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Cleveland Chamber Choir: “La Fleur de la Renaissance” (May 9)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Before the Cleveland Chamber Choir sang a note on Saturday evening in First Lutheran Church in Lorain, the audience had choir practice.

With gentle guidance and help from the chorus, Gregory Ristow got them singing the anonymous L’homme armé melody, antique French pronunciation and all. The tune, now internalized, became a recognizable thread connecting two centuries of Renaissance music.

Under Ristow’s direction, “La fleur de la Renaissance” moved through Mass movements, laments, psalms, battle pieces, and spring chansons, using the L’homme armé melody as both connective thread and point of departure. The evening spanned nearly 200 years, but never felt like a history lesson. Ristow organized the concert as a sequence of changing scenes, moods, and colors, each piece leading naturally into the next.

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Cleveland Chamber Choir to present “La Fleur de la Renaissance”

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by Daniel Hathaway

In an open letter to Cleveland Chamber Choir patrons, artistic director Gregory Ristow wrote:

“Our upcoming concert, La Fleur de la Renaissance, celebrates the new approach to harmony that emerged in the 1400s in the northern reaches of the French empire…To my ears, this is where Western classical choral singing as we know it began. To return to this music is to come back to the source, to explore consonance and dissonance in their purest forms, to delight in how these composers wrote glorious melodies for each part of the ensemble, while also allowing them to come together to form beautifully resonant sonorities.”

On Friday, May 8 at Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland, and Saturday, May 9 at First Lutheran Church in Lorain, the Cleveland Chamber Choir will present “The Flower of the Renaissance,” a compendium of works by six composers in the form of a Roman Catholic Mass that explore this new style. Both performances begin at 7:30.

The program also demonstrates the popular practice among Renaissance composers of embedding pre-existing material in new pieces, something that would come to be regarded as plagiarism in modern times, but were meant as tributes back in the day. Ristow has constructed his imaginary mass from movements of the forty-some Renaissance works based on the mysterious secular song, L’Homme armé. [Read more…]

Cleveland Ballet partners with BlueWater & Cleveland Chamber Choir for an outstanding production of Handel’s Messiah (Mar. 21) 

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by Daniel Hathaway

Three of Cleveland’s flagship organizations joined forces for gripping performances of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah at KeyBank State Theater from March 20 to 22.

Handel’s 1741 oratorio has firmly established itself in the U.S. as a Christmas religious tradition, although it was first performed in Dublin’s Fishamble Street Musick Hall at Easter time, when performances of Italian opera had fallen out of favor in London.

Cleveland Ballet’s productions restored Handel’s most celebrated oratorio to its original context in a theater, with some 50 excellent Blue Water Chamber Orchestra and Cleveland Chamber Choir musicians performing from the orchestra pit under the sensitive direction of CCC’s artistic director Gregory Ristow. [Read more…]

Cleveland Chamber Choir combines music, flowers, and poetry with “Love in Bloom”

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by Stephanie Manning

In the midst of such a chilly and snowy start to the year, a concert titled “Love in Bloom” might sound refreshing right about now.  “It should be a very heartwarming program,” Cleveland Chamber Choir artistic director Gregory Ristow said about the group’s upcoming performances. “Even if we are still shivering like crazy in this cold Ohio winter.”

This week, the Choir will tour the Northeast Ohio area with a collection of love songs, presenting concerts at United Church of Christ in Kent (February 6), Trinity Cathedral in Cleveland (February 7), and Bethany Lutheran Church in Ashtabula (February 8). Tickets are pay-what-you-wish and can be reserved online.

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Brownbag Concert: Madness & Melancholy at Trinity (Jan. 21)

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By Kevin McLaughlin

At noon on alternate Wednesdays, Trinity Cathedral becomes a refuge from the workweek. On January 21, the Cleveland Chamber Choir’s Brownbag Concerts continued a downtown tradition started in 1978 by Cleveland Classical.com’s own Daniel Hathaway — a series that offers listeners a midday pause, with informal, high-quality performances and a welcome sense of community.

The Cleveland Chamber Choir has recently been part of this tradition as artist-in-residence, offering programs that complement the cathedral’s acoustic and reward an audience listening closely over the lunch hour. For this concert, a subset of the full choir performed: Abigail Hakel-Garcia (soprano and violin), Kira McGirr (mezzo-soprano) Gregory Ristow (tenor and harpsichord), Dominic Aragon (baritone), and Adrian Murillo (theorbo).

