Curtis Institute of Music Archives

Pianist Michelle Cann joins Cavani Quartet to open new season of Arts Renaissance Tremont

February 16, 2022 by Daniel Hathaway

by Daniel Hathaway

Thanks (or no thanks) to the pandemic, Arts Renaissance Tremont will open its new season in mid-winter rather than the fall, and due to other circumstances will move its performances from Pilgrim to St. Wendelin Church. The series will also be under new management: the Cavani Quartet will take over its artistic leadership following the passing of its founder, Christine Haff-Paluck.

On Sunday, February 20 at 4:00 pm, pianist Michelle Cann will join the Cavani in a program of piano quintets by Johannes Brahms and Florence Price. Admission is free, but offerings will be gratefully accepted.

Cann, a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Music who is on the faculty of the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, is treating her visit as something of a homecoming.

I chatted with her earlier this week on her mobile phone while she was driving from Santa Rosa to San José in California for a recording session with a flutist friend. (Not to worry: Bluetooth was operational.) [Read more…]

Horn of Plenty: a new concerto
for English hornist Robert Walters

November 24, 2015 by Daniel Hathaway

by Daniel Hautzinger
reprinted with permission from the Oberlin Conservatory

There was no Cleveland Orchestra when the Oberlin Conservatory of Music opened 150 years ago.

By the time the orchestra was founded in 1918 — with pivotal support from Oberlin’s John Long Severance ’85 — the conservatory was 53 years old and well into a phase of monumental growth. In 1919, the year-old orchestra performed for the first time in Oberlin’s Finney Chapel. It has returned to campus every year since — well over 200 performances and counting.

Ninety-six seasons later, as the conservatory celebrates its 150th anniversary, it honors these extensive ties to the Cleveland Orchestra with the commission of a work for English horn by composer Bernard Rands. [Read more…]

Cleveland Repertory Orchestra’s season opener contemplates circles of life (Nov. 2)

by Stephanie Manning

“This moment is full of wonders.” Composer Anna Clyne meditated on those words — written by Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh — as she wrote her orchestral work This Moment. That theme, of learning to cherish life more by reflecting on death, underscored most of the music chosen for the Cleveland Repertory Orchestra’s program on November 2.

The Cultural Arts Center at Disciples Christian Church hosted the season-opening concert, titled “Reflection and Revelations.” The venue’s dry acoustic helped the textures remain clear in Clyne’s piece, a somber and meditative seven minutes. [Read on…]

Pianist Garrick Ohlsson, conductor Daniel Reith lead Cleveland Orchestra in Beethoven concert (Nov. 9)

by Kevin McLaughlin

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com.

CLEVELAND, Ohio — A relaxed understanding born of a long career helped pianist Garrick Ohlsson bring easy grace and Proto-Romantic sensibility to Beethoven’s Second and Fourth Piano Concertos with the Cleveland Orchestra.

The program on Saturday at Severance Music Center featured early and middle works, the second set of concerts in the Orchestra’s cycle of Beethoven piano concertos.

Despite its number, the Second Concerto is actually the composer’s first, begun in 1790. Ohlsson treated this early Beethoven work expressively, with sinuous rubato, keeping his rhythms precise, his touch light, and his rhetoric clear. Nothing, not even Beethoven’s many technical snares, seemed to faze him.

[Read on…]

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