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Cleveland Orchestra with pianist Garrick Ohlsson at Severance (Oct. 30)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Frequent guest pianist Garrick Ohlsson returned to Severance Music Center on Thursday, Oct. 30, 50 years after his first appearance with The Cleveland Orchestra.

The concert, conducted by Franz Welser-Möst, reminded us why we cherish these performances year after year: consistent excellence, both familiar and new music, and the company of an artist whose quiet dignity and calm brilliance have become a reliable part of the city’s musical life.

The program opened with “Permissions,” a ten-minute churn by Tyler Taylor, the Orchestra’s new Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow. The Louisville, Kentucky-born composer and horn player brings a performer’s instinct for timbre and ensemble dynamics to his writing.

[Read more…]

Garrick Ohlsson returns to the Severance Music Center stage

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by Mike Telin

“The thing about playing Mozart concertos, especially with a great orchestra like Cleveland, is that when it goes well, it will leave me on such an adrenaline high I may not be able to sleep,” pianist Garrick Ohlsson said during a recent telephone conversation.

On Thursday, October 30 at 7:30 pm, Garrick Ohlsson will join Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Music Center for a performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23.

“Like Shakespeare, Mozart can find the appropriate way to express the full range of human emotions. He can write the saddest music and the happiest music. He can write an aria for a servant who’s upset because she’s lost a pin. But unlike a 19th century composer, he doesn’t lay it on thick, he doesn’t do what the English call making heavy weather of it.”

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Pianist Garrick Ohlsson, conductor Daniel Reith lead Cleveland Orchestra in Beethoven concert (Nov. 9)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com.

CLEVELAND, Ohio — A relaxed understanding born of a long career helped pianist Garrick Ohlsson bring easy grace and Proto-Romantic sensibility to Beethoven’s Second and Fourth Piano Concertos with the Cleveland Orchestra.

The program on Saturday at Severance Music Center featured early and middle works, the second set of concerts in the Orchestra’s cycle of Beethoven piano concertos.

Despite its number, the Second Concerto is actually the composer’s first, begun in 1790. Ohlsson treated this early Beethoven work expressively, with sinuous rubato, keeping his rhythms precise, his touch light, and his rhetoric clear. Nothing, not even Beethoven’s many technical snares, seemed to faze him.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Chamber Music Society: Garrick Ohlsson at Disciples (May 7)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Cleveland audiences have recently enjoyed a double dose of Garrick Ohlsson’s piano wizardry. After stepping in for Igor Levit with The Cleveland Orchestra in March, Ohlsson returned to close out the Cleveland Chamber Music Society season with a predictably wonderful recital at Disciples Christian Church on Tuesday, May 7. The four works on his program — a Beethoven sonata, a Schubert fantasy, a contemporary Australian piece, and a Chopin triptych gave the large audience plenty to rave about.

Beethoven’s Sixth Sonata is something of an entremet among the three works of his Opus 10. Shorter and lighter in spirit than its siblings, it made a delightful curtain raiser. Ohlsson played the opening movement with an elegant clarity, inviting his listeners to join in the fun he was obviously having. [Read more…]

Cleveland Chamber Music Society concludes season with Garrick Ohlsson

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by Mike Telin

“This is going to sound like a commercial, but coming to Cleveland — and the wider area — is always one of the high points of my artistic life,” Garrick Ohlsson recently said by telephone. And the pianist has performed in Northeast Ohio enough times to make that claim. He has been a regular soloist with The Cleveland Orchestra for some time and has performed on Akron’s Tuesday Musical and Oberlin’s Artist Recital Series. And he has already been to the area twice this calendar year — first making a return engagement with the Canton Symphony, then replacing Igor Levit with The Cleveland Orchestra..

One Tuesday, May 7 at 7:30 pm at Disciples Christian Church, Ohlsson will revisit the Cleveland Chamber Music Society with a program that features the music of Beethoven, Schubert, and Chopin. Tickets are available online.

