by Daniel Hathaway
The program might have looked conventional, but Cuarteto Casals’ performances of string quartets by Haydn, Shostakovich, and Beethoven on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series last Tuesday at Plymouth Church were exceptional. Every piece shone with its own individual character, contributing many-hued elements to an outstanding whole. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals will continue the Cleveland Chamber Music Society’s 66th season at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights on Tuesday, October 27 at 7:30 pm with a program of string quartets by Joseph Haydn, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Ludwig van Beethoven.
Formed in Barcelona in 1997, Cuarteto Casals soon rose to international prominence with first prizes at string quartet competitions in London and Hamburg. Violinists Vera Martínez Mehner and Abel Tomàs Realp, violist Jonathan Brown, and cellist Arnau Tomàs Realp have joined the King of Spain on diplomatic visits and have performed on the special, decorated Stradivarius instruments housed at the Royal Palace in Madrid. Collaborations with György Kurtág, Christian Lauba, and James MacMillan have underlined the ensemble’s commitment to contemporary music. All of the players live in Barcelona, where they are the quartet in residence at the Escola Superior de Musica de Catalunya. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Northeast Ohio has had the pleasure of hearing London’s Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble twice in the past few months. Last May, eight string players from the Academy’s expandable and contractible large chamber music group visited the Tuesday Musical Series in Akron to play Brahms, Shostakovich, and Mendelssohn. Last Tuesday, a string quintet enhanced by three wind players opened the Cleveland Chamber Music Society’s 66th Season with Antonín Dvorak’s Quintet in G and Franz Schubert’s Octet in F. String Quartets are able to conjure up a vast palette of sonorities, but the addition of a double bass, clarinet, horn, and bassoon can increase the possibilities exponentially. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The Cleveland Chamber Music Society will welcome one of its largest groups of the season, the Chamber Ensemble of London’s Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, to open its 66th season on Tuesday, October 6 at 7:30 pm in Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights. The performers will include Tomo Keller and Harvey de Souza, violins, Robert Smissen, viola, Stephen Orton, cello, Lynda Houghton, double bass, Timothy Orpen, clarinet, Lawrence O’Donnell, bassoon, and Stephen Stirling, horn.
The ASMF chamber ensemble’s visit to Cleveland will be only the second stop on their current tour of North America. All told, the group will play fourteen concerts in nineteen days, beginning on October 5 in Dallas and ending on October 25 at Stanford University. In between, the musicians will perform in such far-flung cities as Clinton (NY), San Antonio, Houston, Memphis, Chicago, Columbus, Green Bay, Edmonton (Alberta), Reno, and Ashland (OR). [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Can anyone really say they enjoyed Ian Bostridge’s Songs of the Great War program at Plymouth Church on Tuesday evening? The subject matter was unsettling, and Bostridge, who is as much an actor as a singer, went to extraordinary lengths to put the power of the poetry and music across, assisted by pianist Wenwen Du. Profoundly moved would far better describe the experience of hearing this performance of war-related verse set by Gustav Mahler, Rudi Stephan, George Butterworth, Kurt Weill and Benjamin Britten. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The celebrated British tenor Ian Bostridge will bring the Cleveland Chamber Music Society’s 65th subscription series to a conclusion on Tuesday, April 21 at 7:30 pm at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights, when he joins pianist Wenwen Du in a program entitled “Music of the Great War.”
Despite its title, Bostridge’s musical agenda moves well beyond a commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I. That conflict was called “the war to end all wars,” but we know now that it was nothing of the sort. While Tuesday evening’s program includes songs by two composers who perished early in The Great War — Rudi Stephan of Germany (who died on the Ukrainian Front in 1915) and George Butterworth of England (who was killed in the Battle of the Somme in 1916) — Bostridge will also visit poetry set to music by Gustav Mahler, Kurt Weill and Benjamin Britten that deals with war and its ravages in several generations. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
In the spirit of TV shows like “America’s Got Talent,” the Cleveland Chamber Music Society will hold its first ever Youth Chamber Music Competition on Saturday, April 11 at 2:00 pm at the Lyndhurst Community Presbyterian Church. The competition and concert are free, and all musicians, music educators and friends of chamber music are encouraged to attend what is sure to be an exciting afternoon of music.
by Daniel Hathaway
Those who thought they knew the Beethoven cello sonatas probably had to think again after last Tuesday’s recital by Steven Isserlis and Robert Levin on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights. Over the last decade, the two performers have turned these pieces inside out and explored every crevice in their musical narrative. Heard in a performance like that on Tuesday evening, the results of that joint inquiry are a revelation. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
When British-born cellist Steven Isserlis and American fortepianist Robert Levin present their all-Beethoven program on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series at Plymouth Church on Tuesday evening, March 10, the audience will come as close as humanly possible to hearing the three sonatas and a variation set as Beethoven conceived them. Isserlis will play a period cello with gut strings, and Levin will perform on a Wilhelm Leschen instrument built in Vienna in 1825.
Even that impressive level of authenticity might not perfectly suit these three sonatas. “Unlike the violin sonatas, the cello sonatas really span the entirety of Beethoven’s development as a composer,” Levin said in a telephone conversation from his home in Cambridge, MA, where he recently retired from the Harvard music faculty. “There are the two opus 5 sonatas from his early period, the great A-Major sonata, op. 69, from the middle period, and the visionary sonatas of op. 102 which inaugurate the late period.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
L-R: Ori Kam, Alexander Pavlovsky, Kyril Zlotnikov, Sergei Bresler
A few days before the Jerusalem Quartet’s concert at Plymouth Church on February 24, the ensemble’s home city got buried in a rare 10 inches of snow, with more in the forecast. Perhaps that brought Cleveland and Jerusalem into a special meteorological kinship as well as a musical one. Certainly, there were a lot of warm feelings being passed back and forth between musicians and audience during the quartet’s excellent performance on Tuesday evening on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series. [Read more…]