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Oberlin Orchestra at Carnegie Hall: a conversation with conductor Raphael Jiménez

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by Mike Telin

As a music journalist, I have had many opportunities to have aside conversations with artists about their favorite concert halls. While everyone mentions the acoustic of places like Severance Hall, for example, most add that they can also feel the ghosts that inhabit these storied venues.

Without question one of the most iconic halls in the United States is Carnegie Hall, and on Saturday, January 19 the Oberlin Orchestra and College Choir will perform among the ghosts of Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, Mahler, Bartók, George Gershwin, Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Judy Garland, and The Beatles, to name only a few. To view the full roster of Carnegie Hall ghosts, click here.

You can hear a preview concert by these Oberlin ensembles on Wednesday, January 16 at 7:30 pm in Finney Chapel. Gregory Ristow will lead the Choir in Tarik O’Regan’s Triptych and Stravinsky’s Les noces, and Raphael Jiménez will lead the orchestra in Elizabeth Ogonek’s All These Lighted Things (three little dances for orchestra) and Debussy’s La Mer. Click here for the live webcast.

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Ramping up to Carnegie Hall: a conversation with Oberlin College Choir director Gregory Ristow

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by Daniel Hathaway

On January 19, the Oberlin College Choir and Oberlin Orchestra will share the iconic stage of Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium in New York for performances of works by Tarik O’Regan, Igor Stravinsky, Elizabeth Ogonek, and Claude Debussy led by Gregory Ristow and Raphael Jiménez. That event will be previewed in a free concert in the College’s Finney Chapel on Wednesday, January 16 at 7:30 pm.

Ristow’s choir will be spending most of this month — during Oberlin’s Winter Term, when classes give way to special projects — rehearsing for the New York engagement, but also revisiting a particularly challenging set of pieces they already presented on campus during the fall semester.

He’ll take faculty cellist Darrett Adkins, the Choir, and Sofia Gubaidulina’s Canticle of the Sun to the Cleveland Cello Society’s annual “i Cellisti” extravaganza at St. Paul’s Church in Cleveland Heights on Friday, January 11 at 7:30 pm. And he and his singers will repeat a program they gave for the Oberlin Board of Trustees on the FIRST•Music series at First Lutheran Church in Lorain on Sunday, January 13 at 3:00 pm. [Read more…]

Roomful of Teeth residency at Oberlin: Q&A and composition sessions
(Feb. 15)

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by Hannah Schoepe

Shaw Q&AHow are your compositions formed? How do you balance judgement with unhinged creativity? What is the most profound advice you can offer students today? Those were a few of the questions posed to the Pulitzer prize-winning composer and Roomful of Teeth member Caroline Shaw during an insightful Q & A session Thursday afternoon, February 16 in Oberlin’s Kulas Recital Hall.

During the session Shaw addressed her compositional process, as well as her creative sources of inspiration. She began by playing an excerpt from her recently composed string quartet Valencia. With its simple lines and ethereal harmonics, the piece grabbed the audience’s attention immediately. When asked about the work, Shaw affirmed her love for simple layers in her music.  She said, “I like to create a ‘room,’ a musical space where people can walk around but don’t get lost.” Continuing on a humorous note, she said most listeners assume there is a connection between the quartet and Valencia Spain, when in fact the genesis of the work was derived from the beauty of a valencia orange. [Read more…]

Roomful of Teeth to perform on the Oberlin Artist Recital Series

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by Mike Telin

ROOMFULL-OF-TEETH“It’s amazing how professional choral singing has changed in the past 10 to 15 years,” Gregory Ristow, director of vocal ensembles at the Oberlin Conservatory, said during a recent conversation. “And the singers in Roomful of Teeth are the perfect model for our students because their careers are multi-faceted.”

On Friday, February 16 at 8:00 pm in Finney Chapel, the Oberlin Artist Recital Series will present Roomful of Teeth under the direction of Brad Wells. The program will include Caroline Shaw’s Partita for 8 Voices, Missy Mazzoli’s Vesper Sparrow, Judd Greenstein’s Run Away, and Toby Twining’s Dumas’ Riposte. The Grammy Award-winning ensemble will be joined by the Oberlin College Choir for William Brittelle’s Psychedelics and Merrill Garbus’ Quizassa. Tickets are available online.

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Oberlin Opera Theater: Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (November 3)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Oberlin-Figaro-1What does it take to create a sparkling production of Mozart’s opera buffa The Marriage of Figaro? The music, of course, comes first, and you need a fine group of vocalists to put the composer’s engaging arias and brilliant finales across, a flexible conductor and orchestra in the pit, and a sure hand at the keyboard for recitatives. [Read more…]

Margaret Brouwer’s Voice of the Lake to be premiered at the Breen Center

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by Mike Telin

Margaret+Brouwer+by+Christian+Steiner+#3762Enjoying the natural beauty of Lake Erie has always been part of composer Margaret Brouwer’s life — she grew up spending summers at her family’s lake cottage in Huron. But when dangerous levels of algae blooms in the Lake’s western basin caused a water crisis in Toledo in 2014, the ensuing national conversation about environmental pollution and the state of the country’s drinking water became the source of inspiration for Brouwer’s latest composition, Voice of the Lake.   

The four-part oratorio will have its world premiere this Sunday, November 12 at 3:00 pm at the Breen Center for the Performing Arts.

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Oberlin Opera Theater stages an enchanting Cendrillon (March 8)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Cendrillon-Stepmother-StepsistersWhether you know her as Cendrillon, Aschenbrödel, La Cenerentola, La Cenicienta, Soluschka, or, most likely, Cinderella, the story of that downtrodden stepchild is an irresistible fairy tale. It’s been turned into many operas, but perhaps most magically by Jules Massenet in his Cendrillon, beautifully produced by Oberlin Opera Theater last Wednesday evening at its opening performance in Hall Auditorium. [Read more…]

Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble at CMA: a conversation with conductor Gregory Ristow

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by Jeremy Reynolds

RistowContinuing a collaboration with the Cleveland Museum of Art that began in 2014, Oberlin Conservatory’s Contemporary Music Ensemble (CME) will give the third of four performances this season on Sunday, February 26 at 2:00 pm in CMA’s Gartner Auditorium. While student vocalists have long performed with CME, the upcoming concert is the first time that a museum program by the Ensemble will be dedicated to vocal music.

The program, under the direction of Gregory Ristow, will include Harrison Birtwistle’s Entr’actes and Sappho Fragments, as well as  Oberlin Professor of Composition Stephen Hartke’s Tituli.

Ristow is now in his second year as director of vocal ensembles at the Conservatory. An Oberlin alumnus, he earned his doctoral of musical arts in conducting from the Eastman School of Music.

Ristow also conducts the Interlochen Singers and has previously led the Houston Foundation for Modern Music, and the Voices chamber choir in Rochester.

We caught up with Ristow by phone recently to discuss the upcoming performance and learn more about the program. [Read more…]

Oberlin Opera Theater: double bill of Donizetti & Poulenc in Hall Auditorium (Nov. 2)

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by Daniel Hathaway

mama-groupJonathon Field’s Oberlin Opera Theater shows are always fresh and surprising, but his versions of Donizetti’s Viva la Mamma and Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tiresias burst onstage Wednesday evening in a laughfest of satire and surrealism. With casts that would put many professional companies to shame, these are must-see productions that will prick up your ears and kick-start your imagination. [Read more…]

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