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Imani Winds embrace modernity in season opener for the Cleveland Chamber Music Society

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by Stephanie Manning

This season, even more than usual, Imani Winds is booked and busy. Rescheduled concerts from last year, combined with new additions to their schedule, promise a season full of travel and performances. “It’s a lot of making up for lost time,” bassoonist Monica Ellis said in a recent interview. “We’re just grateful that we’re able to be back and have live performances again, in one way or another.”

One performance relocated from 2020 is the Imani’s visit to the Cleveland Chamber Music Society on Tuesday, October 5 in CIM’s Mixon Hall. The 7:30 pm performance will be preceded by a 6:30 lecture by Chris Jenkins. Click here for tickets.

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CCMS: Ehnes and Armstrong finally get to wrap up their Beethoven cycle

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by Daniel Hathaway

Blissfully unaware of what was to come, on September 10, 2019, I wrote:

The Cleveland Chamber Music Society will take a bit of a different tack for its 70th Anniversary Season in 2019-2020. Violinist James Ehnes and pianist Andrew Armstrong will appear in three of the nine concerts, performing Beethoven’s complete Sonatas for violin and piano, a series that will be presented at the Maltz Performing Arts Center in University Circle on September 17, January 14 (pictured), and April 21.

As we now know, Ehnes and Armstrong had only completed two of their three programs before the novel coronavirus roared into town in March of 2020, causing widespread cancellations and postponements.

The final concert in their Beethoven series will now serve as the finale for CCMS’ 71st season on Tuesday, May 18 at 7:30 pm. The program includes Beethoven’s Sonata No. 8 in G, Op. 30, No. 3, Sonata No. 7 in c, Op. 30, No. 2, and Sonata No. 10 in G, Op. 96.

Tickets for the in-person concert at St. Paschal Baylon in Highland Heights are available online, and the Society is also offering a free live stream of the event. [Read more…]

Cleveland Chamber Music Society:
Junction Trio in person & online

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by Jarrett Hoffman

When you think of famous, old-school musicians, a certain invincibility comes to mind, but also a distance. So it’s refreshing when today’s virtuosos not only match or exceed the abilities of their predecessors, but also reveal without any hint of pretense that they’re human.

That was my experience last week when I met over Zoom with the New York City-based Junction Trio, made up of violinist Stefan Jackiw, cellist Jay Campbell, and pianist Conrad Tao, who individually have all been awarded Avery Fisher Career Grants, to name just one of their honors.

The basis of our conversation was their upcoming program for the Cleveland Chamber Music Society: works by Beethoven, Charles Ives, and John Zorn which they’ll share in person at Saint Paschal Baylon in Highland Heights on Tuesday, May 11 at 7:30 pm, in addition to offering a free livestream (tickets and information here).

But they also provided a glimpse into the psychological and even the vulnerable side of performing. Perhaps there’s no better place to start than with the process of “auditioning” for a chamber music group.

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CCMS: CMS Front Row National
features clarinetist David Shifrin

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Through a partnership with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Cleveland Chamber Music Society is offering the steamed CMS Front Row National series free of charge.

The latest such program, which premiered on January 29 and remains available through today, February 2, centers around clarinetist David Shifrin. It ties together three performances from the past five years at two Lincoln Center venues, including one outing that’s truly in the can’t-miss category.

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Bennewitz Quartet replaces its CCMS concert with splendid video

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by Daniel Hathaway

When the pandemic kicked the Bennewitz Quartet’s performance off the Cleveland Chamber Music Society calendar in November, the presenter and the ensemble arrived at a clever alternative to simply cancelling or postponing the event.

The musicians agreed to record a full concert in Prague exclusively for CCMS. That video is available for free beginning today on the “Safe With Sound” page of the Society’s website. In addition to luminous performances of works by Haydn, Schulhoff, and Beethoven, the recording includes insightful questions from Safe With Sound artistic director Eric Charnofsky and astute responses by second violinist Štěpán Ježek.

