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CIM New Music Ensemble and baritone Dean Southern to perform new work by director Keith Fitch

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by Jarrett Hoffman

FITCH-KeithFor his New Music Ensemble’s biannual concerts, director Keith Fitch often builds programs around guest composers coming to the Cleveland Institute of Music. This year, the addition of a concert in February — one without a visiting artist — gives Clevelanders a further opportunity to hear new music, and provided Fitch extra programmatic flexibility.

“It gave me the freedom to put forward some works I might not otherwise have a chance to program,” Fitch said in a recent interview. Selections by Elliott Carter, Toru Takemitsu, and Frederick Fox came to mind — and to cap off the evening, the esteemed composer, who is head of CIM’s Composition department, looked to a new work in his own catalogue.

On Wednesday, February 7 at 8:00 pm in Mixon Hall, Fitch will lead the CIM New Music Ensemble in a free concert to include the director’s own The Range of Light. Joined by baritone Dean Southern, head of CIM’s Voice and Opera division, the Ensemble will give the 2017 work its second-ever performance.

[Read more…]

May 14 recital by Owens and Huang marks Art Song Festival’s return to CIM

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by Daniel Hathaway

OWENS-EricAfter a fourteen-year sojourn at Baldwin Wallace, the Cleveland Art Song Festival will return to the Cleveland Institute of Music in 2018, the school where it was founded by longtime voice faculty George Vassos in 1985. The every-other-year Festival involves ten singer-pianist teams in a week of intensive coaching, including master classes and artist recitals by well-known singers and collaborative pianists.

In alternate years, the Festival brings in a renowned singer for a solo recital. On Sunday, May 14 at 4:30 pm in Kulas Hall, CIM will celebrate the Art Song Festival’s homecoming with a concert by Metropolitan Opera bass-baritone Eric Owens and pianist Myra Huang. [Read more…]

Preview: Dean Southern and colleagues to present multi-media recital of Hugo Wolf’s Italian songs at CIM on October 2

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by Daniel Hathaway

SOUTHERN-Dean“An entire evening of Hugo Wolf songs might strike fear in the hearts of an audience,” says CIM voice professor and baritone Dean Southern. So Southern has chosen to present the songs of Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch in a multimedia context for his faculty recital in Mixon Hall on Wednesday, October 2 at 8:00 pm.

The multimedia idea arose while Southern was teaching opera at the Frost School of the University of Miami and watched a designer from New York put together the projections for a production he was directing. “It speaks to a creative side I enjoy exploring and gives a different angle on the music,” Southern told us by phone from Macomb, IL, where he was rehearsing with pianist Jeffrey Brown at Western Illinois University.

The recital, presented with the assistance of Brown and soprano Susan Williams of the University of Alabama, will place Wolf’s “Italian” songs in the context of his 19-year affair with Melanie Köchert, ironically the wife of Wolf’s patron, who was the official Viennese Court Jeweler. “We’ll present these songs as if this were the kind of life they wanted to have together.” Projections of song translations, photographs and translations of Wolf’s surviving letters to Köchert (she burned many of them) will be woven into the program as well as three of Wolf’s early piano works. [Read more…]

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