by Jarrett Hoffman
Amir ElSaffar has had the type of musical career that you can imagine laid out as a board game: a winding path with important points along the way where he’s taken on new instruments, absorbed new genres, and crossed the globe to research musical practices more deeply.
He began as a classical trumpeter growing up in Chicago, the son of an Iraqi immigrant father and an American mother. And he has since found his way to jazz, Arabic music, composition, and Iraqi maqam, a centuries-old tradition of highly structured, semi-improvised compositions sung to Classical Arabic and colloquial Iraqi poetry.
The foremost purveyor of that tradition is Hamid Al-Saadi, who will join ElSaffar and the group Safaafir for “Journey to the Heart of the Iraqi Maqam” in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Wednesday, January 29 at 7:30 pm as part of the Museum’s Performing Arts Series. Tickets are available online.
Fretwork, the famous England-based viol consort, will return to Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art next week for a program inspired by the Museum’s current exhibit “Michelangelo: Mind of the Master.”
Since bursting onto the scene in 2012 with its 
Avi Avital remembers meeting Omer Avital — no relation — in the cafeteria at the Jerusalem Music Academy.
ChamberFest Cleveland, the celebrated summer music festival founded by Franklin Cohen, principal clarinet emeritus of The Cleveland Orchestra, and his daughter, Diana Cohen, concertmaster of The Calgary Philharmonic, returns to the Cleveland scene with Season 8, “Under the Influence.” The festival will take place from June 13 through June 29, 2019, at venues throughout Greater Cleveland, and will include nine concerts plus a special late-night electronic violin performance at The Wine Spot on Lee Road in Cleveland Heights.
When I asked Xiaoxuan Li how he started playing the piano, he gave me an honest answer. “I was four years old, so I remember nothing, but my mom let me study it and I really loved it,” Li said during a telephone conversation. “She said that many kids didn’t want to practice but I was totally different.”
“The music as always speaks its own language.” In a program note for his new piece 
The average classical musician’s biography is a thinly veiled list of names. A performer’s teachers, schools, venues, festivals, grants, and roles may impress when dressed up in prose, but they sit side by side haloed by auras of significance, like hieroglyphs. How refreshing, then, to read a bio that sums up the appeal of a group in plain terms by the third sentence: “Since its inception, the ensemble has been defined by its unique sound, appealing as much through the personality of each timbre as it does through the color and the uniformity of the voices.” This honesty in advertising is hardly the only thing for which Northeast Ohioans can thank Vox Luminis, the Baroque-focused vocal ensemble who performed in Cleveland last week.
In a year when arts organizations across the globe have looked back on the life of Leonard Bernstein, it’s easy to lose sight of what his centennial might mean to one of his own children.