by Jarrett Hoffman
Identical twins Christina and Michelle Naughton — the first piano duo to receive the Avery Fisher Career Grant — are known for their uncanny level of mind-melding in performance. Christina once told The Wall Street Journal, “There are times I forget we are two people playing together.”
As I learned during a recent telephone call, that sense of unity extends to their interviews. Our central topic of conversation was their upcoming appearance on Tuesday Musical’s Margaret Baxtresser Annual Piano Concert on Tuesday, November 16 at 7:30 pm at E.J. Thomas Hall, where they’ll play an all-American program of music by Copland, Bernstein, Schoenfield, and Adams. (Tickets are available here.)
Throughout the call, they were thoughtful, humorous, down-to-earth — and very similar in voice. Occasionally I asked who had just been speaking, only to find out they had been switching off. According to Michelle (I think), they’ve been misquoted for each other “ten million times” — they’re not only used to it, but used to laughing about it.
The opening of a concert season is always a festive occasion, and there’s a lot to celebrate this year for the Akron Symphony. “We’ve actually emerged from the pandemic stronger in a lot of ways than we went into it,” music director Christopher Wilkins said in a recent interview. On Saturday, November 13 at 8:00 pm, the orchestra will return to E.J. Thomas Hall with a program of works by Dvořák, Perry, Ellington, Price, and Beethoven.
Chanticleer, the legendary all-male vocal ensemble, appeared on Tuesday Musical’s series at E.J. Thomas Hall on July 27. Founded in 1978, the ensemble presented one of their trademark eclectic programs, in which a Renaissance motet by William Byrd could bump up against Burton Lane’s pop song 
Located on the campus of the University of Akron, the concrete structure that is E.J. Thomas Hall is a formidable space. With a seating capacity of 2,955, it is not the first venue that comes to mind when you think of enjoying an intimate musical experience. But in a concert presented by Tuesday Musical on April 20, Edgar Meyer proved that a great musician is capable of making a large hall feel small.
If you heard about someone sneaking 
There was an unspoken tension between the composers on the Akron Symphony’s January 18 concert. Gustav Mahler’s hour-plus Fifth Symphony dominated the one-night-only program at E.J. Thomas Hall, which also featured an uncharacteristically short work by Richard Wagner — no slouch when it comes to profundity and grand gestures in his own music. Yet Wagner’s somewhat humble place on the program provided a conceptual key to Mahler’s self-contained, sometimes overwhelming symphony.
Programming a concert is like working out a puzzle. And if one of the pieces is Mahler’s 
It’s a rare treat to hear two excellent orchestra members out front as soloists in a single concert. In a program titled “The Four Seasons” on November 16 at E.J. Thomas Hall, the Akron Symphony and music director Christopher Wilkins featured concertmaster Tallie Brunfelt and principal horn Meghan Guegold in well-loved concertos by Antonio Vivaldi and Richard Strauss alongside works by Joseph Haydn and Gabriela Lena Frank.
Following in a line of pianists that has included Garrick Ohlsson, Yuja Wang, Emanuel Ax, and Conrad Tao, the latest performer to be featured in Tuesday Musical’s Margaret Baxtresser Annual Piano Concert is Fei-Fei.