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Kent/Blossom Music Festival Culminates in Side-by-Side Concert with The Cleveland Orchestra

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By Daniel Hautzinger

Robinson-KeithLearning and putting together Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is a scramble against time. The piece features complicated rhythms (sometimes notated without time signatures), infinitely long phrases, and complicated layering of parts. György Ligeti’s Horn Trio and Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony are similarly difficult works. But students at Kent/Blossom Music Festival (KBMF) are assigned to learn them in two weeks for performance.

“Two weeks is just enough time,” said Keith Robinson, artistic coordinator of Kent/Blossom, professor of cello at Kent State and KBMF, and cellist in the Miami String Quartet, who gave a recital as part of the festival. “You want something that will challenge them for two whole weeks.” [Read more…]

Preview: Akron Baroque — conversations with oboe soloists Thomas Moore and Danna Sundet

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by Mike Telin

MOORE-&-SUNDET“Why was the oboe so popular during the baroque period? Probably because it was the wind instrument most closely associated with the human voice,” says oboist Thomas Moore. “And I think that composers and listeners were intrigued with the instrument’s unique lyrical tone quality.” “It does have a tone possessed by no other instrument,” adds oboist Danna Sundet.

On Thursday, November 14 beginning at 7:30 pm in Akron’s First Congregational Church, Guy Victor Bordo will lead Akron Baroque in a concert featuring Thomas Moore and Danna Sundet, in Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Oboes in C, RV 534 and Albinoni’s Concerto for Two Oboes, Op.7, No. 11. The concert also includes works by Corelli, Locatelli and Marcello. (See our concert listing page for program details)

“I’m not a scholar, but the baroque composers were also the first to put the instrument into the opera orchestra,” Sundet adds. “It went from being an outdoor instrument like the shawm, to an indoor instrument.” [Read more…]

Preview: Kent/Blossom Festival launches on June 26 with Miami Quartet, Spencer Myer & CD release

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by Daniel Hathaway

Miami-SQ-Spencer-Myer“It’s bigger than ever, and we’re really excited about it,” exclaimed Danna Sundet, who along with cellist Keith Robinson, is one of the co-artistic directors of the Kent/Blossom Festival. This year’s festival officially begins on June 26 with a concert featuring the Miami String Quartet and pianist Spencer Myer in Ludwig Recital Hall on the Kent State University Campus. “We’re releasing our first-ever Kent/Blossom CD at a gala party afterward,” Sundet said during a conference call. Robinson jumped in with more news. “We’re also having our first Kulas Guest Artist, clarinetist David Shifrin, who used to play in The Cleveland Orchestra before he went on to fame and fortune with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.”

Those concerts are only two of the seventeen events Kent/Blossom will offer between now and July 27. There will be six performances by Cleveland Orchestra members and friends (who make up the faculty for the chamber music-oriented summer festival which began when the Blossom Music Center opened in 1968), and six concerts by students — three at the end of each of the two-week chamber music sessions. At the end of the festival following an orchestral week, the Kent/Blossom Chamber Orchestra will play Ravel’s La Valse in a side-by-side concert with The Cleveland Orchestra on July 27 preceded by its own set under the baton of James Feddeck, who will lead the student ensemble in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8 and Debussy’s Clair de lune. [Read more…]

Review: Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival — four concerts in two days (April 19-20)

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by Daniel Hathaway

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For the eighty-first time, Baldwin Wallace (formerly College, now University and no longer hyphenized) honored the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and some of his forebears and contemporaries with four main concerts on its campus in Berea on April 19 and 20 — plus a lecture, a Bach Institute open house, a master class, ancillary events held in area churches and a reunion of former Bach Festival participants. The Cantor of Leipzig would have been proud.

CONCERT ONE

The opening concert was an organ recital of music by Bach and music that inspired Bach given by Hungarian-born, Oberlin-trained organist Bálint Karosi, who now lives and works in Boston. Playing the 1974 Rudolf Janke organ in Berea Methodist Church, Karosi presented music by Nicolaus Bruhns, Dietrich Buxtehude and Bach, as well as music by others — Johann Friedrich Fasch, Prince Johann Ernst and François Couperin — that Bach had arranged for the organ. Additionally, Karosi improvised on a chorale theme given to him on the spot. [Read more…]

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