by Daniel Hathaway
Concerts at Transformer Station always come with surprises, and on Thursday evening, March 29, there were at least two from the get-go. The audience found themselves seated around one of Mexican artist Raúl de Nieves’ enigmatic beadwork and fabric installations. And in a way, the extraordinary concert by German violinist Carolin Widmann was already in progress when ticket holders arrived. [Read more…]
by Jarrett Hoffman
Avi Avital remembers meeting Omer Avital — no relation — in the cafeteria at the Jerusalem Music Academy.
“We both had this look on our faces like, ‘What’s in that strange instrument case?’” Avi told me during a recent phone call. “He was with his oud, and I was with my mandolin.”
They started talking and discovered how much they had in common. “There’s the family name, for one thing,” Avi said. “We’re not blood-related, but it’s the DNA of our heritage — Avital is a name that is typical to Jewish Moroccan families.” Both Avi and Omer were born and raised in Israel, their parents having immigrated there from Morocco. “We connected very fast.”
by David Kulma
The young award-winning Frenchman Emmanuel Culcasi is the most recent organist to set ablaze the thousands of pipes of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s McMyler Memorial Organ. His program on Sunday afternoon, March 31 in Gartner Auditorium focused on light and included works by the great French organist Louis Vierne, who gave a recital on the instrument in March of 1927 when it was still located in the Museum’s Armor Court. [Read more…]
by Jarrett Hoffman
German violinist Carolin Widmann rarely performs in the U.S. — and we Americans might be feeling a tad neglected.
To smooth things over, the winner of the 2017 Bayerischer Staatspreis für Musik will bring a solo program of Medieval, Baroque, and contemporary music to Transformer Station on Friday, March 29 at 7:30 pm as part of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Performing Arts Series. Get tickets here.
I caught her on the phone in Leipzig, where she was happy to be home for a day between performances in Italy and Frankfurt. I began by asking her if there’s a reason she doesn’t perform in America more often?
by Mike Telin
François Girard’s latest film, Hochelaga, Terre des âmes (“Hochelaga, Land of Souls”), is a historical drama that investigates and dramatizes the long struggle for the land that became Montréal. Like all of the French-Canadian director and screenwriter’s work, which includes Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould and The Red Violin, a great deal of attention has been placed on the musical score — here Girard has turned to the father and son team of Terry Riley and Gyan Riley.
Hochelaga, Land of Souls, which will be screened at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Friday, March 1 at 7:00 pm, features performances by the Kronos Quartet and violinist Tracy Silverman.
by Mike Telin
When I asked Xiaoxuan Li how he started playing the piano, he gave me an honest answer. “I was four years old, so I remember nothing, but my mom let me study it and I really loved it,” Li said during a telephone conversation. “She said that many kids didn’t want to practice but I was totally different.”
On Saturday, March 2 at 8:00 pm at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium, the Cleveland International Piano Competition Concert Series will present Xiaoxuan Li, the winner of the 2018 CIPC for Young Artists Competition senior division. His program will include works by Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and Liszt. The evening will also feature Eva Gevorgyan, winner of the 2018 junior division. Together, Li and Gevorgyan will play four-hand arrangements of excerpts from The Nutcracker.
by Nicholas Stevens
“The music as always speaks its own language.” In a program note for his new piece Pathways, Henry Threadgill names places and people who inspired him, yet declines to describe the music or the process behind it. Immersion in the 90-minute work feels like watching a non-narrative film in a familiar yet unknown language. What the committee for the Pulitzer Prize for Music recognized when they honored Threadgill in 2016 was the unique vitality of this invented language. In its world premiere outing on Friday, January 11, Pathways unfolded like a hive intelligence fleshing out its own original, complex definition of beauty.
by Daniel Hathaway
The Cleveland Foundation, which has brought more than eighty international artists to Cleveland since 2008 under the auspices of its Creative Fusion program, has partnered with the Cleveland Museum of Art to commission six new works to be premiered over the next two seasons.
Launching the series, composer and multi-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill will bring his Zooid ensemble to the Museum’s Performing Arts Series on Friday, January 11 at 7:30 pm in Gartner Auditorium to join Tim Weiss’s Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble in the world premiere of Threadgill’s Pathways, a partly improvisatory, partly pre-determined work.
Threadgill, now 74, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for his recording In for a Penny, In for a Pound, which the awards jury described as a “highly original work, in which notated music and improvisation mesh in a sonic tapestry that seems the very expression of modern American life.”
Although he has been been characterized as a jazz musician, Threadgill objects to being hedged in by that branding. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Stevens
The average classical musician’s biography is a thinly veiled list of names. A performer’s teachers, schools, venues, festivals, grants, and roles may impress when dressed up in prose, but they sit side by side haloed by auras of significance, like hieroglyphs. How refreshing, then, to read a bio that sums up the appeal of a group in plain terms by the third sentence: “Since its inception, the ensemble has been defined by its unique sound, appealing as much through the personality of each timbre as it does through the color and the uniformity of the voices.” This honesty in advertising is hardly the only thing for which Northeast Ohioans can thank Vox Luminis, the Baroque-focused vocal ensemble who performed in Cleveland last week.
by Daniel Hathaway
Having on earlier tours performed twice on the Helen D. Schubert Concert Series at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, Lionel Meunier and his Belgian choir Vox Luminis will open this season’s Cleveland Museum of Art Performing Arts Series at Gartner Auditorium on Wednesday, October 24 at 7:30 pm with an all-Bach program.
ClevelandClassical.com’s Nicholas Jones wrote that on October 31, 2014, Vox Luminis “presented a beautifully crafted program that was at once passionate and serene.” This writer reported that the choir’s April 26, 2017 concert was “flawlessly sung,” “made dramatic use of the cathedral space,” and featured “meticulous tuning and vocal blend” in a program of “sober but exquisitely beautiful music.”
Those earlier programs featured laments (Domenico Scarlatti’s 10-voice Stabat Mater) and funeral music (including Purcell’s musical obsequies for Queen Mary). Sensing that the repertoire might be perceived as a bit dour, Meunier said to the audience in 2017, “I have to confess: we do have happier programs!”
The Belgians will prove that on Wednesday with their concert of five Motets by Johann Sebastian Bach, part of a tour which will include the ensemble’s first Bach performances in the United States (above, rehearsing in Kansas City). [Read more…]