by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:

The Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival gets up to speed for the weekend today at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Click here for details about the numerous events on the docket for this weekend, culminating in the Final Round of the James Stroud Youth Competition on Sunday evening at 6:30.

Jinjoo Cho’s ENCORE Festival of Music and Ideas has events scheduled this weekend in Peninsula, at Gilmour Academy’s Dodero Center in Gates Mills, and Federated Church in Chagrin Falls. Tickets available online.

Margi Griebling Haigh’s opera The Higgler receives its world premieres on Saturday at 7:30 and Sunday at 3:30 in a production directed by Marla Berg and conducted by Steven Smith, featuring tenor Brian Skoog in the title role at Disciples Church in Cleveland Heights. Tickets available online.

Apollo’s Fire repeats its Countryside Concert ¡HISPANIA! on June 6 at 7:30 pm, June 7 at 3:30 and 7:30 pm, and June 8 at 3:00 pm, but better check venue updates here. It’s safe to assume that the indoor performance on June 9 at 7:30 pm at Avon Lake UCC, will proceed as planned. Tickets available online.

On Saturday at 3 pm, Studio Espressivo Sunday Studio Series presents Sounds of the Cinema at Murray Hill Galleries, repeated on June 7 at 8 pm and June 8 at 3 pm. Pay-what-you-wish, suggested donation $15. At 7 pm, Matthew Salvaggio will conduct the Cleveland Repertory Orchestra, featuring hornist Van Parker, in Federated Church, in Chagrin Falls. Freewill offering.

And on Sunday at 3:30, Western Reserve Chorale will perform Dan Forrest’s Jubilate Deo, with chamber orchestra and soloists conducted by David Gilson, at First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights. (Freewill offering, concert to be live streamed here.)

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Notable births on June 8 in music history include German composer Robert Schumann in Zwickau (1810), Czech composer Ervin Schulhoff in Prague (1894), and Polish-American pianist Emanuel Ax (1949). [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

R.I.P. Karen Holtkamp, 83

Karen McFarlane Artists, Inc. writes on their website, “It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of Karen Elizabeth (McFarlane) Holtkamp in Cleveland on June 3, 2025, at the age of 83 following a two-year battle with cancer.” Read more here.

HAPPENING TODAY:

9:45 am -12:15 pm & 1:30 pm – 4:00 pm – Sixth Annual James Stroud Classical Guitar Youth Competition: Semi-final Round. Mixon Hall, Cleveland Institute of Music. Free and open to the public.

7:30 pm – Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival. Hao Yang, guitar, with Helen Zhibing Huang, soprano (China). Mixon Hall, Cleveland Institute of Music.

7:30 pm – Apollo’s Fire. ¡HISPANIA! Countryside Concerts. VENUE CHANGE: St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Cleveland Heights. Tickets available online. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING TODAY:

A blank date on the performance calendar is an opportunity to look ahead to events later in the week, when the pace begins picking up fast. The Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival and the James Stroud Youth Competition fill up the weekend along with the premiere of Margi Griebling-Haigh’s opera The Higgler, Apollo’s Fire’s Spanish programs, and the beginnings of the ENCORE Festival and ChamberFest Cleveland (note: opening night in Mixon Hall is sold out), to mention only a few. Have a look here.

Or you can hop on to one of several live streams of the 2025 Van Cliburn Piano Competition, now in its final round in Fort Worth, Texas. Click here to choose, and scroll down to learn about some of the innovative video techniques the Cliburn is introducing to bring the contest to worldwide computer screens.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On June 4, 1951, Russian-American conductor Serge Koussevitzky (pictured above with Bernstein and Copland), who led the Boston Symphony for a quarter of a century, died in Boston. [Read more…]

by Stephanie Manning

HAPPENING TODAY:

At 12:00 pm, organist Jonathan Moyer presents this week’s program of the Tuesday Noon Organ Plus Concerts. Moyer, who is the Church of the Covenant’s primary organist, is also an assistant professor at Oberlin Conservatory.

If you can’t make it to University Circle in person, you can listen to the live stream here.

INTERESTING READ:

Should the Met stage all their operas in English? Absolutely, argues John McWhorter in a recent New York Times opinion piece. “Many opera fans object to translation on the grounds that composers set the music to the words carefully, according to the accent patterns and vowel colors of the language in question,” he writes. But “opera is better when you can understand it.”

Needless to say, this article has generated plenty of debate in the comments — there are almost 250 of them. Form your own opinion by giving those and McWhorter’s article a read here. [Read more…]

by Stephanie Manning

LOOKING AHEAD:

The first week of June gets off to a quiet start, but things will quickly pick up into the weekend as summer offerings like the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival and ENCORE Music & Ideas Festival kick into gear.

Learn more about what’s ahead by visiting our Concert Listings.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

The prestigious Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, which has been going on since May 21 in Fort Worth, Texas, announced its six finalists last night. Among them is Evren Ozel (pictured, photo by Mike Grittani), the second-prize winner in last year’s Cleveland International Piano Competition. Local audiences may also recognize him from appearances at ChamberFest Cleveland and the Cooper Competition.

As part of the final rounds, Ozel will perform Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. 1 tomorrow evening with Marin Alsop and the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. He will perform again on Friday, June 6 with Beethoven’s Concerto No. 4. All rounds can be streamed live here. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:

“June is busting out all over,” declares one of the opening numbers in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel, which kicks off the Ohio Light Opera season in Wooster on June 14.

The summer concert season will be similarly exploding with festivals and other events next week, but our weekend events make up an interesting if modest list.

