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Preview: Cleveland Chamber Music Society: Young Artists Showcase—The Omer Quartet

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By Mike Telin

OmerQuartetcroppedFor the past six seasons the Cleveland Chamber Music Society has sponsored an outreach program that brings concerts to Cleveland area elementary school students. The program is designed to “stimulate interest in classical music, encourage aspiring musicians to share their enthusiasm, and develop chamber music lovers from childhood.” These concerts are presented by a young string quartet whose members are participants in the Intensive Quartet Seminar at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

In addition to presenting concerts in schools the selected quartet is invited to perform a concert on the CCMS series. For the second season, The Omer Quartet, Mason Yu and Erica Tursi, violins, Joseph LoCicero, viola, and Alexander Cox, cello, has been the chosen group and on Sunday, May 5th beginning at 7:00 pm in First Unitarian Church of Cleveland the young award-winning quartet will perform a concert featuring Mendelssohn’s Quartet in a, op. 13, and Janáček’s Quartet No. 1, “Kreutzer Sonata”. A Pre-concert interview with Costa Petridis begins at 6:15 pm. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Chamber Music Society — Quatuor ébène at Plymouth Church (April 16)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Quatuor-ebeneAnybody who thinks that string quartet concerts can be uneventful — or downright ennui-producing — should have heard the French bad boys who make up Quatuor ébène on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series at Plymouth Church on April 16. Pierre Colombet, Gabriel Le Magadure, Mathieu Herzog and Raphaël Merlin took mostly well-mannered quartets by Mozart and Mendelssohn out and gave them a hard ride. Either you hated their interpretations for their sheer wilfulness and distortion or you adored them for their sang-froid and cockiness. And then les garçons flipped a switch during intermission and turned into an astonishingly sophisticated pop/jazz group (chouette alors! — turn down the lights and break out the cabernet!)

You know it’s going to be an odd evening when the “dissonant” introduction to Mozart’s K. 465 quartet goes by without much of a ripple but the happy-sunny musical events that follow raise multiple eyebrows. [Read more…]

Preview: Cleveland Chamber Music Society: Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet to play formerly mechanized Mozart

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by Daniel Hathaway

BerlinPhilWWQWhen the excellent Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet plays the last regular season concert of the Cleveland Chamber Music Society at Plymouth Church on April 30 at 7:30, they’ll repeat the Pavel Haas Quintet they played here in 2010. The rest of the program will be devoted to music by Jean Françaix (Quintet No. 1), Czech composer Josef Bohuslav Foerster (Quintet in D, op. 95) and three curiosities by Mozart: the three Fantasies for mechanical organ, K. 594, K. 616 and K.608 as arranged by the quintet’s flutist, Michael Hasel, who studied the organ before he took up the flute.

Mankind has been fascinated with producing music by mechanical means since the middle ages, and a fine collection of its most clever inventions can be seen and heard at the Museum Spielklok (Musical Clock Museum) in the Dutch city of Utrecht, ranging from street organs to recording grand pianos to a device that cleverly plays multiple violins that lean into a circulating bow.

Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were all persuaded to write music for mechanical organs, Haydn for a real musical clock (thirty-two lovely miniatures), Beethoven (a potboiler, the Battle Symphony) for the “Panharmonium” built by Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, who invented the metronome. [Read more…]

Preview: Cleveland Chamber Music Society: Quatuor ébène — not your usual string quartet

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by Daniel Hathaway
Quatuor-ebeneIf you’re a regular Cleveland Chamber Music Society patron, you already know that the French ensemble Quatuor ébène is scheduled to cross the genre borders between Mozart & Mendelssohn and Jazz & Pop next Tuesday evening, April 16 at Plymouth Church, but don’t be surprised if the four young Frenchmen also break into song — as they charmingly do in this video of “Un jour mon prince viendra” from “Banche-neige et les sept nains” (somehow the brief Tide commercial fits right in with the Snow White theme).

The members of “The Ebony Quartet,” violinists Pierre Colombet and Gabriel Magadure, violist Mathieu Herzog and cellist Raphaël Merlin, got together as an ensemble in 1999, when they were students at the Conservatory in Boulogne-Billancourt on the west side of Paris. In the next decade and a half, the quartet won important awards and acquired a reputation for moving seamlessly between different musical genres. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland Chamber Music Society: Takács Quartet with Garrick Ohlsson at Plymouth Church (March 19)

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by Daniel Hathaway

TakacsQuartetSmReferring in a recent interview to the Brahms-Haydn-Brahms program the Takács String Quartet cooked up for their March 19 Cleveland Chamber Music Society concert with Garrick Ohlsson (and repeated the following evening at Lincoln Center), violist Geraldine Walther exclaimed, “Who would have thunk it! But it actually does work and it’s a really satisfying concert to hear.”

The unusually large crowd in Plymouth Church last Tuesday evening agreed enthusiastically with that assessment as the Takács and their distinguished piano colleague dug deeply into the structure and substance of Brahms’s Quartet in a, op. 51, no. 2, Piano Quintet in f, op. 34 and Haydn’s Quartet in B-flat, op. 76, no. 4, sculpting performances that rank among the most distinguished and compelling of the CCMS season to date.

