by Mike Telin
As a young girl growing up in the Caribbean, soprano Jeanine De Bique had no idea that it was possible to make a living as an opera singer. “I come from Trinidad and Tobago, where you are surrounded by music all day long. Whether it’s classical music, calypso, soca, or chutney, it’s always around you,” De Bique said during a Skype conversation from Barbados.
“When I finished high school at 18, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I thought about being a lawyer or physiologist, but my voice teacher asked me if I wanted to pursue music. I had no clue that you could have a career in opera. When a country doesn’t have any means for you to see an opera — where people are doing that as their job — you have no idea that those jobs exist.” [Read more…]
The temperature outside was a balmy 60 degrees when CityMusic Cleveland presented its December program. I attended the last of five concerts, on Sunday, December 13 in Lakewood; others were scattered around the area from Elyria to Willoughby Hills. While it was a pleasure not to have to negotiate a Polar Vortex in getting to the concert, once inside, I was happy to experience winter in the milder form of Antonio Vivaldi’s brilliant program music from The Four Seasons. 
If you’re not quite ready to immerse yourself in concerts totally dedicated to music of the holiday season, you’re in luck. Beginning on Wednesday, December 9 at 7:30 pm at St. Noel Church in Willoughby Hills, guest conductor Stefan Willich will lead CityMusic Cleveland in the first of five concerts that will feature Cleveland Orchestra first violinist Miho Hashizume as soloist in both Piazzolla’s “Spring” from The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires and Vivaldi’s “Winter” from The Four Seasons. Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, K. 551 (“Jupiter”) will round out the performances. Check our
After a Wednesday evening concert in Dublin, near Columbus, CityMusic Cleveland opened its new season at Lakewood Congregational Church on October 15 with the first of four area concerts featuring violinist Sayaka Shoji. On Thursday, she turned in a tidy reading of the Brahms concerto, and the orchestra itself delivered an impressive, highly polished performance of Robert Schumann’s first symphony led by music director Avner Dorman.
On Thursday, May 28 at Masonic Auditorium, CityMusic Cleveland, under the direction of Avner Dorman, presented the first of two performances featuring a percussion concerto on the first half and a selection of show tunes on the second. What do these two musical styles have in common? Perhaps nothing, but in the words of Duke Ellington, “if it sounds good it IS good,” and from beginning to end, this was one good concert. The performance was presented as part of CityMusic’s “Wishes and Dreams: A Homeless Children Project.” 
If Friday evening’s CityMusic Cleveland concert ended up being a bit topsy-turvy, it was for a good reason. The order of events in the printed program began with Edvard Grieg’s first Peer Gynt suite and ended with Arvo Pärt’s Symphony No. 4, with Carl Nielsen’s violin concerto in the middle. In actuality, the first and last pieces were flipped, making for a much more effective sequence. 
CityMusic Cleveland continued to move into new territory with the first of its five “Holiday Concerts” on Wednesday evening, December 3. Led by Peter Bennett and collaborating with members of the choirs of Sagrada Familia Parish on their home turf on Cleveland’s West Side, CityMusic ventured into Latino repertoire with a performance of Ariel Ramirez’s forkloric Missa Criolla. The curtain-raiser was a Sinfonia by Antonio Sarrier, a Spanish-born composer and trumpeter who emigrated to Mexico in the mid-eighteenth century. In between, Laura Koepke was the featured soloist in Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto.