ClevelandClassical.com Header
Ad
Ad
Ad

Heights Chamber Orchestra at St. Paul’s, Cleveland Hts. (Feb. 24)

by

by Nicholas Stevens

Concert promoters often confront a dilemma: advertisement demands a level of concision that can reduce a rich, varied program to a name or two and some titles. Undeclared riches might await behind a program labeled, say, “Satie’s Parade.” Wise, then, for the Heights Chamber Orchestra to avoid choosing a descriptive tagline for their most recent concert. So many individual aspects of the performance charmed that to single out one would be to minimize its many surprising delights. [Read more…]

Heights Chamber Orchestra: getting to know Dean Buck

by

by Jarrett Hoffman

Dean Buck grew up on the West Side of Cleveland, then headed to New York City for four years of school and five years of work. Now he’s back, pursuing a master’s in conducting at the Cleveland Institute of Music and digging into the city’s freelance scene.

Two things he’s enjoyed since being back? For one, the cost of living. “You have substantially less rent to make each month,” he said, laughing. And two, the music scene. “It’s fun — there are some great groups and great people. I’m almost wary about saying how good it is here because it’s like, oh no, everyone’s going to come.”

Having led a couple of workshop performances during Cleveland Opera Theater’s {NOW} Festival in recent weeks, next up for Buck is a guest conducting opportunity with Heights Chamber Orchestra. What stands out most on that program on Sunday, February 24 at 3:30 pm at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church: a concerto for the Wagner tuba.

[Read more…]

Maltz Center at Case announces new Silver Hall Concert Series

by

by Hannah Schoepe

The Milton and Tamar Maltz Performing Arts Center at the Temple Tifereth-Israel on the campus of Case Western Reserve University will present a new Silver Hall Concert Series. The performances begin this weekend with the annual Showcase Concert presented by the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society on September 15, and continue with the Cleveland Chamber Choir on September 23. The series will comprise nineteen free concerts featuring professional and semi-professional ensembles from greater Cleveland in the 1,200-seat Silver Hall Auditorium (a full concert calendar is below).

The idea of shimmering silver is certainly a fitting concept to describe the Series, presented in partnership with CWRU. Renovated in 2015, Silver Hall Auditorium now includes state-of-the art recording and live-streaming capability. This Series marks the Maltz Center’s new venture into presenting.

Randall Barnes, executive director of the Maltz Center, said the Series tackles several key components that help to define the niche of the Center. “First, the celebration of the musical artistry of our students through the CWRU Music Department ensembles; second, the professional and semi-professional talent of the greater Cleveland area ensembles showcased here; and finally, the intersection of technology and heritage by delivering one-of-a-kind performances both in-person and live-streamed from Silver Hall, the historical showpiece of the Maltz Performing Arts Center.”

[Read more…]

Heights Chamber Orchestra with Emanuela Friscioni at First Baptist (March 29)

by

by Daniel Hathaway

Friscioni-EmanuelaFor the fourth event in its five-concert, 32nd season, Heights Chamber Orchestra invited pianist Emanuela Friscioni to be its guest artist in a rare performance of Francis Poulenc’s Piano Concerto. The largely avocational orchestra is playing its first season under its new music director, Mark Allen McCoy. In addition to the Poulenc, HCO offered its audience Charles Gounod’s Funeral March of a Marionette and Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 6 in C at First Baptist Church on Sunday afternoon, March 29. [Read more…]

Pianist Emanuela Friscioni to play Poulenc concerto with Heights Chamber Orchestra on March 29

by

by Daniel Hathaway

Friscioni-EmanuelaMention Francis Poulenc’s piano concerto and most musically savvy people will ask, “Don’t you mean the two-piano concerto?” In fact, there’s another one that came later than the 1932 d-minor work for two pianos and orchestra. In 1949, Poulenc wrote a solo piano concerto on commission for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. That piece will be performed by Emanuela Friscioni and Heights Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Mark McCoy, on Sunday, March 29 at 3:30 pm at First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights. (Also on the program are Gounod’s Funeral March for a Marionette and Schubert’s sixth symphony.)

“It looks like the Poulenc may be a Cleveland premiere,” Friscioni told us in a telephone conversation. “The orchestra checked everywhere and there’s no record of another performance.” Underscoring the work’s relative obscurity, the soloist herself wasn’t familiar with it before McCoy suggested it to her. “He saw that my husband Antonio Pompa-Baldi and I had played the two-piano concerto, and Mark and I both love Poulenc. It’s good to learn something new and fresh.” [Read more…]

Review: Heights Chamber Orchestra with violist Jeffrey Irvine at Grace Lutheran (February 17)

by

by Daniel Hathaway

IRVINE-JeffreyNortheast Ohio abounds in avocational, community orchestras — more it would seem than most regions of the country can boast. One such ensemble, Heights Chamber Orchestra, now celebrating its thirtieth anniversary (with seven of its founding members still active and featured on its program cover), gave the third concert of its season on Sunday, February 17 at Grace Lutheran Church in Cleveland Heights. The imaginative program, conceived and conducted by music director Anthony Addison, was built around Lionel Tertis’s adaptation of the Elgar Cello Concerto, with CIM viola professor Jeffrey Irvine as soloist. The concert was dedicated to the late Edward Ormond, former first assistant principal violist with the Cleveland Orchestra, who played with HCO after his retirement.

Instrumentalists are fond of poaching each others’ sonatas and concertos — think of César Franck’s Violin Sonata, which has been successfully appropriated by cellists (and perhaps less convincingly by flutists). In this case, the translation from cello to viola by the foremost British violist of his era was vetted and approved by Elgar himself. [Read more…]

Preview: Heights Chamber Orchestra conductor’s notes: Tertis’s viola version of Elgar’s Cello Concerto

by

by Anthony Addison

Special to ClevelandClassical

AnADDISON-Anthony old adage suggested that violists were merely violinists-in-decline. That was before Lionel Tertis! He was born in 1876 of musical parents who had come to England from Poland and Russia and, at three years old, he started playing the piano. At six he performed in public, but had to be locked in a room to make him practice, a procedure that has actually fostered many an international virtuoso. At thirteen, with the agreement of his parents, he left home to earn his living in music playing in pickup groups at summer resorts, accompanying a violinist, and acting as music attendant at a lunatic asylum.

When finances permitted, he studied at Trinity College of Music, taking violin as his “second study,” but concentrating on the piano and playing concertos with the school orchestra. As sometime happens, his violin teacher showed little interest in a second study pupil, and even told his father that he was “better fitted for the grocery trade.” With such encouragement, Tertis decided he had to teach himself. Fate intervened when fellow students wanted to form a string quartet. Tertis volunteered to play viola, borrowed an instrument, loved the rich quality of its lowest string and thereafter turned the old adage upside down: a not very obviously gifted violinist becoming a world class violist. [Read more…]

Follow ClevelandClassical.com

Contact us