra’s November 16 concert — and asked what this programming initiative means to them.

“I’m just so thrilled that the ASO is doing this, especially in light of the centennial,” Brunfelt said by telephone. Being a woman at her position in the Orchestra makes this project all the more exciting for her. “There aren’t many female concertmasters, and I think representation and visibility are extraordinarily important,” she said.

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Akron Symphony in “Symphonic Shakespeare” (Oct. 19)

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by Nicholas Stevens

Shakespeare is everywhere these days: not just at the roots of today’s literature, poetry, philosophy, pop culture, and theatre, but as the ultimate canonic figure in the arts. His fame helps keep him famous. Titles of novels riff on the fact that his work remains required reading; Supreme Court justices make headlines for doubting his authorship; tempests in teapots brew when people move his portrait. Classical music, with its piano-adorning composer busts, boasts figures of comparable monumentality. In presenting music on Shakespearean themes and scenarios in a recent concert, however, the Akron Symphony seized a chance to savor works of rarer vintages. [Read more…]

Akron Symphony:
“Symphonic Shakespeare”

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Akron Symphony music director Christopher Wilkins has long had an interest in theater. “I’ve kept my eye out for theater-related projects for years and years and years,” he said during an interview.

One of those projects was Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream interleaved with a significant chunk of Shakespeare’s play, a production ClevelandClassical.com reviewed in 2014. “I’ve also done The Tempest with the complete incidental music by Sibelius,” Wilkins said. “But these next two pieces are knockouts.”

Those would be Shostakovich’s Hamlet Film Suite and William Walton’s Henry V: A Shakespeare Scenario, which make up two-thirds of “Symphonic Shakespeare,” the Orchestra’s program this Saturday, October 19 at 8:00 pm at E.J. Thomas Hall.

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