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Les Délices welcomes the festive season with “Noel, Noel” (Dec. 7)

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by Stephanie Manning

Once December kicks in, an almost overwhelming number of holiday programs pop up around Northeast Ohio. But Les Délices’ offering should draw your attention.

While other festive concerts may create the atmosphere of a bustling party by the fireplace, “Noel, Noel” is like observing a snowy evening from the warmth of the indoors. This is music best enjoyed in quiet contentment, and especially live — so it’s no surprise that the early music ensemble brought back this signature program for three performances this month.

On December 7 at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church, the six-member group presented a lovely ninety-minute program, which is also available on CD and via streaming until the end of the year. [Read more…]

Les Délices’ elaborate, entertaining Aesop Project (Nov. 22)

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by Peter Feher

In the 1670s, Louis XIV commissioned a series of 39 fountains for the Gardens of Versailles, each modeled on a story from Aesop’s Fables and intended for the education of the king’s young son, the Dauphin.

The Aesop Project, the latest community offering from Les Délices and artistic director Debra Nagy, is slightly less ornate but just as inspired. Cleveland’s ever-resourceful period chamber ensemble partnered with local puppeteers and poets for this family-friendly program teaching music and morals.

After touring Northeast Ohio schools earlier in the week, the project received a public performance at the CMA Community Arts Center on Saturday morning, November 22. Children, parents, and committed patrons of early music sat down for the 35-minute show, surrounded by spectacular displays of costumes and props from the Cleveland Museum of Art’s annual Parade the Circle celebration. [Read more…]

Les Délices: “Bohemian Rhapsody” at West Shore UU Church (Oct. 19)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Although Les Délices’ most recent subscription program actually featured music by composers from what is now the western part of the Czech Republic, it borrowed its marketing title from an American rock anthem and culminated in a major work by a celebrated Austrian.

Never mind a slight bit of confusion. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which I heard on Sunday, October 19 in the agreeable space of West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church in Rocky River, provided the welcome opportunity to focus in on the classical oboe artistry of director Debra Nagy, and to make at least a nodding acquaintance with historical composers Franz Krommer, Georg Druschetzky, and Katerina Veronika Dusikova-Cianchettini (whose name should be appear on classical radio hosts’ audition scripts), as well as the more recent Nathan Mondry. [Read more…]

Les Délices opens new season with “Bohemian Rhapsody”

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by Mike Telin

The first thing you may think of when you hear the words “Bohemian Rhapsody” is that 1970’s iconic Rock song by Queen.

But when Les Délices launches their new season on Friday, October 17 at 7:30 pm at Westminster Presbyterian Church in  Akron their “Bohemian Rhapsody” will feature music by Bohemian and Moravian composers Franz Krommer (1759-1831), Georg Druschetzky (1745-1819), and Katerina Veronika Dusikova-Cianchettini (1769-1833).

Performed by oboist Debra Nagy, violinist Shelby Yamin, violist Allison Monroe, and cellist Rebecca Landell, the program also includes Mozart’s Oboe Quartet and a new work by Nathan Mondry.

“We’re opening with Franz Krommer’s Quartet no. 2 in F major for oboe & strings, and he is probably the best-known of these lesser-known composers,” Debra Nagy said during a telephone conversation. “He was a very popular composer during his time along with Beethoven. He wrote 100 string quartets, but today he’s known mostly for his wind partitas.”

[Read more…]

Les Délices delights with “The Mermaid” in Rocky River (Apr. 27)

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by Daniel Hathaway

As their name implies, the rarefied music of the French baroque is the pain quotidien of Cleveland’s period instrument ensemble Les Délices, but artistic director Debra Nagy occasionally points her excellent and variable group in other directions.

The latest crossing of genres at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church on Sunday afternoon, April 27,  took Nagy and her colleagues out of the salons of Paris across the Channel to the docks of Portsmouth.

Wielding her baroque oboe and recorder, Nagy joined soprano Elena Mullins Bailey, violinist Allison Monroe, cellist Rebecca Landell, percussionist Anthony Taddeo, and special guest Sean Dagher, shantyman and Irish bouzouki artist, in slightly more than an hour’s worth of rollicking sea shanties, plus oceanic tunes by Henry Purcell, Joseph Haydn, and Maurice Green.

[Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire gives a sublime performance of Bach’s Mass in b minor (Apr. 5)

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by Peter Feher

The 2024–2025 season for Apollo’s Fire may be coming to a close, but the group’s performances of J.S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor will continue to resound throughout Northeast Ohio. Just like those listeners who are forever returning to the work for comfort, cogitation, or a glimpse of transcendence, Cleveland’s Baroque orchestra isn’t finished with this all-embracing masterpiece.

