On Wednesday, June 25, Mike Telin had the opportunity to attend a ChamberFest Cleveland rehearsal of Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera for String Quartet and Pipa, with Water, Stones, Paper and Metal, which will be presented in Kulas Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music on Saturday, June 28 at 8:00 pm. The performance will feature the world premiere of choreography by GroundWorks Dance Theater artistic director David Shimotakahara. The performance promises to be an emotional experience. Tan Dun’s music is captivating and the choreography adds a new and wonderful dimension to the music. The production is a collaboration that requires a lot of sharing of ideas between the musicians, the dancers and the collective. As violinist Amy Schwartz Moretti said, “I’ve never done anything like this before. You can only prepare so much at home, because everything needs to be discussed with your colleagues. But we’re all having a great time!” (Click on the images to enlarge.) [Read more…]
ChamberFest Cleveland: Conversations with Noah Bendix-Balgley, Gao Hong and David Shimotakahara
By Mike Telin and Daniel Hautzinger
After four concerts and a family program, ChamberFest Cleveland now moves into its second and final week with five more concerts. One of those includes a performance of Chinese composer Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera with world premiere choreography. As part of our continuing coverage of ChamberFest, we spoke with three participants.
Noah Bendix-Balgley
Sometime in the next year, Noah Bendix-Balgley will leave his position as concertmaster of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, which he won when he was 27 in 2011. Why leave such a desirable chair, especially when he was appointed at such a young age? To become first concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic, one of the most prestigious orchestras in the world.
But before he leaves for Berlin, Bendix-Balgley will come to Cleveland to join “a really wonderful cast of some of the best young musicians around,” as he described his fellow ChamberFest participants in a phone interview. Needless to say, Bendix-Balgley is a worthy addition to that cast.
He joins ChamberFest to play some Romantic masterworks, “some of the best chamber music out there and some of my favorite pieces to play:” Brahms’s piano Quintet, Dvořák’s E-flat piano quartet, and Tchaikovsky’s “Souvenir de Florence” sextet. Beyond those pieces, he’ll also perform two pieces for the first time. “I’m very much looking forward to working with [pianist] Orion Weiss on the Janáček violin sonata, it’s a really wonderful piece,” he said. Osvaldo Golijov’s Last Round for double string quartet and bass, on ChamberFest’s final concert, is also new to him. [Read more…]
Review: Akron Symphony’s Rite of Spring (April 13)
by Mike Telin
Although Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is now recognized as one of the most important musical scores of the 20th century, the story of its premiere in May of 1913 is now a legend. And the question of whether or not it was Stravinsky’s music or Nijinsky’s choreography that caused the near-riot reaction from the Parisian audience is still the subject of debate. On Saturday, April 13 at Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall, the Akron Symphony Orchestra and Cleveland-based GroundWorks DanceTheater along with guest dancers — both professional and amateur — presented an enthralling new production of Stravinsky’s mammoth ballet score.
During the past few years The Akron Symphony has presented some outstanding performances resulting from community-based projects (think Porgy and Bess) and Saturday’s performance did not disappoint. Stravinsky said, “What I was trying to convey in The Rite was the surge of spring, the magnificent upsurge of nature re-born,” and GroundWorks’s artistic director David Shimotahakara’s imaginative choreography brilliantly served the composer’s wishes. And a cast of dancers that included GroundWorks’ five members, three other professionals and an ensemble of 15 Akron area students performed with style and conviction. [Read more…]
Preview: Akron Symphony & GroundWorks’s Rite of Spring — a conversation with choreographer David Shimotakahara
by Daniel Hathaway
There are lots of ways of celebrating the centennial of Igor Stravinsky’s revolutionary ballet score, The Rite of Spring. The Joffrey Ballet’s reconstruction of the original Ballets Russes production will be a highlight of The Cleveland Orchestra’s Blossom season this summer. Cleveland’s Verb Ballets is undertaking a new version with an overdubbed performance of the original two-piano score.
Taking a different tack, the Akron Symphony is spreading the joy by creating a community project spearheaded by David Shimotakahara’s GroundWorks Dance Theater that will involve eight professional dancers and fifteen student dancers in addition to the more than one hundred musicians Stravinsky’s score requires. The performance, led by ASO’s music director Christopher Wilkins, will take place in Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall on Saturday, April 13 at 8 pm (followed by an orchestra-only runout performance in Medina on Sunday afternoon).
“I wish I could have been at that performance,” Shimotakahara told us by phone from his studio, referring to the ballet’s turbulent premiere at the Theatre Champs-Elysées in Paris on May 29, 1913. “Nijinsky was trying something with movement that had never been done before.” [Read more…]