by Jarrett Hoffman
Some performers like to talk to the audience during a concert, providing insight into the program, inviting them to get up and dance, or maybe just shooting the breeze. Last Sunday night, October 26, on the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Performing Arts Series at Transformer Station in Ohio City, Vietnamese traditional performer and composer Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ took audience participation a step further. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Musicians who are inclined to talk to the audience during concerts should take their lead from Timothy Weiss. On Saturday afternoon in Gartner Auditorium of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the director of the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble gave cogent and dryly humorous introductions to music by Luke Bedford, Philip Cashian and Morton Feldman, and conducted a brief, impromptu interview with composer Sean Shepherd. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
John Luther Adams’s Veils and Vesper, a cycle of electronic works composed in 2005, will end its two-month run next weekend at the newly restored Historic St. John’s Episcopal Church in Ohio City. A slow-moving, “immersive sound installation,” Veils and Vesper lasts six hours and allows the listener to “create her own mix by moving through the space.” The installation launched this year’s edition of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Performing Arts Series.
The remaining visiting hours are on Friday, November 7 and Saturday, November 8 from 12 Noon to 6:00 pm. Admission is free. St. John’s is located at 2600 Church Avenue (off West 25th Street near the western end of the Detroit-Superior Bridge). Read a CMA blog post and watch a short video here.
by Mike Telin
In his introduction to Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ’s January of 2014 tiny desk concert, NPR music producer, Tom Huizenga wrote: “Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ is a veteran when it comes to taking risks, and it pays off in her compelling music.
“As a young girl in Vietnam, she knew she wanted to be a traditional musician, even though it was a world dominated by men. It was risky, then, when she pestered a master teacher for three years to give her lessons. He finally gave in, taking her on as an apprentice.”
On Sunday, October 26 at 7:30 pm in the Transformer Station, The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Performing Arts Series will present the masterful player of the 16-string “dan Tranh”—a zither with moveable bridges — and the pitch-bending monochord, dan Bau. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Having birthed such first-rate new music ensembles as eighth blackbird and ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble), the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble has been long overdue for it own regular presence in Cleveland. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
This weekend the Cleveland Museum of Art Performing Arts series will begin its new season with two events featuring the music of 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams.
On Saturday, September 20 beginning at 7:00 pm in Historic St. John’s Episcopal Church in Ohio City, The Alaskan-based composer will discuss Veils and Vesper, two distinct but related electronic soundscapes that create an immersive listening experience over a period of six hours. The evening includes a “sneak preview” of the work followed by a meet-and-greet reception. The event is free and all are welcome. Audiences can experience Veils and Vesper on Fridays and Saturdays from 12:00 noon to 6:00pm beginning on Friday, September 26. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Two sound extravaganzas by environmental composer and Pulitzer prizewinner John Luther Adams will launch the 2014-2015 Performing Arts Series of the Cleveland Museum of Art — though not at the museum.
Veils and Vesper, a cycle of electronic works composed in 2005, will begin a two-month run on Saturday, September 20 at the newly restored Historic St. John’s Episcopal Church in Ohio City. A slow-moving, “immersive sound installation,” Veils and Vesper lasts six hours and allows the listener to “create her own mix by moving through the space”. Visiting hours through December 1 are Wednesdays through Saturdays from Noon to 5:00 pm and Thursdays from Noon to 8:00 pm. Admission is free
Adam’s second contribution to the series is Inuksuit, a 2009 daylong site-specific work devised for nine to 99 percussionists to be dispersed over a wide outdoor area, in this case Lakeview Cemetery, and inspired by “the Stonehenge-like markers used by the Inuit and other native peoples to orient themselves in Arctic spaces.” The free performance begins at 2:00 pm on Sunday, September 21. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
Since making her debut at age eleven as a surprise guest soloist with the New York Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta in 1982, violinist Midori has become recognized as a master musician and a devoted and gifted educator. In addition to her many achievements as a performer, Midori is an active music educator for underserved communities. She runs several successful programs that have reached hundreds of thousands of children since the early 1990s, especially at New York public schools.
On Saturday, April 12 at 7:30 pm in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium, violinist Midori will be joined by pianist Özgür Aydin in a concert featuring Debussy’s Sonata in g, Shostakovich’s Sonata, op. 134, Beethoven’s Sonata No. 10 in G, op. 96 & Schubert’s . The concert is part of the Museum’s Masters of the Violin Performing ArtsSeries.
Midori graciously agreed to answer questions by e-mail and discussed her activism in underserved communities, her thoughts on teaching and her collaboration with Mr. Aydin. She began by talking about her program. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Not quite twenty-five years old, violinist Ray Chen has left his prodigy days well behind and enjoys a burgeoning reputation as a smart, stylish young virtuoso who told this publication that his main concern is to connect with audiences.
Born in Taiwan and brought up in Australia, and having spent a local stint at the Encore School for Strings in Hudson barely a decade ago, Chen is refreshingly devoid of pretense and attitude. And as he showed a good-sized audience at the Cleveland Museum of Art on February 12, he can deliver an impressive and thoroughly engaging recital.
Chen and his pianist partner, Julio Elizalde, playing modishly from iPads, led off with a vigorous and incisive retelling of Mozart’s A-major sonata, K. 305, neatly passing off phrases and finishing each other’s sentences like old buddies. The two-movement piece, written when Mozart was barely twenty, concludes with a set of six variations on a theme in which the two musicians brought out a variety of subtle inflections. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Luke Ratray’s photograph on the cover of the program for Gil Shaham’s solo violin concert at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Thursday evening, February 6, caught the essence of the artist’s musical personality. Self-effacing and smiling, he looks down on his bow and fiddle with gently concentrated intensity but easy assurance, qualities he brought in full measure to his enthralling performances of three of Johann Sebastian Bach’s six works for violin alone.
Alone means, of course, violin without its customary baroque underpinning of bass line and harmony supplied by continuo instruments. Bach, with his uncanny way of creating multiple layers out of single melodic lines, makes you feel that nothing is missing — even when he writes virtual fugues — but a lot of the magic remains to be supplied by the performer, who is as solitary and just about as vulnerable on stage as a musician can be. [Read more…]