On Saturday, April 5, at Trinity Cathedral, the consoling final notes of the “Dona nobis pacem” — Bach’s “vision of peace,” as AF artistic director Jeannette Sorrell has described it — seemed to linger in the stone vaulting long after the music had died away. The effect was a sublime example of the ensemble making the most of the space, the combined period-instrument forces of woodwinds, brass, strings, and organ supporting the uplifting message sung by the chorus.

[Read more…]

Les Délices: music fosters meaningful conversation at Cleveland’s VA Medical Center (Feb. 21)

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by Stephanie Manning

Navigating dementia — a common, yet devastating part of aging — requires confronting all sorts of complex emotions. People with memory loss, their caregivers, and the medical teams who interact with them all understand this well. So when Les Délices commissioned a piece tackling this difficult topic, they made a special effort to bring the music to those who would resonate with it the most.

The Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center hosted the early music ensemble for two performance-discussion sessions on February 21, a moving and emotional afternoon of empathetic, honest conversations about memory loss all framed by the solace of music.

At 12:00 pm, medical professionals and providers gathered in the rec hall, where flags of the U.S., the Department of VA, and the military’s many branches now provided a backdrop to a harpsichord and a collection of music stands. As part of the “Bioethics at Noon” series, the Les Délices musicians performed François Couperin’s La Visionnaire and selections from Viet Cuong’s world premiere, A Moment’s Oblivion. [Read more…]

Les Délices contemplates what makes us human in “A Moment’s Oblivion” (Feb. 23)

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by Stephanie Manning

“How wretched to forget,” sings the son in A Moment’s Oblivion — a character whose father now struggles to recognize members of his own family. “For all we were forms who we are.”

But the miracle cure that restores his father’s memory turns out to be a more fraught solution than it appears. Such is the conflict at the heart of Les Délices’ recent commission, with music by Viet Cuong and libretto by Cleveland poet Dave Lucas. The early music ensemble’s latest program surrounded the world premiere of A Moment’s Oblivion with more musical opportunities to reflect on the complex, and sometimes contradictory, emotions that make us human. [Read more…]

Les Délices unveils “The Mythology Project”

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By Mike Telin

When Debra Nagy asked Nicholas Phan to think about a non-Western, specifically non-European, myth that could be a fit for Les Délices’ The Mythology Project, he knew exactly where to turn.

“I had been spending a lot of time in Ann Arbor at my parents’ place because their health was starting to decline. And in my childhood bedroom was this very tattered book of Chinese myths that I had as a child,” the Grammy-winning tenor said on a recent Zoom call from Lisbon, Portugal.

“So I thumbed through the book and “The Loss of Memory Myth” jumped out at me. Probably because of what I had been experiencing with my parents’ decline in health and my needing to step up to take care of them. That role reversal really spoke to me.”

This weekend Les Délices will present A Moment’s Oblivion, the first instalment of “The Mythology Project,” a three-year initiative that will bring new life to the secular cantata that was popular in 17th and 18th-century France.

On Saturday at 4:00 pm at Heights Theater and Sunday at 4:00 pm at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church, tenor Nicholas Phan, oboist Debra Nagy, violinist Shelby Yamin, violist da gamba Rebecca Landell, and harpsichordist Mark Edwards will perform Michel de Montéclair’s La Bergère & Le Dépit généreux, Marin Marais’ “Le Labyrinthe” from Livre 4ème, and François Couperin’s “Barricades mistérieuses” and “Les Langueurs tendres” from Sixième Ordre. Tickets are available online.

[Read more…]

Les Délices visits 14th Century Avant-garde at Pivot Center (Nov. 24)

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by Daniel Hathaway

As the historian Barbara Tuchman revealed in her book A Distant Mirror, the 14th century in Europe was both eventful and full of contradictions.

On the traumatic side, the Great Famine and the bubonic plague claimed a great swath of the population, the Hundred Years’ War raged, and the  papacy moved from Rome to Avignon in France, marking the beginning of the decline in influence of the Catholic Church.

On the positive side came the flowering of experiments in music, a subject that Debra Nagy and her Les Délices colleagues charmingly explored in their “14th Century Avant-garde” program on Saturday, November 23 at the Pivot Center on Cleveland’s West Side, a converted 1919 building once used for making ships’ sails and awnings. [Read more…]

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