by Daniel Hathaway
Carlos Kalmar, newly appointed principal conductor of the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra, made his debut with the ensemble on Sunday afternoon, October 10, in what is now the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center.
The well-attended, free performance gave Northeast Ohio classical music fans their first local look at the Uruguayan-born conductor, who led the Oregon Symphony for two decades and continues to serve as artistic director of Chicago’s Grant Park Music Festival during the summers. (Above, Kalmar led CIM musicians in a pop-up concert at the Cleveland Museum of Art last week.)
In music by Šerkšnytė, Beethoven, and Dvořák, Kalmar showed himself to be a meticulous but expressive presence on the podium.
Is there a more fun-filled, accessible opera than Mozart’s 
The template for a good opera, according to Ravel’s 
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, as epitomized by Euripides’ infamous character Medea. After her husband Jason rejects her for another woman in order to further his political career, she will stop at nothing to get revenge, including murdering her own children.
String players sometimes say that instruments can “remember their past” — that one can tell the quality of the previous owner by listening to the violin’s tone. Played for years by a mediocre player, the violin settles into mediocrity; played by the best, the violin becomes the best. The violins played in last week’s community concert at Severance Hall have a long and heavy past. Now, restored to life, they seem to remember the tragedy and the hope of the Holocaust, a memory that can remind us of the worst and the best in human life. 
In his 2012 New Music Box feature on composer 
Leah Ferguson is delighted to be performing Béla Bartók’s skillfully-crafted Viola Concerto in the Cleveland Orchestra’s beautiful home of Severance Hall. On Wednesday, November 19th, beginning at 8:00 pm, guest conductor Kimbo Ishii will lead the CIM Orchestra in a dynamic concert that also includes Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture and Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra.