by Jeremy Reynolds
In 1935, Frances Bolton acquired the Cleveland Museum of Art’s first film projector and began hosting screenings of works by prominent filmmakers. Now, 80 years later, the program is still going strong, with around 90 annual screenings of historic and avant-garde movies alike. According to the Museum’s website, the program is one of the oldest in the nation, and it continues to draw thousands of patrons over the course of the year.
On Friday evening, June 19, a modest crowd gathered in Morley Lecture Hall in the Museum. A projection screen hangs in the front of the hall, with speakers dotted around the room to provide an optimal surround sound experience. At precisely 7:00 pm, the lights dimmed and the night’s program began, though latecomers continued to trickle in. [Read more…]
Born in Romania, displaced by the Nazis, educated in Hungary, and finally settling first in Vienna then in Germany after the 1956 Hungarian revolution, György Ligeti spent a lot of his life on the move. Musically nomadic as well, he chased after a number of different compositional styles. Two of Ligeti’s pieces composed thirty years apart formed the backbone of the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble’s arresting program in Gartner Auditorium of the Cleveland Museum of Art on Saturday afternoon, April 11. 
Since their founding in 2008, the Mivos Quartet have quickly established themselves as leading interpreters of the contemporary classical string quartet literature. On Saturday, March 28 at Transformer Station, the Mivos proved exactly why that is during their hour-long program featuring works by Mincek, Stauning and Lachenmann. Never has a concert consisting almost exclusively of extended techniques felt so much like a meal of comfort food. 
The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Performing Arts Series continues on Wednesday, April 8th at 7:30 pm with a concert by pipa virtuoso Wu Man in Gartner Auditorium. “I’m sure that people who are coming to the concert are prepared to listen to something they are not familiar with,” Wu Man said during a telephone conversation from Knoxville, Tennessee, where she was performing at the Big Ears Festival along with her longtime collaborators, the Kronos Quartet.
The a cappella vocal group Roomful of Teeth made a big roomful of noise at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium on Friday, March 20 before a large, enthusiastic audience. This remarkable group, founded in 2009, has won a Grammy for their 2012 eponymous first album, and one of the major works on the program, Partita for 8 voices by member Caroline Shaw, won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for music. 
An inspiring moment in our travels prompts many of us to write in our journals, or for the more ambitious, to create a travelogue. For Swiss flutist Matthias Ziegler, it resulted in the reinventing of his flute, enabling him to perform the sounds that he heard on an exotic instrument in a foreign place. His brainchildren were on display in a concert of original works at Transformer Station on Thursday, March 12 as part of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Performing Arts Series. 
Although