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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Credit Opus 47 for inspiring the complete cycle of Beethoven’s violin sonatas that James Ehnes and Andrew Armstrong are touring this season to celebrate the composer’s 250th birthday.
As the Canadian-born violinist told us in a phone conversation last fall, he and his piano colleague once booked a studio in England to record a commissioned piece, but the work wasn’t ready yet. “The space, the recording engineer, and the producer were all on hold and we were faced with a whole day of dead time. What could we do to turn this into a useful day?”
Having performed Beethoven’s Ninth Sonata (the “Kreutzer”) quite frequently around that time, Ehnes proposed using that day to record it. “It’s never a bad idea to have a recording of the ‘Kreutzer,’ and we could figure out what to do with it later.”
What they did with it later was to record Beethoven’s Sixth Sonata and release the two sonatas on the same disc. “Some publications assumed that this was the start of a cycle,” Ehnes said, and that prediction came true when the violinist was looking for a way to mark the big anniversary of the composer’s birth in 2020. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Departing slightly but refreshingly from the time-honored pattern of classical era quartet + modern piece + major romantic work, the Dover Quartet brought a challenging but engaging contemporary quartet by David Bruce to the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series at Plymouth Church on December 3, prefacing it with an evanescent Britten quartet and following it with dependably sturdy Brahms. [Read more…]
by Jarrett Hoffman
On Tuesday, December 3 at 7:30 pm at Plymouth Church, the Dover Quartet will return to the Cleveland Chamber Music Society bearing a healthy, six-week-old piece of music by David Bruce alongside works by Britten and Brahms.
The group premiered Bruce’s The Lick Quartet in October on the Dallas Chamber Music Society, then played it again at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and the Stadthaus in Ulm, Germany. That makes this the fourth performance of the piece, and if you want to get geographic about it, the East-of-the-Mississippi U.S. premiere.
And about that title — it has nothing to do with anyone’s tongue, but rather it’s the word for a melodic fragment in jazz. According to Bruce’s notes on the piece, the term “lick” has become a cliché, an Internet meme, and an inside joke among musicians. But after he noticed the resemblance of a lick in his early sketches for the piece, he decided to challenge himself to use it unironically.
by David Kulma
Tuesday, October 22 was my second opportunity to hear the Jerusalem Quartet. This was their eighth appearance on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society’s concerts at Plymouth Church, and it’s no wonder they keep getting invited back. In an invigorating program of Mozart, Korngold, and Shostakovich, violinists Alexander Pavlovsky and Sergei Bresler, violist Ori Kam, and cellist Kyril Zlotnikov showed off this elegant quartet’s power and maturity. [Read more…]
by Jarrett Hoffman
Till Fellner last came to town in 2011 at the invitation of the Cleveland Chamber Music Society. The Austrian pianist returns to the series for a recital next Tuesday, November 12 at 7:30 pm in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Roger Klein will give a pre-concert lecture at 6:30 pm. Tickets are available online.
Fellner’s international career was launched when he won first prize at the Clara Haskil International Piano Competition in 1993. Since then, he has been a guest at major orchestras and music centers of Europe, the U.S., and Japan. Last season brought his debut with the London Symphony, and this season includes his second appearance with the Boston Symphony. He teaches at the Zurich Hochschule der Künste.
The pianist’s Chamber Music Society program is one part Schoenberg and two parts Schubert — who is among the composers Fellner admires most. As he told Kyle MacMillan last year in an interview for the Chicago Symphony’s CSO Sounds and Stories, “…it seems to me that Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert and Bach are so important, and it’s the most interesting music for me.”