The two Brahms works are fascinatingly dissimilar — the quartet lyrical but abstract, the quintet craggy and visceral. The Haydn — especially in the magical hands and bows of the Takács — provided a delicious entremet and made for just about as much fun as you could possibly have at a chamber music concert. [Read more…]

Chamber Music Society announces its 64th season

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CCMS-ribbon-200x200The Cleveland Chamber Music Society will present nine concerts during its 2013-2014 season at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights.

October 15, 2013: Susanna Phillips, soprano, Anne Marie McDermott, piano & Paul Neubauer, viola.

October 29: Cuarteto Casals with Manuel Barrueco, guitar.

December 3: the Daedalus Quartet.

February 4, 2014: the Albers Trio with Orion Weiss, piano.

March 17 & 18: the Takács Quartet (complete Bartók Quartets in two concerts).

April 8: the Pavel Haas Quartet. April 29: eighth blackbird at Waetjen Auditorium, CSU.

The date for a young artists showcase performance will be announced.

Preview: Cleveland Chamber Music Society — a conversation with Takács String Quartet violist Geraldine Walther

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by Daniel Hathaway

TakacsQuartetThe Takács String Quartet, originally formed in Budapest in 1975 and since 1986 in residence at the University of Colorado at Boulder, will return to the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series on Tuesday, March 19 at 7:30 at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights.

Pianist Garrick Ohlssohn will be the special guest for Brahms’s Piano Quintet in f, op. 34. Also on the program are Brahms’s Quartet in a, op. 51, no. 2 and Haydn’s Quartet in B-flat, op. 76, no. 4.

Compared to other long-standing groups, the membership of the Takács Quartet has been remarkably stable over its 38-year history. British violinist Edward Dusinberre took over the driver’s seat in 1993 and another British musician, Roger Tapping, replaced the original violist in 1994. Tapping was succeeded in 2005 by Geraldine Walther, who left her post as principal violist of the San Francisco Symphony to join the quartet. We spoke with Walther by phone in San Juan, Puerto Rico. [Read more…]

Preview: Cleveland Chamber Music Society: a conversation with Takács String Quartet violist Geraldine Walther

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by Daniel Hathaway

 

The TakácsWALTHER-Geraldine String Quartet, originally formed in Budapest in 1975 and since 1986 in residence at the University of Colorado at Boulder, will return to the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series on Tuesday, May 19 at 7:30 at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights.

 

Pianist Garrick Ohlssohn will be the special guest for Brahms’s Piano Quintet in f, op. 34. Also on the program are Brahms’s Quartet in a, op. 51, no. 2 and Haydn’s Quartet in B-flat, op. 76, no. 4.

 

Compared to other long-standing groups, the membership of the Takács Quartet has been remarkably stable over its 38-year history. British violinist Edwin Dusinberre took over the driver’s seat in 1993 and another British musician, Roger Tapping, replaced the original violist in 1994. Tapping was succeeded in 2005 by Geraldine Walther, who left her post as principal violist of the San Francisco Symphony to join the quartet. We spoke with Walther by phone in San Juan, Puerto Rico. [Read more…]

Review: Oberlin Artist Recital Series: Steven Isslerlis & Jeremy Denk at Finney Chapel (February 5)

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by Daniel Hathaway

The Isserlis-Denkglobetrotting British cellist Steven Isserlis recently passed through Northeast Ohio twice in eight days, performing with Kyrill Gerstein on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society Series on January 29 (our review appears here) and joining his fellow Oberlin alumnus Jeremy Denk on the Oberlin Artist Recital Series in Finney Chapel on February 5 (popping off to Chicago and New York for concerts and masterclasses in between). What’s even better than hearing Isserlis perform twice on successive Tuesdays is hearing him play two very different, superbly constructed programs with two equally fine partners.

In Cleveland, Isserlis built his program around both of Brahms’s sonatas, separated by Liszt’s own arrangements of early songs and prefaced by Bartók’s First Rhapsody and Busoni’s Finnish folk song variations. In Oberlin, he drew back the curtains on what could have been a typical chamber music concert in Paris during the Belle époque — that brief cultural golden age between the 1870s and the first World War — including two out-of-period works that fit right into the spirit of the occasion.  [Read more…]

Review: CCMS: Steven Isserlis & Kirill Gerstein at Plymouth Church (January 29)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Isserlis-GersteinChamber music recitals all too often follow the Chinese menu approach — one piece from Column A, one from Column B… Not so with the program the British cellist Steven Isserlis and Russian-born pianist Kirill Gerstein are touring with this month, which is fascinating for its choices and clever in its ordering of pieces. And this pair of musicians, who got together by accident but seem perfectly suited for one another, put it across brilliantly to the large Cleveland Chamber Music Society audience at Plymouth Church on Monday evening, an intergenerational crowd infused with young cellists, pianists and chamber musicians.

Here was the ground plan: both of Brahms’s cello sonatas, early and late, introduced by short pieces by Bartók and Busoni based on folk music and separated by two of Liszt’s late cello arrangements of his earlier songs. Liszt the revolutionary and Brahms the conservative didn’t get along at all during their lifetimes, but seemed as happily at ease with their proximity here as did Gerstein’s high-tech tablet computer (no page turner needed!) and Isserlis’s retro, gut-wound cello strings.  [Read more…]

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