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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

by

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…]

Preview: Cleveland Chamber Music Society: The Juilliard String Quartet— ten minutes with the ensemble’s new first violinist, Joseph Lin

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by Daniel Hathaway

TouringJuilliard-SQ string quartets seem to change first violinists a bit more often than second violinists, violists and cellists, but the Juilliard String Quartet may have established a record: three different individuals have sat in its driver’s seat in the last fifteen years.

When Robert Mann, one of the quartet’s founders in 1946, decided to retire in 1997, second violinist Joel Smirnoff moved up a chair. After Smirnoff left to become president of the Cleveland Institute of Music in 2008, Nicholas Eanet, one of the concertmasters of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, was chosen to take his place. Ebullient at receiving the good news about his appointment, Eanet went inline skating in Central Park and broke his wrist — while trying to avoid an accident. Though the wrist healed in record time, Eanet withdrew a year later for unrelated health reasons. Joseph Lin took his place in November of 2011. [Read more…]

Conversations with David Finckel, Wu Han and Philip Setzer

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by Daniel Hathaway

David Finckel, Wu Han & Philip Setzer

The trio with no name, but made up of three eminent musicians (violinist Philip Setzer, cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han) plays Schubert Trios on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series on Tuesday, March 23 at Fairmount Temple Auditorium. Finckel and Setzer play in the Emerson Quartet; Finkel and Wu Han are husband and wife, owners of the recording company ArtistLed and co-artistic directors both of Chamber Music at Lincoln Center and Music at Menlo in California. Their Schubert tour derived from an ArtistLed recording project. Due to their busy schedules, we spoke with the trio in three different conversations. We reached David Finckel in Vienna, Wu Han in New York between rehearsals, and spoke with Philip Setzer soon after he returned from Europe.

DAVID FINCKEL

DH: I just read the interview the three of you had with Classical Archives’ artistic director Nolan Gasser in February, and you touched on every subject I could possibly think to ask you about!

DF: That was quite some interview, wasn’t it.

DH: It must have taken some time to do, but I’ll try to find some interesting questions for you. First off, congratulations on the 13th anniversary of ArtistLed. How is the company doing in the current economic climate?

DF: Fine, because our decimal point is in another place. We manage to make ends meet because we have a loyal following. We keep our costs low without having it affect quality at all and we always manage to recoup our expenses through the sales of the recordings, which I think is the golden rule. So as long as we can do that, we can just keep going ahead and making more recordings.
[Read more…]

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