by Mike Telin
Each year, the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Performing Arts Series engages Northeast Ohio audiences with a roster of innovative performers and ensembles representing a myriad of musical genres. Last season, the Museum’s director of performing arts, Tom Welsh (left), presented a diverse lineup that included performances by the Calder Quartet, Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, Ragamala Dance and Rudresh Mahanthappa, Mivos Quartet, Roomful of Teeth, and pipa virtuoso Wu Man.
On Sunday, January 10, at the Westin New York in Times Square during Chamber Music America’s National Conference, The Cleveland Museum of Art will be honored with the CMA/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming in the category of Large Presenter, Mixed Repertory. The award, which includes $500 plus a commemorative plaque, will be presented by Cia Toscanini, vice president of concert music, American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). Welsh will be receiving the award on behalf of the Museum. [Read more…]
James Feddeck, former assistant conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra, played an ambitious and enjoyable organ program Sunday afternoon, December 6, on the Holtkamp instrument in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The annual Holiday Circlefest was taking place simultaneously all over University Circle, so the museum was swarming with visitors, some of whom stopped in for part of the recital. Feddeck, an alumnus of the Oberlin Conservatory, might be described as an over-achiever, having studied piano, oboe, organ, and conducting at Oberlin. He now mostly travels the world as a guest conductor of many notable orchestras. 
Former Cleveland Orchestra assistant conductor James Feddeck will return to perform in Cleveland this Sunday, but he’s leaving his baton at home this time. Feddeck will play a free organ recital in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art on December 6 at 2:00 pm, using one the other musical tools he honed at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he simultaneously studied oboe, piano, and conducting along with organ.
Impressionism provides a unique intersection between visual art and music. You can draw parallels between what composers were writing and artists were painting in other periods — baroque, romantic, modernist — but “aha” moments come with remarkable spontaneity when you put Debussy and Monet side by side. It’s like art you can hear, and music you can see.
Hailed as “…one of America’s most satisfying — and most enterprising — quartets,” by the Los Angeles Times, the Calder Quartet, Benjamin Jacobson and Andrew Bulbrook, violins, Jonathan Moerschel, viola, and Eric Byers, cello, is an ensemble of distinction. The Quartet returns to the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Performing Arts Series on Monday, November 16 at 7:30 pm with a performance at Transformer Station. The program will include works by Bjarnason, Britten, and Beethoven.
The plangent sounds of Merima Ključo’s accordion, combined with an arsenal of musical effects from pianist Seth Knopp and evocative video art by Bart Woodstrup, told the affecting saga of a medieval Jewish prayer book last Wednesday evening in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art. 
“Nobody who comes to the performance will regret it. I promise,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks exclaimed during a telephone conversation. On Wednesday, October 28 at 7:30, the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Performing Arts Series will continue with Merima Ključo’s “The Sarajevo Haggadah: Music of the Book,” a multimedia work for accordion, piano, and video. The piece traces the story of a precious Jewish prayer book’s journey from medieval Spain to 20th-century Bosnia — where it was hidden and rescued during World War II — to its restoration by the National Museum in Sarajevo after the 1992-1995 war.
When you go to one of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s concerts at Transformer Station in Hingetown on Cleveland’s near West Side, expect to hear music as edgy and provocative as the art on the walls (and just as hip: the current exhibition from the collection of the Akron Art Museum dispenses with wall tags in favor of elucidation from your smart phone). The performance on Friday, September 25, the second of three concerts by featured performer Ellen Fullman and cellist Theresa Wong, fit that m.o. perfectly.