ClevelandClassical.com Header
Ad
Ad
Ad

Cleveland Chamber Choir: “La Fleur de la Renaissance” (May 9)

by

by Kevin McLaughlin

Before the Cleveland Chamber Choir sang a note on Saturday evening in First Lutheran Church in Lorain, the audience had choir practice.

With gentle guidance and help from the chorus, Gregory Ristow got them singing the anonymous L’homme armé melody, antique French pronunciation and all. The tune, now internalized, became a recognizable thread connecting two centuries of Renaissance music.

Under Ristow’s direction, “La fleur de la Renaissance” moved through Mass movements, laments, psalms, battle pieces, and spring chansons, using the L’homme armé melody as both connective thread and point of departure. The evening spanned nearly 200 years, but never felt like a history lesson. Ristow organized the concert as a sequence of changing scenes, moods, and colors, each piece leading naturally into the next.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Chamber Choir to present “La Fleur de la Renaissance”

by

by Daniel Hathaway

In an open letter to Cleveland Chamber Choir patrons, artistic director Gregory Ristow wrote:

“Our upcoming concert, La Fleur de la Renaissance, celebrates the new approach to harmony that emerged in the 1400s in the northern reaches of the French empire…To my ears, this is where Western classical choral singing as we know it began. To return to this music is to come back to the source, to explore consonance and dissonance in their purest forms, to delight in how these composers wrote glorious melodies for each part of the ensemble, while also allowing them to come together to form beautifully resonant sonorities.”

On Friday, May 8 at Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland, and Saturday, May 9 at First Lutheran Church in Lorain, the Cleveland Chamber Choir will present “The Flower of the Renaissance,” a compendium of works by six composers in the form of a Roman Catholic Mass that explore this new style. Both performances begin at 7:30.

The program also demonstrates the popular practice among Renaissance composers of embedding pre-existing material in new pieces, something that would come to be regarded as plagiarism in modern times, but were meant as tributes back in the day. Ristow has constructed his imaginary mass from movements of the forty-some Renaissance works based on the mysterious secular song, L’Homme armé. [Read more…]

Cleveland Ballet partners with BlueWater & Cleveland Chamber Choir for an outstanding production of Handel’s Messiah (Mar. 21) 

by

by Daniel Hathaway

Three of Cleveland’s flagship organizations joined forces for gripping performances of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah at KeyBank State Theater from March 20 to 22.

Handel’s 1741 oratorio has firmly established itself in the U.S. as a Christmas religious tradition, although it was first performed in Dublin’s Fishamble Street Musick Hall at Easter time, when performances of Italian opera had fallen out of favor in London.

Cleveland Ballet’s productions restored Handel’s most celebrated oratorio to its original context in a theater, with some 50 excellent Blue Water Chamber Orchestra and Cleveland Chamber Choir musicians performing from the orchestra pit under the sensitive direction of CCC’s artistic director Gregory Ristow. [Read more…]

[VIDEO] Cleveland Ballet presents Messiah with BlueWater, Cleveland Chamber Choir

by

by Stephanie Manning

Handel’s Messiah will come to life at Playhouse Square on March 20-21 in a co-production by Cleveland Ballet, BlueWater Chamber Orchestra, and Cleveland Chamber Choir. Gregory Ristow will conduct the live musical forces as the dancers perform the iconic two-hour oratorio, choreographed by Robert Weiss.

Take a look inside rehearsal and hear how this collaboration came together in the video below, featuring Cleveland Ballet artistic director Timour Bourtasenkov and répétiteur Dameon Nagel.

Messiah will be presented at the KeyBank State Theater on March 20 at 10:30 am & 7:00 pm, March 21 at 7:00 pm, and March 22 at 2:00 pm. Tickets available online.

Watch the video below and find it on Instagram and Facebook. [Read more…]

Cleveland Chamber Choir combines music, flowers, and poetry with “Love in Bloom”

by

by Stephanie Manning

In the midst of such a chilly and snowy start to the year, a concert titled “Love in Bloom” might sound refreshing right about now.  “It should be a very heartwarming program,” Cleveland Chamber Choir artistic director Gregory Ristow said about the group’s upcoming performances. “Even if we are still shivering like crazy in this cold Ohio winter.”

