by Daniel Hathaway
The Cleveland Chamber Music Society’s concert brochure presents information about its seven-concert season, neatly organized to include one concert each month, and all of them scheduled for Tuesday evenings.
This season, the Society has invited the Belcea Quartet, the Danish String Quartet, the Takács Quartet with pianist Marc-André Hamelin, cellist Steven Isserlis with pianist Connie Shih, the Pavel Haas Quartet, tenor Matthew Polenzani with pianist Julius Drake, and solo pianist Garrick Ohlsson to perform at Disciples Church in Cleveland Heights.
How did this series of concerts come together? We went right to the source, programming committee chair Steve Somach, for insights into the selection process. We spoke this week by phone.
Daniel Hathaway: I thought it would be interesting to write an article about how CCMS puts a season together, especially since you’ve got over twenty people on your board.
Steve Somach: That’s for sure.
DH: It’s always like solving a jigsaw puzzle, but I think in your case, it’s kind of a special one. [Read more…]
Clarinetist Anthony McGill brought star power to the Cleveland Chamber Music Society on March 28. In a concert that was all about singing — that, in fact, included two pieces with soprano — McGill stood out as the most prominent voice.
“First is the worst, second is the best…” It may not be the most profound of old sayings, but there might just be some slight bit of wisdom — I said 
Every once in a while, a concertgoer is treated to an evening where all of the hoped-for elements are in place: the playing is first-rate, the performers exude warmth and ease, the audience is engaged, the program is a mix of familiar and unusual — in other words, a concert with Carnegie Hall electricity but summer festival 
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, 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.