[Read more…]

DIARY: Wednesday, April 3, 2024

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by Jarrett Hoffman

IN THIS EDITION:

•Today: “Folk Songs from the British Isles and Beyond” at Trinity Cathedral, and the Beijing Guitar Duo at Stow-Munroe Falls Public Library

•Announcements: Cleveland Orchestra Youth Chorus accepting applications, and the participants in the 2024 She Scores program from Local 4 Music Fund

•Almanac: Garrick Ohlsson’s last-minute visit to Cleveland, and going down the YouTube rabbit hole with Kurt Weill’s “Mack the Knife”

[Read more…]

Pianist Garrick Ohlsson, Cleveland Orchestra team up for refined, unfussy evening of Mozart (Mar. 14)

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By Kevin McLaughlin, Cleveland Classical
Originally published in Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Though we missed hearing pianist Igor Levit, who withdrew due to illness, it was a pleasure, as always, to welcome Garrick Ohlsson to Severance Music Center on Thursday, March 14. With Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra musicians as partners, the pianist strode onstage to render as refined and unfussy a performance of a Mozart Piano Concerto as one might hope to hear.

The Concerto No. 27 in B-flat, K. 595 — Mozart’s last — was composed in 1788, though not performed until March of 1791. Many keyboard players like to ascribe to Mozart the same pathos that attached itself to Schubert in his final years of life, but Ohlsson knows better. Mozart’s music rarely reflects immediate personal crises, and this particular concerto wasn’t designed for that anyway. (Photo by Yevhen Gulenko)

[Read more…]

Canton Symphony enters a new era:
a conversation with music director designate Matthew Jenkins Jaroszewicz

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by Mike Telin

When Matthew Jenkins Jaroszewicz was appointed Music Director Designate of the Canton Symphony in August of 2020, the plan was for him to assume the role of Music Director in 2026. But with the passing in June of Gerhardt Zimmermann, the Orchestra’s longtime Music Director, Jaroszewicz suddenly found himself tasked with filling some big shoes sooner than expected.

On Saturday, October 7 at 7:30 pm, the young conductor will lead the Orchestra’s season-opening concert at Zimmermann Symphony Center. The program, titled “Ode to Freedom,” includes Joan Tower’s Made in America, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, and two works that will feature Seohyun Kim, winner of the 2022 Thomas and Evon Cooper International Violin Competition: Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane and Jeff Scott’s Song of the Uirapuru, receiving its world premiere. Tickets are available online.

I caught up with Jaroszewicz by phone and began by asking him how he is managing during this period of transition.

Matthew Jenkins Jaroszewicz: It’s been difficult for a lot of reasons. Obviously, in six years serving as Gerhardt’s assistant and then associate, I built a professional and personal relationship with him, and with his wife Sharon as well. The plan was for me to take over as Music Director in 2026, and after that Gerhardt would still be around as the Music Director Emeritus for five more years. So to not only be thrust into the role three years early, but to not have Gerhardt there as someone I could lean on as a mentor was a shock.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom: Blomstedt’s Beethoven 7 (Aug. 1)

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by Peter Feher 

From the podium, Herbert Blomstedt is always proving that there are new insights to be found in even the most well-trod pieces.

The 94-year-old Swedish American conductor, whose big American post was with the San Francisco Symphony several decades ago, returned to Blossom Music Center on Sunday, August 1, with the kind of austere program only he can pull off.

[Read more…]

Garrick Ohlsson wrangles Busoni at Severance Hall (February 7)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Italian-born composer Ferruccio Busoni, who died in 1924, is mostly known for his rather extravagant elaborations of J.S. Bach’s keyboard works and for a notorious piano concerto that scarcely anyone has ever heard live. Cleveland Orchestra audiences had that rare opportunity twice last weekend, thanks to pianist Garrick Ohlsson — and to the Orchestra’s music director laureate Christoph von Dohnányi, who originally engaged Ohlsson to play it in Cleveland in 1989 and to record it for Telarc. [Read more…]

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