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BW Opera presents a memorable double bill about women’s empowerment (Feb. 1)

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by Stephanie Manning

Asked at the post-concert talkback about her musical influences, composer Kamala Sankaram described an eclectic hodgepodge — Kaija Saariaho, Radiohead, and the Cameroonian electronic musician Francis Bebey, to name a few. “For the most part, things that I write sound very different from each other,” she said. “So it’s interesting that these two pieces sound kind of similar.”

Sankaram was referring to the pairing of A.E. Reverie and Rise, a duo of chamber operas recently co-presented by Baldwin Wallace Opera and the Cleveland Museum of Art. The February 1 performance in the Museum’s Gartner Auditorium showcased a double-bill united not just by composer but also by topic: both operas center on female protagonists pushing against gender stereotypes.

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She Scores: a dazzling display from composers & performers (June 2)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

You might have gone to the Sunday, June 2 She Scores concert to hear exemplary works by female and nonbinary composers, or simply to enjoy some fresh new sounds. But once there, you would have stayed for the dazzling expertise on display, from both composers and performers alike.

Credit the Local 4 Music Fund and executive director Amber Rogers for organizing the fourth annual iteration of this splendid concert series, which ran from May 30-June 2 in CIM’s lovely Mixon Hall. Genre or gender aside, this was an afternoon of superb music.

Margi Griebling-Haigh’s Triskaidekaphilia (“love of the number thirteen”) for three violins made for an arresting and mathematical start. Violinists Ken Johnston, Leah Goor-Burtnett, and Emily Cornelius drew out the composer’s introspective and playful sides in this well-crafted three-movement work. [Read more…]

BW Opera: Taking Up Serpents (Feb. 2 & 4)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Baldwin Wallace Opera Theater became only the fourth company — and the first collegiate one — to stage Kamala Sankaram and Jerre Dye’s provocative Taking Up Serpents when the show opened at the Kleist Center for Theater and Drama in Berea on February 2.

Masterfully directed by Scott Skiba with a talented student cast and a 13-piece professional chamber ensemble tightly conducted by Dean Buck, the one-act, 80-minute piece commissioned by Washington National Opera centers around 25-year-old Kayla, the daughter of a Holiness preacher in the Deep South.

A “lost soul and a wanderer,” Kayla’s on a quest to establish her own relationship with God outside the smothering confines of a patriarchal church that handles snakes, speaks in tongues, and indulges in other questionable practices invented by Christian charismatics. [Read more…]

Taking Up Serpents: Fire-and-brimstone at BW

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by Mike Telin

In her 2023 article “The History of Snake Handling in Religion,” published in Grunge, Sarah Crocker writes, “According to National Geographic, [the practice] is now most often understood as a uniquely American religious observance, typically practiced in rural Appalachian churches that are associated with Pentecostal Christians and other charismatic Protestant denominations.”

On Friday, February 2 at 8:00 pm in the Kleist Center for Arts & Drama, Baldwin Wallace Opera will present Taking Up Serpents. With a score by Kamala Sankaram and an original story inspired by librettist Jerre Dye’s roots in the Deep South, the opera tells the story of 25-year-old Kayla, the estranged daughter of a fire-and-brimstone preacher who is dangerously bitten by one of his own snakes. Kayla’s journey home forces her to confront her troubled upbringing.

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Cleveland Opera Theater:
La Casa de Bernarda Alba (June 10)

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by Peter Feher

Cleveland Opera Theater saw the payoff of several years’ work when La Casa de Bernarda Alba premiered earlier this month. The production, fully realized on the mainstage at Baldwin Wallace University’s Kleist Center for Art and Drama from June 9-12, didn’t just spring out of nowhere. The company nurtured the piece through its New Opera Works Festival beginning in 2017 with a series of public readings of the source material.

And Federico García Lorca’s 1936 play is a good place to start. La Casa de Bernarda Alba makes for highly effective theater in that the simplest elements (a chair, a door, an offstage character) generate all the drama. Even in this operatic adaptation, Scott Skiba’s direction and Jeff Herrmann’s set design emphasized the essentials and communicated much of the action silently.

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Mack & McGuire’s Ghosts of Gatsby at Music Box Supper Club (Jan. 12)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Although the turbulent marriage of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald —  self-caricatures of the Jazz Age — has inspired a number of literary efforts in addition to their own near-autobiographical novels, the subject never seems to have been approached through the lens of opera. Composer Evan Mack and librettist Joshua McGuire have stepped in to fill that void with their one-act The Ghosts of Gatsby, commissioned by Samford University (Montgomery, Alabama), where it premiered in November 2018. [Read more…]

Cleveland Opera Theater moves to Playhouse Square with La Bohème (Sept. 13)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Puccini’s La Bohème was produced 598 times worldwide during the 2017-2018 season, making it the fourth most-performed title in the repertoire (trailing La traviata, Carmen, and The Magic Flute). It’s also the show that Cleveland Opera Theater chose for its move from venues like the Masonic Auditorium and the Maltz Performing Arts Center to the Ohio Theater, a more traditionally-outfitted house. On Friday, September 13, Scott Skiba’s clever production surrounded a fine cast with memorable scenic design by Matthew D. McCarren and projections by Brittany Merenda that brought a Parisian garret, the Café Momus, and a toll gate outside the city vividly to life in Playhouse Square.

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Cleveland Opera Theater: La traviata at the Maltz (April 28)

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by Daniel Hathaway

While opera often treats its audiences to spectacle on a grand scale, what really makes the art form take flight is the melding of distinguished singing with excellent acting and staging. Those elements came together beautifully in Cleveland Opera Theater’s production of Verdi’s La traviata on Sunday afternoon, April 28 at the Maltz Performing Arts Center. A strong cast and a fine chamber orchestra joined director Scott Skiba and conductor Domenico Boyagian in bringing the story of Violetta Valéry to vibrant life on an engagingly human scale. [Read more…]

Heights Chamber Orchestra at St. Paul’s, Cleveland Hts. (Feb. 24)

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by Nicholas Stevens

Concert promoters often confront a dilemma: advertisement demands a level of concision that can reduce a rich, varied program to a name or two and some titles. Undeclared riches might await behind a program labeled, say, “Satie’s Parade.” Wise, then, for the Heights Chamber Orchestra to avoid choosing a descriptive tagline for their most recent concert. So many individual aspects of the performance charmed that to single out one would be to minimize its many surprising delights. [Read more…]

Heights Chamber Orchestra: getting to know Dean Buck

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Dean Buck grew up on the West Side of Cleveland, then headed to New York City for four years of school and five years of work. Now he’s back, pursuing a master’s in conducting at the Cleveland Institute of Music and digging into the city’s freelance scene.

Two things he’s enjoyed since being back? For one, the cost of living. “You have substantially less rent to make each month,” he said, laughing. And two, the music scene. “It’s fun — there are some great groups and great people. I’m almost wary about saying how good it is here because it’s like, oh no, everyone’s going to come.”

Having led a couple of workshop performances during Cleveland Opera Theater’s {NOW} Festival in recent weeks, next up for Buck is a guest conducting opportunity with Heights Chamber Orchestra. What stands out most on that program on Sunday, February 24 at 3:30 pm at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church: a concerto for the Wagner tuba.

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