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Cleveland Photoplayers to make debut at Cleveland Silent Film Festival

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Aficionados of silent film music know there is an infinite variety of approaches to performing a film’s music, from original scores to improvised performances and generic musical cues that have been stitched together from a variety of sources.

On Saturday, April 5 at 4:30 pm in the Louis Stokes Wing Auditorium at the Cleveland Public Library, the Cleveland Silent Film Festival will continue their “CPL: Celebrating 100 Years” series with a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 thriller Blackmail. Daniel Goldmark, Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University, will introduce the film and the musical score. Admission is free.

The screening will also mark the debut of The Cleveland Photoplayers. Directed by pianist Eric Charnofsky (pictured), the ensemble includes violinist Emily Cornelius, cellist David Ellis, clarinetist Amitai Vardi, and cornetist Riley Conley.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Chamber Collective: Music of America VII (Jan. 12)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

In a program titled Music of America VII held on Sunday, January 12 at Disciples Christian Church in Cleveland Heights, the Cleveland Chamber Collective presented a concert of attractive and varied new music, inspired by sounds from around the globe —  India to Buenos Aires and Bali to Manhattan.

At two and a half hours, the program might have stood a trimming, but it would be hard to know what to cut — the works and performances by familiar and rising Cleveland professionals were uniformly splendid. Director Ty Alan Emerson served as gracious host as well as stagehand and impresario.

In Reena Esmail’s Blaze, a duo for violin (Emily Cornelius) and tabla (Dylan Moffitt) much of the intensity came from Cornelius’s relationship to Moffitt’s exact playing — we were drawn in by the quietness of Moffitt’s tabla and by Cornelius’s attention to it. The two drifted in and out of sync, with the violinist both captive to and rebelling against the insistent rhythm, even while she conjured enigmatic extremes of darkness and ecstasy.
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Cleveland Chamber Collective: Music of America VI

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by Mike Telin

On Saturday, August 3 at 7:00 pm at Disciples Christian Church, The Cleveland Chamber Collective will present Music of America VI. The program includes works by Caroline Shaw, Missy Mazzoli, Jessie Montgomery, Michael Oesterle, Trevor Kazarian, and Eric Charnofsky. The concert is free.

During a recent telephone conversation Cleveland Chamber Collective director and conductor Ty Alan Emerson said that the Music of America series has evolved over time.

“When we started out, we were calling it American Icons, which was our way to feature music by composers such as Lou Harrison, George Crumb, and Leonard Bernstein. Then we thought, there’s all this other music being made in America that isn’t getting played. So several years ago we started to look at who else is out there and who are we missing.”

Emerson noted that right now, inclusion is the hot button in classical music, and that for several years the ensemble has been trying to find ways to be more inclusive.

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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…]

Cleveland Chamber Collective: Ty Alan Emerson’s Oath Breaker (Apr. 28)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

It is one of Cleveland’s persistently good things that outlets for fresh new music — played by some of the area’s best musicians — continue to thrive. On Sunday, April 28, we were reminded of this again at Cleveland Chamber Collective’s presentation of Ty Alan Emerson’s Oath Breaker, a Requiem for chamber ensemble and digital playback at the Pivot Center.

Emerson conducted a distinguished ensemble comprising Linda White, flute, Emily Cornelius, violin, Brian Slawta, viola, Trevor Kazarian, cello, Eric Charnofsky, piano, and Dylan Moffitt, percussion.

Oath Breaker takes the audience on a 60-minute journey of anger, grief, and hope, as a kind of collective PTSD therapy session about the events of January 6 and its subsequent aftermath. The mixture of recorded electronics, live performances, and poetic and prosaic texts helped to conjure in real time the horror of that day.

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A Healing Return to the Stage for the Canton Symphony Orchestra

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by Tom Wachunas

Reasons to be cheerful: they’re back! The May 23 concert by the Canton Symphony Orchestra marked the first time in more than a year that the ensemble has performed live at Umstattd Performing Arts Hall. This occasion was certainly an important step on the road back to cultural “normalcy” as we recover from the dreadful pandemic shutdown.

For a May 21 article by Ed Balint in The Repository (Canton’s daily newspaper), CSO president and CEO Michelle Charles said of the concert, “That’s what we do, that’s what we love and that’s why we exist, to perform music live. You do take for granted how readily available (classical music) is until it’s not. So I think it’s going to be very emotional.” [Read more…]

Local 4 “Tuning In” with Cornelius and Charnofsky (Nov. 19)

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by Jarrett Hoffman

On November 19, violinist Emily Cornelius and pianist Eric Charnofsky were minutes into a live-streamed recital as part of the Local 4 Music Fund’s “Tuning In” series when technical issues arose. The duo stopped playing after someone off-screen said that Facebook had shut down the broadcast, and following a moment of confusion, the video stream on my computer indeed cut out.

That delay was odd, but apparently the problem was a mistaken concern from that ever-benevolent giant of social media companies about a copyright violation. Twenty minutes later, Cornelius and Charnofsky began once again, and the city of Cleveland crossed its fingers.

[Read more…]

Violinist Emily Cornelius on escaping the inescapable — performing in a pandemic

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by Stephanie Manning

In such an unpredictable year for musicians, Emily Cornelius feels overwhelmingly grateful to continue performing for others. From a small, socially distanced concert with the Canton Symphony to a recent guest concertmaster appearance with the Eric Philharmonic, the violinist considers herself lucky to have been staying busy these past few months. “Like most musicians, my work is really the center of my life—it’s not just a job, it’s who I am,” she said in a recent Zoom interview.

“To get to continue doing that in some form is enormous.” With her time in Erie now behind her, she is focusing on her next performance, a live streamed recital on November 19th sponsored by the Local 4 Music Fund.

The three composers and their pieces on the program are all well-known, but familiarity was the goal. She and her collaborator, pianist Eric Charnofsky, chose works “that would be personally challenging and satisfying for us to play and hopefully a joy for the audience to hear.” [Read more…]

BlueWater Chamber Orchestra at Plymouth Church (Feb. 1)

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by David Kulma

During Daniel Meyer’s short tenure as artistic director and conductor of BlueWater Chamber Orchestra, the ensemble has risen to a new level of quality. On Saturday, February 1 at Plymouth Church, Meyer and his ensemble performed an excellent program titled “A Classical Feast,” focusing on music from the late 18th century.

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BlueWater: chatting with violin soloists Ken Johnston and Emily Cornelius

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Two founding members of BlueWater Chamber Orchestra will partner as soloists this weekend, when conductor Daniel Meyer and the ensemble perform “A Classical Feast” at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights on Saturday, February 1 at 7:30 pm.

Concertmaster Ken Johnston and principal second violin Emily Cornelius will play the Op. 13 Symphonie Concertante in G by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, who is remembered as the first known classical composer of African origin. One of his contemporaries was Mozart, whose Symphony No. 40 in g closes Saturday’s program. And in between those two works, soprano Laura Pedersen will be featured in Beethoven’s concert aria Ah, Perfido! Tickets are available online.

Johnston and Cornelius have known each other for at least ten years — BlueWater celebrates its own decade in 2020 — but this will be their first time appearing together as soloists. “At this point, she and I are old friends,” Johnston said by telephone last week. “I have a tremendous amount of respect for her musicianship. I think we share the same sense of humor in a lot of ways, and that comes across.”

[Read more…]

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