No Exit presents a program of music from The Collective, an international consortium of composers on Friday at 7 at the Bop Stop, and Saturday at 7 at Heights Arts. The program features works by Agata Zubel, Mathew Rosenblum, Douglas Knehans, Spiros Mazis, Amy Kaplan, Constantine Koukias, Edward Smalldone, and Timothy Beyer (pictured).

On Saturday at 7:30 at Severance Music Center, Carl Topilow will lead Cleveland Pops Orchestra in real tunes from the fictitious Great American Songbook, featuring vocalist Capathia Jenkins and the Cleveland Pops Chorus.

On Sunday at 3 at Shore Cultural Center, Euclid Symphony will join conductor Jimmie A. Parker, Sr., and special guests for a program of big band music.

Closing out the weekend, on Sunday at 3, the Omni Quartet will play Beethoven’s string quartets Nos. 8 and 12 in a carriage house in Cleveland Heights. At 5, The Resonance Project will put Baroque instrumentalists together with West African drummer and vocalist Assane M’Baye at Forest Hills Church. And at 7, OPUS 216 will launch their summer Symphony at Sunset series in Voinovich Bicentennial Park on the E. 9th Street Pier.

WEEKEND ALMANAC:

We’ll zero in on one date in music history: May 31, which in 1656 marked the birth of French composer and violist da gamba Marin Marais in Paris. [Read more…]

 by Daniel Hathaway

INTERESTING READS:

In his Critic’s Notebook in today’s New York Times, Zachary Woolfe asks, “People love Janáček’s music when they hear it. So why isn’t my favorite composer more popular?

“On Sunday, when the Cleveland Orchestra (pictured by Roger Mastroianni) finished an elegant but crushing concert version of Jenůfa, which ends with a vision of forgiveness and reconciliation after extraordinary suffering, I would have happily sat through it again, right then and there.” Read the article and comments by readers here.

And marking the centennial of his birth, German baritone Benjamin Appl remembers his teacher Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, as one of the 20th century’s greatest singers and a complicated, conflicted man. Read the New York Times article here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz was born on this date in Camprodón. Taste just one of his iconic Iberian portraits in a 2010 performance of Sevilla by Jason Vieaux in Kulas Hall at CIM. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING TODAY:

Tonight at 6 pm at Heights Arts, you can sit in on an open rehearsal of the Omni Quartet’s Beethoven quartet program and watch the process of preparing for the concert that Amy Lee & Alicia Koelz, violins, Joanna Patterson Zakany, viola, and Tanya Ell, cello, will give on Sunday.

Tonight at 7 pm, No Exit will present music from The Collective, an international consortium of composers including Agata Zubel, Mathew Rosenblum, Douglas Knehans, Spiros Mazis, Amy Kaplan, Constantine Koukias, Edward Smalldone, and Timothy Beyer (pictured) in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art (it’s free).

And at 7:30, Apollo’s Fire takes its summer program ¡HISPANIA!, led from the harpsichord by Jeannette Sorrell and featuring flamenco guitarist Jeremías García, to Harkness Chapel at Case.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1805, Italian composer Luigi Boccherini died in Madrid, Hungarian composer György Ligeti was born in Transylvania in 1923, and German baritone and conductor Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau took his first breath in 1925 in Zehlendorf. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING TODAY:

12:00 pm – Tuesdays at the Covenant: Oberlin Conservatory Organ Majors. Noah Duckwall: Michelangelo Rossi’s Toccata settima & William Byrd’s Fantasia in a, BK 13 | Evan de Jong: Dietrich Buxtehude’s Praeludium ex g, BuxWV 148 & Anthoni van Noordt’s Psalm 24 | Owen Metz: Percy Whitlock’s Fantasie-Choral in D-flat. Church of the Covenant, 11205 Euclid Ave., Cleveland. Freewill offering.

7:30 pm – Apollo’s Fire. ¡HISPANIA! – A Voyage from Spain to the Americas. Jeannette Sorrell, harpsichord & direction, featuring Jeremías García, flamenco guitar. Music by Diego Ortiz, Gaspar Sanz, and Santiago de Murcia, plus Sephardic ballads from the Jewish communities of Spain and Argentina. The Bath Church UCC.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

The Canton Symphony Orchestra is looking for dedicated volunteers. “Whether you’re greeting concertgoers, assisting with special events, or supporting behind-the-scenes operations, your time and energy help bring the power of live music to life. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING THIS MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND:

On Friday at 7:30 and Saturday at 8,  The Cleveland Orchestra continues its Opera Festival with Vox Humana (works by Francis Poulenc, J.S. Bach, Galina Ustvolskaya, and Richard Strauss, with Franz Welser-Möst, conducting, Sarah Aristidou, soprano, Tony Sias, narrator, and The Cleveland Orchestra Chorus.

Also on Saturday, at 7:30 Carl Topilow leads the Firelands Symphony Orchestra in Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto, with Andrès Cárdenes, plus works by Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and John Williams at Sawmill Creek Convention Center, in Huron. Tickets available online.

And on Sunday at 3 pm, Franz Welser-Möst leads The Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus in the third and final performance of Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa (pictured, photo by Roger Mastroianni).

Same day same hour, Cleveland Chamber Collective presents Music of America VIII, featuring works by Missy Mazzoli, Eric D. Gould, and Katherine Hoover, plus premieres of works by Ty Alan Emerson and Eric Charnofsky (Disciples Church in Cleveland Hts., free and live streamed here.) [Read more…]