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Cleveland Chamber Choir: music to mark the hours and seasons

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by Mike Telin

This week, Cleveland Chamber Choir invites you to join them by candlelight for a concert of two works that take listeners on a musical journey from sunset to sunrise, and winter to spring.

On Friday October 24 at 7:30 pm at Trinity Cathedral, Gregory Ristow will lead the Cleveland Chamber Choir in Sergei Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil and Reena Esmail’s A Winter Breviary.

The program will be repeated on Saturday at 7:00 in Fairchild Chapel in Oberlin. Charles Edward McGuire, PhD, from Oberlin College & Conservatory, will present a pre-concert talk 45 minutes prior to each performance. Pay-what-you-wish tickets are available online.

“In the traditional Eastern Orthodox All-Night Vigil service, prayers and chants would have been spaced through the entire night from just before sunset to just before the rising of the sun,” CCC artistic director Gregory Ristow said during a Zoom conversation. “But the service that Rachmaninoff would have had in mind combines all the prayers that would have been said through the night into one service.”

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Cleveland Chamber Choir celebrates tenth birthday

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by Mike Telin

On Saturday, May 17 at 7:30 pm in Trinity Cathedral, BlueWater Chamber Orchestra and Cleveland Chamber Choir present “I Believe! Knitted Voices of Justice and Faith,” with conductor Daniel Meyer and soprano Katherine Jolly. The program includes Margaret Bonds’ Credo and Mozart’s “Great” Mass in c. Pay-what-you-wish tickets are available at the door and online.

The concert also marks the culmination of the tenth anniversary season for Cleveland Chamber Choir. We spoke to CCC’s president, Melissa Vandergriff, who helped found the Choir in 2015 along with the ensemble’s first artistic director, Scott MacPherson. We also spoke to ensemble member and executive director Kira McGirr as well as Gregory Ristow, who became the group’s second artistic director in August 2023. [Read more…]

Cleveland Chamber Choir & HaZamir: music by Rossi at West Shore Unitarian Church (Mar. 2)

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by Daniel Hathaway

“I spent a week in Mantua one afternoon” sounds like a standup comic’s putdown of a hopelessly boring city. No such thing on Sunday afternoon, March 2, when Gregory Ristow, the Cleveland Chamber Choir, and members of HaZamir Cleveland youth choir, presented “Synagogue and Salon” at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church.

Conceived as a week-long walking tour through Mantova, the program was designed to better understand the complex musical world of Jewish violinist and composer Salamone Rossi. During their virtual progress through the Italian city that was ruled for 400 years by the wealthy Gonzaga family, the audience heard some 30 pieces of music by Rossi and his contemporaries, as well as examples of the popular and folk music of the streets, all excellently performed by the 24-voice choir and 8-piece instrumental ensemble of bowed and plucked strings with percussion and chamber organ.

Rossi, who lived from around 1570 to around 1628 — on the cusp of the Renaissance and Baroque periods — produced a vast quantity of music. [Read more…]

Cleveland Chamber Choir to feature works by Salamone Rossi

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by Daniel Hathaway

Cleveland Chamber Choir will devote its midwinter concerts to the music of the prolific Italian Jewish composer and violinist Salamone Rossi, a transitional figure who bridged the Renaissance and Baroque periods and was equally at home in the worlds of Jewish liturgical and Italian secular music. Like his contemporary Claudio Monteverdi, he was employed at the court of the Gonzaga family in Mantua.

Artistic director Gregory Ristow will lead the Chamber Choir and youth choir HaZamir in “Synagogue and Salon” on Saturday, March 1 at 8:00 pm at Congregation Mishkan Or in Beachwood, and Sunday, March 2 at 4:00 pm at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church in Rocky River. Admission is pay-what-you-can.

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Cleveland Chamber Choir At Cleveland School of the Arts (Dec. 20) 

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by Peter Feher

Handel’s Messiah wasn’t the only oratorio you could hear in Northeast Ohio over the Holiday season. The Cleveland Chamber Choir offered a brilliant, bracing alternative with two performances of David Lang’s the little match girl passion, December 20 and 21 at Cleveland School of the Arts.

Friday’s concert saw expert singing in service of sincere emotion, vividly realizing this stark Christmas story adapted from Hans Christian Andersen.

There’s no trace of a happy ending in Andersen’s original 19th-century fairy tale. The titular character in “The Little Match Girl” freezes to death on New Year’s Eve after being kicked out of the house by her father, losing her slippers in the street, and failing to sell any matches to passersby who can’t spare so much as a penny. [Read more…]

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