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Gabrielle Haigh visits Respighi’s circle in debut CD with pianist Randall Fusco

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by Daniel Hathaway

There are myriad paths to follow — both musical and literary — when curating an art song recital. For her impressive debut solo CD, soprano Gabriella Haigh chose to visit repertoire reflecting musical relationships that swirled around the 19th-century Italian composer Ottorino Respighi.

That idea was born when Haigh discovered that Respighi’s wife, Elsa (née Olivieri-Sangiacomo), who outlived him by some 60 years — she died at 102 — was both his pupil and a composer herself.

“This revelation led to the idea of performing a recital featuring art songs composed by Respighi’s most influential teachers, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Giuseppe Martucci, by his students Vittorio Rieti and Elsa Respighi, and of course several of his own,” Haigh wrote in her album notes. [Read more…]

Margi Griebling-Haigh’s The White Trout: a chamber opera in one act on YouTube

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by Daniel Hathaway

Commissioned by Peter Gallagher in 2012, premiered in 2013 at the convention of the International Society of Bassists, and revised in 2019, Margi Griebling-Haigh’s 25-minute chamber opera, The White Trout, was released in mid-November on YouTube.

The piece embellishes an Irish folk tale from County Mayo as told by Samuel Lover and collected by William Butler Yeats. Predictably fantastical, the story centers around a beautiful woman whose fiancé, a king’s son, is murdered and thrown into a lake. The grieving bride eventually disappears (the work of fairies?) about the time villagers notice a strange white trout in the water. [Read more…]

Akron Symphony & Chorus: Mozart’s Requiem (Feb. 22)

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by Peter Feher

The history of classical music sometimes borders on mythology. The music on the Akron Symphony’s Saturday, February 22 program has taken on this fabled, quasi-historical quality — Mozart’s Requiem, Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, and Beethoven’s over-finished Leonore Overture No. 3. Fortunately, in performance the music more than lived up to the story. [Read more…]

Review: Choir of Clare College, Cambridge in concert at Fairmount Presbyterian Church (December 14)

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by Nicholas Jones

Clare-College-ChoirIt is one of the joys of the holiday season that choral music rings all about us. Clevelanders have a banquet of our own choral groups to enjoy, but it is an added pleasure to hear an accomplished choir from England, where the choral tradition is so deeply established.

A goodly crowd turned out at Fairmount Presbyterian Church in Cleveland Heights on a very snowy Saturday evening to hear the choir of Clare College, one of the 31 colleges of the University of Cambridge (indeed, the second oldest of those colleges, established in the early 14th century). The choir, some 25-strong, warmed the church and the audience with its accomplished and vigorous musicality.

[Read more…]

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