by Stephanie Manning
After a year with no shortage of pre-recorded performances, watching musicians play together live and unmasked — even through a computer screen — feels like a breath of fresh air.
Though there was no audience in the room, the energy was palpable as the musicians of the Local 4 Music Fund’s She Scores concert series came together on Sunday for an afternoon of music at the Pilgrim UCC. [Read more…]
by Jarrett Hoffman
The Local 4 Music Fund continued its “Tuning In” series on December 17 with an engaging, emotionally wide-ranging program of piano quintets, streamed live from the Steinway Piano Gallery of Cleveland.
The opener was Amy Beach’s Op. 67 (1907), a late-Romantic showcase of powerful and direct expressiveness. The closer was Dmitri Shostakovich’s intense but close-to-the-vest Op. 57 (1940). And in between was Eric Charnofsky’s 5 by 5 (2011), in one respect a hybrid of those other styles of musical communication: sometimes overtly emotional, but often exhibiting a coolness in its leaping gestures and its glassy harmonies.
by Nicolette Cheauré
A concert program comprised entirely of piano quintets is fairly uncommon, but on Thursday, December 17th at 7:00 pm at the Steinway Gallery you can hear three such pieces on the same program, as part of the Local 4 Music Fund’s “Tuning In” virtual concert series. You can hear piano quintets by Shostakovich and Amy Beach, performed by violinists Jennifer Walvoord and Diana Pepelea-Vardi, violist Esther Nahm, cellist Derek Snyder, and pianist Eric Charnofsky. The concert will also feature Charnofsky’s own composition, 5 by 5.
The piece was commissioned for and premiered by the Los Angeles-based group Pacific Serenades, and partly modeled off of Meditations on a Suicide, a film score Charnofsky composed in 1989. The work hasn’t been performed since 2011, “So this is bringing it back nine years later,” Charnofsky said during a recent Zoom interview. Specializing in premiering new works, Pacific Serenades highlighted a composer from the area at every concert, and their only requirement was to “compose something that is of lasting beauty.” In 5 by 5, commission number 101, Charnofsky utilized the compositional freedom he was granted. The title refers to the instrumentation and number of movements. Each — Intrada, Chaconne, Tarantella, Meditation and Postscript — features a different instrument and a specifically chosen interval, bouncing between celebration, resonance, quirkiness, and thoughtfulness. [Read more…]
by David Kulma
It was another fascinating afternoon of recent music by members of the Cleveland Composers Guild at CSU’s Drinko Recital Hall on Sunday, October 13. Opening the Guild’s 60th anniversary season, the concert featured chamber music by eight local composers in the usual explorative potluck format.