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CIM Young Composers Program: a conversation with Jessie Montgomery

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By Mike Telin

“I’m very excited to be part of the CIM summer community,” Grammy Award-winning composer, violinist, and educator Jessie Montgomery said during a recent conversation.

From June 22 through 27, Montgomery will serve as the creative partner for CIM’s Young Composers Program — a five-day intensive for emerging composers consisting of personalized lessons, masterclasses, and workshops with Montgomery, as well as with CIM faculty.

The 2025 program is open to composers ages 12-17 in the Young Innovators division, and ages 18-28 in the Next Gen division. Applications are being accepted now through March 24. Click here for more information.

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Ravel at 150: a conversation with Antonio Pompa-Baldi

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by Mike Telin

Born on March 7, 1875, Maurice Ravel without question is one of the most popular French composers to date. He is admired for his attention to form and craftsmanship and for his masterful orchestration. Although he is frequently associated with Impressionism, he famously rejected the term.

On Friday, March 21 at 7:30 pm in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music, pianist Antonio Pompa-Baldi will present “Ravel at 150: A Celebration.” The program will feature the composer’s Gaspard de la nuit and the Piano Trio in a, as well as Roberto Piana’s Ravel en Rêve. The evening will also include the world premiere of Luca Moscardi’s Theme and Variations on the name Maurice Ravel. The program is presented as part of CIM’s Insiders Series. The concert is free, but reservations are required.

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CIM Opera: all smiles in L’Étoile (Nov. 17)

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by Stephanie Manning

A black box theater might not be the first-choice location for an opera — but with a clever creative team, a smaller production can still get big results. Audiences at the Westfield Studio Theater on November 17 know this firsthand thanks to the Cleveland Institute of Music Opera Theater’s scaled-down L’Étoile, which came wrapped in a bundle of laughs and topped with a ribbon of genuine heart.

It’s true that the Playhouse Square venue — the CIM company’s temporary home while their primary hall is under construction — wasn’t ideal. Interrupted sightlines, occasional volume disparities, and the lack of a proper curtain simply had to be par for the course. But artistic director JJ Hudson’s choice of a comedic opera, especially one that relies on spoken dialogue and physical comedy as heavily as this one by Emmanuel Chabrier, was the perfect decision. [Read more…]

Quince Ensemble at CIM: patience pays off (Oct. 16)

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by Stephanie Manning

The Quince Ensemble doesn’t specialize in instant gratification. The vocal quartet likes “slow music,” as soprano Amanda DeBoer Bartlett has explained in interviews, and she repeated that sentiment onstage on October 16. “Not slow in tempo, but slow in development.”

That ethos can also form the arc of entire programs, as Quince demonstrated to its audience at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Before the concert in Mixon Hall reached its apex with Courtney Bryan’s Requiem, the quartet built up to the finale by demonstrating just what their voices can do.
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Wild Up at CIM: graphic scores & Julius Eastman

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by Mike Telin

On the homepage of the new music ensemble Wild Up, you’re met with this description of who they are: “We’re Wild Up. We’re a band. An experiment in its second decade. We make shows, and records. We tell stories and make projects that live somewhere between new music and theater and performance art and pop.”

On Sunday, March 24 at 7:30 pm in Mixon Hall, the CIM Perspectives series will present the new music and composer collective Wild Up. Their program includes works by Raven Cachon, inti figgis-vizueta, Jürg Frey, Felipe Lara, and Julius Eastman. The concert is free but seating passes are required.

I caught up with artistic director and conductor Christopher Roundtree (pictured) by phone and began the conversation by asking him to talk me through the group’s program.

Raven Chacon’s Whistle Quartet

We all love Raven, and Whistle Quartet is beautiful. It’s a graphic score with simple instructions. It says the first player should use a very small whistle to create a musical line of their choosing that responds to the score. And then another player comes in and tries to replicate that line as accurately as possible, followed by a third person, then a fourth person, and so on.

Raven’s scores are beautiful to look at, and his Zitkála-Šá score was in the 2022 Whitney Biennial.

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Stewart Goodyear to make Cleveland debut at CIM

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by Mike Telin

“This will be my first time in Cleveland,” Canadian pianist and composer Stewart Goodyear said by phone from Toronto, where he serves as Artist in Residence at the Royal Conservatory. “Toronto is so close, I don’t know why it took me so long, but I am excited about my visit.”

Goodyear will make his Cleveland debut on Wednesday, November 8 at 7:30 pm in Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Hall. The program will include works by J.S. Bach, Beethoven, Clara Schumann, and Goodyear himself. The concert is part of CIM’s Perspective Series. The event is free but reservations are required.

How did this debut come about? “I just received a call from the Cleveland Institute of Music asking me if I would be interested in doing a mini residency that would be a combination of lessons, a lecture, and a recital.”

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Come As You Are —
Banks & Bjerken at CIM

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by Jarrett Hoffman

In one way, saxophonist-composer Steven Banks’ Come As You Are is straightforward: it’s about family, and it’s about church. Its movements are dedicated to his mother and three sisters, and inspired by their favorite spirituals and works of sacred music.

In another way, the piece — which will conclude his free program with pianist Xak Bjerken on October 5 at 7:30 pm in Mixon Hall at CIM, where Banks is a visiting faculty member — is about something more abstract: a merging of different parts of his identity that previously didn’t feel as if they could coexist.

“As a classical musician, the vast majority of my colleagues have little knowledge or understanding of Black culture or how it influences my music-making,” Banks writes in his program note from 2021, when he performed the piece as part of his Young Concert Artists debut recital. “As a Black man from North Carolina, many of my family and friends don’t have a true sense of what I do and love as a classical performer and composer. I have also spent an incredible amount of time and energy on keeping these worlds separate and trying to show up in each as if the other didn’t exist.”

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Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival: 
a recital by Hao Yang (June 4)

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by Mike Telin

The presentation of young and emerging artists has always been a priority for the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival. And for Festival followers it’s an opportunity to be made aware of young guitarists, and then watch them mature as musicians.   

In 2017 CICGF introduced Cleveland audiences to Hao Yang (China). “[She] attended two years ago as a student [and] impressed everyone with the way that she played in the master classes,” Festival founder and artistic director Armin Kelly recalled during an interview that year with this publication. 

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Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival: the Patterson-Sutton Duo (June 4)

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by Mike Telin

The best chamber music performances are the ones where the synergy of the players is so captivating that you simply sit back, relax, and let yourself get lost in the music. Such was the case when the Patterson-Sutton Duo — Kimberly Patterson (cello) and Patrick Sutton (guitar) — made a return visit to the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival on Sunday afternoon, June 4.

With the spring sunshine flowing through the windows of the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Hall, the Duo led listeners down a path of musical delights drawn from the late 20th and 21st centuries. 

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Jason Vieaux opens the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival (June 1)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

On Thursday, June 1 at the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Hall, guitarist Jason Vieaux opened the 2023 Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival with a sparkling display, mixing assured technique with an impressively broad guitar ethos. In a program stretching from Albéniz to Metheny, Vieaux acquitted himself with ease and authority, setting a high bar for every festival recital to follow.

The night began with one of Andrés Segovia’s favorite works, Albéniz’s Torre Bermeja, a short piano piece that, in the hands of a skilled player like Vieaux at least, seems more suited to the guitar. His touch throughout was light, particularly in the repeated sixteenth-note triplets, which imparted buoyancy and optimism. 

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