by Daniel Hathaway
The Intergalactic Scheduling Office that normally takes care of bringing planets and other heavenly bodies into conjunction without causing head-on collisions has messed up big time.
On Tuesday, November 15 at 7:30 pm, the Jupiter Quartet, formed in Northeast Ohio, will celebrate its 20th anniversary with a return to the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series at Plymouth Church where it last appeared in 2015. On the same date at the same hour, the Oberlin Artist Recital Series will bring ACRONYM, the Baroque string band formed by Oberlin Conservatory alumni, back to campus for the first time since its founding a decade ago in 2012.
What is a conflicted audience member to do? In order to encourage a bit more scientific solution than flipping a coin, ClevelandClassical.com has spoken with Jupiter Quartet cellist Daniel McDonough and ACRONYM cellist Kivie Cahn-Lipman, both founding members of their ensembles, to find out what’s in store at Plymouth Church and Warner Concert Hall on Tuesday.
I caught up with Daniel McDonough in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, who was walking his sons to a park where his 5-year-old would meet up with a friend and Daniel and his older son were going to kick a soccer ball around in celebration of the great fall weather. [Read more…]
On Tuesday, October 18, London’s Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble will return to the Cleveland Chamber Music Series at Plymouth Church in Shaker Square to play works by Purcell, Brahms, and Enesco.
St. Martin’s has shared its real estate with the monument to Admiral Horatio Nelson after the Battle of Trafalgar in 1808, with the National Gallery of Art, completed in 1838, and until their eviction at the turn of the 21st century, with a flock of 35,000 feral pigeons, not to mention protesters demonstrating en masse for multiple causes (like the 100,000 Pakistanis who poured into Trafalgar Square one Sunday in the 1970s when I decided to visit St. Martin’s for the first time).
After more than a decade spent together as an ensemble, Wu Han, Philip Setzer, and David Finckel have become very familiar with certain pieces. And they’re determined to make sure those works only get better with age. On September 13, the pianist, violinist, and cellist opened the 73rd season of the Cleveland Chamber Music Society with a staple in their repertory — Franz Schubert’s two piano trios.
When you’ve been booking visiting chamber ensembles for seven decades, you develop some special relationships that regularly bring audience favorites back to town.
In March of 2010, we interviewed each of the musicians prior to their performance of Schubert trios on the CCMS series at Fairmount Temple Auditorium. We reached David Finckel in Vienna, Wu Han in New York between rehearsals, and spoke with Philip Setzer soon after he returned from Europe.
Having discovered surprisingly little overlap between their mailing lists, Cleveland’s two main purveyors of chamber music decided to bring their followers together on April 5 to enjoy a joint concert at the Maltz Performing Arts Center.
Lawrence Brownlee was still in master-class mode when he visited the Cleveland Chamber Music Society on April 26. The star tenor, born and raised in Youngstown, brought an educational element to his recital at the Maltz Performing Arts Center.
If you were assembling an all-star chamber group, you couldn’t do much better than the Rosamunde String Quartet. The ensemble — a passion project for its members, who play in the string sections of some of the world’s top orchestras most of the year — visited the Cleveland Chamber Music Society on March 15.
Examining the mailing lists of an arts organization can reveal a lot. First and foremost that list tells you who is attending the events. And when comparing the mailing lists of two like-minded organizations, for example ones devoted to chamber music, one would expect to find more than a fair amount of overlap.
Cleveland Chamber Music Society has recently had to deal with more than its fair share of postponements and cancellations, but when Cuarteto Casals cut short their U.S. Tour last month due to a medical emergency, the Society was lucky to be able to field a replacement.