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…]

CIM Opera’s engaging Puccini double bill prompts both laughs and tears (Nov. 7)

by Stephanie Manning

The three one-act operas that make up Giacomo Puccini’s Il trittico (The Triptych) are typically connected by theme, rather than location. Although the trio of works take place in 13th-century Paris, 17th-century Siena, and 20th-century Florence respectively, they all deal with keeping someone’s death a secret — whether tragically or comedically.

CIM Opera Theater’s recent production of two-thirds of the triptych brought the action into one particular place and time, as director Dean Southern moved both Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi into 1918’s New York City. What stood out more, however, were the impressive performances from across the large cast, which I heard on November 7 in Kulas Hall.

[Read on…]

Oberlin Orchestra with the Poiesis Quartet in Finney (Oct. 31)

by Daniel Hathaway

Fresh from winning the grand prize at the prestigious Banff Competition on the last day of August, the Poiesis Quartet (Sarah Ying Ma & Max Ball, violins, Jasper de Boor, viola, and Drew Dansby, cello) took a late October victory lap at the Oberlin Conservatory, returning to their place of birth as an ensemble to give master classes and solo with the Oberlin Orchestra.

Judging from the turnout in Finney Chapel on Friday, it might not have been a prizewinning idea to schedule a major orchestra concert on a college campus on Halloween, but there was nothing slim about the sound that the stage full of musicians produced. Brilliantly scored works by Carlos Simon, John Adams, Angélica Negrón, and Zhou Tian, were conducted with precision by Rafael Jiménez.

[Read on…]

Cleveland Orchestra makes a sinister showing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (Nov. 5)

by Peter Feher

A violin bow is an unlikely murder weapon. But in the hands of composer Bernard Herrmann, the slashing motion of a string instrument seems almost one and the same with the stabbing knife onscreen in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho.

The infamous soundtrack to secretary Marion Crane’s final moments in the shower — and also to private investigator Milton Arbogast’s stumbling death down the stairs later in the film — is horrifyingly simple. A series of screeching down-bows begins in the first violins and then stacks in dissonant intervals as the remaining string sections join in. The gesture is more like a Foley effect than music per se, evoking something between a human scream and the shriek of metal against metal.

[Read on…]

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