by Daniel Hathaway
Pity poor Johannes Brahms, whose op. 51, no. 1 quartet came last on the program played by the excellent Belcea Quartet on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series last Tuesday evening at Plymouth Church. He didn’t really stand a chance after the emotionally wrenching performance the quartet had just given of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
“We’ve played several times on the series and we’re very happy to be back,” Belcea Quartet violist Krzysztof Chorzelski said during a telephone conversation from London, the quartet’s home base. “We love playing in Cleveland and we have very nice memories. The audience is always very special.” On Tuesday, October 21 at 7:30 in Plymouth Church The Cleveland Chamber Music Society will present the Belcea Quartet in a concert featuring works by Mozart, Berg and Brahms. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
On Tuesday, September 23 at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights, the Han-Setzer-Finckel piano trio opened the Cleveland Chamber Music Society’s sixty-fifth season with a beautifully-structured and thrillingly-performed program of trios by Beethoven, Shostakovich and Mendelssohn that first beguiled you, then put you through an emotional wringer, and finally brought you cathartically back home again — with vivid memories of having made an eventful journey. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
We took advantage of a last-minute opportunity to chat on the phone with violinist Philip Setzer of the Han-Setzer-Finckel Trio on the morning before the ensemble’s performance on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series on Tuesday, September 23 at 7:30 pm at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The famous piano trio with no name of its own, consisting of pianist Wu Han, violinist Philip Setzer and cellist David Finckel, will launch the sixty-fifth season of the Cleveland Chamber Music Society at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights on Tuesday, September 23 at 7:30. The program will include Beethoven’s Trio in G, op. 1, no. 2, Shostakovich’s Trio No. 2 in e, op. 67 & Mendelssohn’s Trio in c, op. 66. A 6:30 pm pre-concert lecture will feature WCLV’s Robert Conrad in a talk entitled “Not Your Father’s Radio Station.”
by Daniel Hathaway
When you mostly present ensembles as portable as string quartets, what do you do when an ensemble requires a whole lot of percussion? In the case of the Cleveland Chamber Music Society and eighth blackbird, you move the concert to where the percussion lives — to Cleveland State University’s Waetjen Auditorium, where the celebrated new music sextet performed their acoustic program, “Still in Motion,” on Tuesday evening, April 29.
As season finales go, this was a doozy. eighth blackbird is famous for performing the unplayable and making thorny pieces engaging for audiences. As they rightly claim on their website, the ensemble “combines the finesse of a string quartet, the energy of a rock band and the audacity of a storefront theater company.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway & Mike Telin
Today, we complete our preview of eighth blackbird’s repertory for the ensemble’s program next Tuesday, April 29 at 7:30 in Waetjen Auditorium at Cleveland State University. Spokesman and flutist Tim Munro shares his personal reflections about pieces eighth blackbird will perform composed by Richard Parry, Brett Dean, and Steven Mackey.
Richard Parry: Duo for Heart and Breath
Canadian performer, composer and producer Richard Parry (left) is a core member of the indie band Arcade Fire. Duo is one of a series of works that connect the rhythms of the human body to musical performance.
Tim Munro: “Parry did not write this for us, although it is a very recent piece. We discovered it in a YouTube clip. One of the difficulties of being on the road so much is that we have to hear all of this fantastic new music second or third hand.
“It is an unspeakably beautiful piece. It is literally a duo for heart and breath. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway & Mike Telin
“Expect the unexpected,” eighth blackbird’s spokesman/flutist Tim Munro told our readers in the first of these previews, but he didn’t mean that patrons should go in uninformed. Today, Tim delves into the background of two of the pieces on the ensemble’s program next Tuesday, April 29 at 7:30 in Waetjen Auditorium at Cleveland State University.
The concert will begin with Bryce Dessner’s Murder Ballades, inspired by violent stories preserved in American folk music. The piece was written for and premiered by eighth blackbird in 2013 in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, where Dessner is a composer-in-residence at the Muziekgebouw.
Tim Munro: “We met Bryce six or seven years ago when he came to some of our concerts and we were quite taken with his music. He’s kind of a wildly famous rock star (he’s a member of the band The Nationals) as well as a classically trained musician (he has a master’s degree from Yale, where he studied classical guitar, flute and composition). He has an incredibly unique compositional voice that we were excited to take advantage of. And he was quite taken with this dark, dingy, strange world of the murder ballads. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
What does eighth blackbird flutist Tim Munro want audiences to know about their Cleveland Chamber Music Society program titled Still in Motion? “There are a lot of things that I love about this program, the surprising twists and turns that it takes. But I would say to expect the unexpected.”
On Tuesday, April 29 beginning at 7:30 in Waetjen Auditorium at Cleveland State University, eighth blackbird makes a return visit to the Chamber Music Society’s series with a concert that features Dessner’s Murder Ballade Suite, Johnson/Ligeti’s Counting Duets/Etudes, Parry’s Duet for Heart and Breath, Dean’s Sextet & Mackey’s Suite: Slide. A pre-concert lecture by Daniel Hathaway begins at 6:30.
Speaking by telephone from Philadelphia where the group serves as Ensemble in Residence at the Curtis Institute of Music, Munro said there is a duality implied in the concert’s title, Still in Motion. “Sometimes things can appear to be very still while requiring a lot of energy or requiring a lot of motion. It’s about the conjunction between those two things and the fight between those two things – the stillness and the motion. And no sooner are you lulled into a false sense of stillness and calmness, than the music takes you into another direction and moves you into motion. So the world of the concert is constantly shifting.The ground is constantly shifting under your feet.“ [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
For their second appearance on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series at Plymouth Church on April 8, the Pavel Haas Quartet scheduled two riveting twentieth-century works, Leos Janáček’s Quartet No. 1 and Benjamin Britten’s Quartet No. 2, followed by Beethoven’s “middle period” Quartet in e, op. 59, no. 2.
Founded in 2002 in Prague, the Haas Quartet retains two of its founding members, first violinist Veronika Jarůšková and violist Pavel Nikl. In an amusing swap soon afterward, the Haas Quartet traded cellists with the Škampa Quartet, thus musically reuniting Jarůšková with her husband, Peter Jarůšek. Second violinist Marek Zwiebel joined the ensemble in 2012, becoming the fourth person to occupy that position.
Changes in personnel are worth mentioning if only to marvel at the unanimity of approach such a quartet as the Pavel Haas can maintain as players come and go. Among the ensemble’s distinguishing characteristics is a visceral intensity that can be hair-raising in aggressive music but sustains itself even in quieter passages, along with finely managed dynamics and smooth, even crescendos and diminuendos. [Read more…]