This week, the Choir will tour the Northeast Ohio area with a collection of love songs, presenting concerts at United Church of Christ in Kent (February 6), Trinity Cathedral in Cleveland (February 7), and Bethany Lutheran Church in Ashtabula (February 8). Tickets are pay-what-you-wish and can be reserved online.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Chamber Choir: In Four Voices (Dec. 3)

by

by Kevin McLaughlin

Renaissance polyphony can bloom in resonant spaces, but the Donna and James Reid Gallery at the Cleveland Museum of Art presents particular challenges: hard surfaces and a long reverb tend to blur consonants into watercolor. The Cleveland Chamber Choir’s four-voice ensemble met those conditions head-on during its “In Four Voices” program on December 3. What emerged was an evening of consistently beautiful vocal timbre shaped by a group navigating the sonic characteristics of the room.

The concert, to be followed in January and March by appearances of various-sized ensembles, is part of a new development for the Cleveland Chamber Choir, called the Camerata Series — more information here.

To improve their chances of hearing one another, the quartet — soprano Lauren Vanden Broeck, mezzo-soprano Kira McGirr, tenor Joel Kincannon, and bass Dominic Aragon — stood in a traditional “part book” formation, like a diamond, facing inward. This meant that their sound was directed toward each other, rather than outward to the listeners around them. [Read more…]

Cleveland Chamber Choir shines with music to mark the hours and seasons (Oct. 25)

by

by Kevin McLaughlin

Often called The Vespers, Sergei Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil reaches for something beyond an evening service. Its fifteen movements, rooted in Russian Orthodox chant, rise and surround like incense — not to display magnificence, but to deepen the mystery. Rachmaninoff was so fond of the work that he requested the fifth movement, the Nunc dimittis, be sung at his funeral.

On Friday evening, October 25, the Cleveland Chamber Choir, directed by Gregory Ristow, presented this monumental work in Trinity Cathedral — a resonant space of tradition and calm, where the beauty of the setting matched the beauty of the sound.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Chamber Choir: music to mark the hours and seasons

by

by Mike Telin

This week, Cleveland Chamber Choir invites you to join them by candlelight for a concert of two works that take listeners on a musical journey from sunset to sunrise, and winter to spring.

On Friday October 24 at 7:30 pm at Trinity Cathedral, Gregory Ristow will lead the Cleveland Chamber Choir in Sergei Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil and Reena Esmail’s A Winter Breviary.

The program will be repeated on Saturday at 7:00 in Fairchild Chapel in Oberlin. Charles Edward McGuire, PhD, from Oberlin College & Conservatory, will present a pre-concert talk 45 minutes prior to each performance. Pay-what-you-wish tickets are available online.

“In the traditional Eastern Orthodox All-Night Vigil service, prayers and chants would have been spaced through the entire night from just before sunset to just before the rising of the sun,” CCC artistic director Gregory Ristow said during a Zoom conversation. “But the service that Rachmaninoff would have had in mind combines all the prayers that would have been said through the night into one service.”

[Read more…]

BlueWater Chamber Orchestra and Cleveland Chamber Choir: “I Believe!” (May 17)

by

by Peter Feher

Trust in a higher purpose is part of what’s sustained BlueWater Chamber Orchestra and Cleveland Chamber Choir for many seasons now.

So it was fitting that the two local ensembles came together in a concert titled “I Believe! Knitted Voices of Justice and Faith” on May 17 at Trinity Cathedral. The evening not only marked major milestones for BlueWater and CCC — their 15th and 10th anniversaries, respectively — but also spoke to a shared mission. Making classical music more accessible is a priority for both organizations, whether through pay-what-you-wish performances or programming that forges new connections.

Saturday’s concert paired Margaret Bonds’ Credo and Mozart’s “Great” Mass in c in a righteous demonstration of belief that swelled to fill the magnificent space of Trinity.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Chamber Choir celebrates tenth birthday

by

by Mike Telin

On Saturday, May 17 at 7:30 pm in Trinity Cathedral, BlueWater Chamber Orchestra and Cleveland Chamber Choir present “I Believe! Knitted Voices of Justice and Faith,” with conductor Daniel Meyer and soprano Katherine Jolly. The program includes Margaret Bonds’ Credo and Mozart’s “Great” Mass in c. Pay-what-you-wish tickets are available at the door and online.

The concert also marks the culmination of the tenth anniversary season for Cleveland Chamber Choir. We spoke to CCC’s president, Melissa Vandergriff, who helped found the Choir in 2015 along with the ensemble’s first artistic director, Scott MacPherson. We also spoke to ensemble member and executive director Kira McGirr as well as Gregory Ristow, who became the group’s second artistic director in August 2023. [Read more…]

Follow ClevelandClassical.com

Contact us