by Stephanie Manning
Just like most summer festivals, the schedule for the Kent Blossom Music Festival gets increasingly packed as it goes on. That all culminates with the fifth and final week, when the students rehearse side-by-side with The Cleveland Orchestra and perform in a concert at Blossom Music Center.
Helping send the students into that week was the last faculty concert of the summer, presented this year on July 15. The program, in Kent State University’s Ludwig Recital Hall, featured a group of Cleveland Orchestra string players with whom the students would soon be rehearsing.
Violinist Genevieve Smelser, violist Gareth Zehngut, cellist Dane Johansen, and bassist Charles Paul kicked things off with a modern piece: Fred Lerdahl’s Waltzes, written in 1981. Unsurprisingly, the quartet played together like the colleagues they are — paying attention to the broader needs of the group and not stepping on anyone’s toes.
Hearing the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” was not on my ChamberFest Cleveland bingo card. But Brandon Ridenour had other ideas.
In 1993 Dolores White was commissioned by the Cleveland Women’s Orchestra to write 
The weather on Sunday morning, June 13, was bright and sunny but not too hot — perfect for a ChamberFest lawn concert. Not to miss out on the occasion, a multitude of people, lawn chairs in hand, made their way down Guilford Road in Cleveland Heights to hear a wonderfully varied program titled Bach and More. 
Since many Clevelanders don’t have a clue why State Route 91 in Cuyahoga and Lake Counties is called SOM Center Road, maybe it’s time to rename at least one five-mile segment of that thoroughfare that passes through the centers of Solon, Orange, and Mayfield townships.
Four string players and a clarinetist, all from The Cleveland Orchestra, came together on December 7 for a quartet and a quintet in “Nothing But Mozart,” streamed live from West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church as part of the 62nd season of the Rocky River Chamber Music Society.