Ježek greets viewers at the beginning from the chamber music hall of the Prague Spring Festival, before joining his colleagues Jakub Fišer (first violin), Jiří Pinkas (viola), and Štěpán Doležal (cello) in Haydn’s Quartet in G, Op. 17/5. That delightful work, largely dominated by the loquacious first violin, immediately introduces the special skills of the players: graceful accents, chains of subtleties, and perfect ensemble even in tricky rhythmic situations. [Read more…]

Cleveland Chamber Music Society: Chanticleer in “Trade Winds” (March 3)

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by Daniel Hathaway

The Cleveland Chamber Music Society sailed into relatively uncharted waters on March 3, hosting the Bay Area male vocal ensemble Chanticleer in “Trade Winds.” This musical voyage took its name from a triptych by Zhou Tian, part of a varied program that called in at multiple ports for Italian madrigals, settings of Ave Maris stella (“Hail Mary, Star of the Sea”), an Edwardian part song, a Portuguese Mass, songs from the Pacific, and English sea shanties. [Read more…]

Chanticleer brings Trade Winds to Cleveland Chamber Music Society

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by Jarrett Hoffman

“In a way, we’re the most blissfully portable ensemble around,” Chanticleer music director William Fred Scott said by telephone from his home in Atlanta. “We don’t need microphones, we don’t need a piano, we don’t even need music stands.” If the 12-member male chorus had a superhero catchphrase, it might be what Scott said next, with the obligatory baby tagged on at the end: “All we need is a nice acoustic and we’re ready to go.”

The resonant Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights ought to do the trick. As part of an extensive tour away from its home base of San Francisco, Chanticleer will make its debut on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society Series on Tuesday, March 3 at 7:30 pm at Plymouth. David Rothenberg will give a pre-concert lecture at 6:30 pm, and tickets are available online.

The program, Trade Winds, was “kind of a no-brainer for us this particular year,” Scott said. It’s themed around global travel, fitting for Chanticleer’s presence on the Pacific and for the ensemble’s schedule this season: in July, they head to Oceania for their debut in New Zealand and their first trip to Australia since 1997. [Read more…]

Apollon Musagète Quartet on CCMS Series (Feb. 4)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Today’s touring string quartets hew to so uniformly high a standard that it’s often little individual touches that make ensembles stand out. The Polish musicians who make up the Apollon Musagète Quartet showed up at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights for their debut on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series on February 4 in matching plaid suits and black shirts. And jettisoning their jackets, they played standing (except for the cellist). [Read more…]

Welcoming the Apollon Musagète Quartet to the Cleveland Chamber Music Society

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by Daniel Hathaway

Founded in Vienna in 2006 by four young Polish musicians, the Apollon Musagète Quartet will visit the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights on Tuesday, February 4 at 7:30 pm.

Violinists Paweł Zalejski and Bartosz Zachłod, violist Piotr Szumieł, and cellist Piotr Skweres, now on a multi-city tour of North America, will bookend their program with Haydn’s Quartet in D, Op. 64, No. 5, “Lark,” and Dvořák’s Quartet in A-flat, Op. 105. Following their custom of featuring at least one work by a Polish composer on each of their concerts, the Quartet will center their program with Krzysztof Penderecki’s Quartet No. 3, “Leaves from an unwritten diary.”

Written only two years after Apollon Musagète was formed — and named after Apollo ‘The Inspirer of the Muses’ — Penderecki’s third quartet marked the composer’s first foray into chamber music in four decades. As Peter Lakí writes in his program notes for the February 4 concert, “Penderecki rarely gives his works programmatic subtitles. The fact that he chose to do so in this case shows that this quartet meant something special to him.” [Read more…]

Ehnes & Armstrong in second of three CCMS concerts (Jan. 14)

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by Daniel Hathaway

When a pianist is performing center stage and seating is open, audiences tend to drift toward the keyboard side of the auditorium to get a good view of the performer’s hands. I like to head toward stage left, the better to catch the expressions on the pianist’s face. That paid off on Tuesday evening, January 14 on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society’s series at the Maltz Performing Arts Center when violinist James Ehnes and pianist Andrew Armstrong continued their progress through Beethoven’s complete sonatas. Per il Clavicembalo o Forte-Piano con un Violino is how the first edition subtitled them, making it clear that if the pianist isn’t the major actor, the two instruments are at least equal partners in this musical enterprise. [Read more…]

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