by Daniel Hathaway
To close out their first season under the leadership of Jay White, Quire Cleveland presented “Ave Maria: England’s Rose,” two concerts of early English church music devoted to the cult of the Virgin Mary. On Sunday afternoon, May 5, Quire’s commanding performances reveled in the sumptuous acoustic of Historic St. Peter Church in downtown Cleveland. Appropriately, a statue of the Virgin gazed on nearby. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Quire Cleveland’s spring program, to be performed on Saturday, May 4 at 7:30 pm at Lakewood Congregational Church and Sunday, May 5 at 4:00 pm at Historic St. Peter Church in downtown Cleveland, will be devoted to Marian music of the early English church.
Both concerts are free, and will cover a wide range of pre- and post-Reformation music by John Dunstable, Leonel Power, William Cornysh, William Byrd, Richard Dering, Peter Philips, Robert White, and Robert Parsons. Quire is also inviting the public to witness the final polishing of the repertoire by attending a free rehearsal on Friday, May 3 from 6:45 to 9:30 pm at the Lakewood venue (online registration is required).
I reached Quire’s artistic director Jay White by telephone at his studio at Kent State University to chat about the music he has chosen for this program. I began by asking why English music of the period seems so rich in references to Mary. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
For its spring production, Kent State Opera will present Aaron Copland’s 1954 opera, The Tender Land — a title that seems not to have been staged in Northeast Ohio for at least ten years, although a suite of orchestral excerpts has appeared with some regularity on concert programs.
In a telephone conversation with music director Jay White, the Kent professor admitted that Tender Land was not on his radar before he and Marla Berg decided to produce it at Kent. “The only thing I was familiar with was the choral arrangements of ‘The Promise of Living’ and ‘Stomp Your Foot,’” he said. “Marla wanted to do something in English again and we had done an excerpt from it in our scenes program a couple of years ago. There are essentially three main male characters and two main female characters, and for the first time, we actually had enough men to fill all the principal roles.”
Inspired by Walker Evans’ Depression-era photos and James Agee’s book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and with a libretto by Horace Everett under the pseudonym of Erik Johns, the opera was originally conceived for broadcast on television, but its producers sank the project. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
In what must have been among the most alluring Christmas music concerts of this season, period instrument ensemble Les Délices (Debra Nagy, director) and Quire Cleveland (Jay White, director) teamed up to present French Baroque music for Christmas, highlighted by the Messe de Minuit (“Midnight Mass”) by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704). [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
If you stop to think about it, most of our American Christmas traditions have their roots in British and German culture. Far fewer trace their origins to France, even though colonization brought French influence to a large portion of what is now the United States. Les Délices, Cleveland’s French Baroque ensemble, will join the singers of Quire Cleveland this weekend to explore this less-familiar, Gallic side of Christmas in three concerts of music by Marc-Antoine Charpentier led by guest conductor Eric Milnes.
The concerts, at Holy Trinity Lutheran in Akron on December 21 at 7:30 pm, at Lakewood Congregational on December 22 at 8:00 pm, and Our Lady of Peace on December 23 at 4:00 pm, will be anchored by Charpentier’s unique Midnight Mass on French Noëls. “There are eleven French Noëls incorporated into the Mass either in instrumental interludes or in ingenious interpolations throughout the text,” Milnes said in a telephone conversation. “Almost every main motive is derived from a carol tune. It’s hard for us in our Anglo-German culture to imagine a mass built on Silent Night or Joy to the World.”
Will all those tunes be as familiar to the audience as the carols he mentioned? “Maybe one or two of them have made their way into our holiday traditions, maybe not,” Milnes said. “I have the benefit of working a lot in Québec, so I get to experience more directly how that population relates to the tradition. But these carols are still far less known, far less performed, and far less familiar than their German or English counterparts, even in the Baroque community.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Programs of opera scenes are pedagogical standards in music schools, but Kent State Opera’s fall excerpts offered something special this time around. The premiere of senior education major, oboist, and composer Scott Little’s one-act opera, The Story of an Hour, along with two large chunks of Mozart and Berlioz revealed deep talent among Kent’s voice students in cleverly staged performances by Marla Berg with music direction by Jay White. Karen Ni Bhroin and Tori Petrak conducted, and pianist Vicky Tong fluently covered the orchestra parts. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Quire Cleveland began its eleventh season on November 2 with new artistic leadership. Under the direction of Jay White, the professional chorus marked the dual celebrations of All Saints Day and All Souls Day with a cleverly devised, masterfully sung program at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in downtown Cleveland. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Conductor Jay White is leading Quire Cleveland into its second decade this season following the retirement of the professional choir’s founders, Ross W. Duffin and Beverly Simmons. His debut program at St. John’s Cathedral in downtown Cleveland on Friday, November 2 at 7:30 pm is a complex web of music celebrating All Saints and All Souls Days.
White, who toured as a countertenor for eight seasons with Chanticleer, and now serves as professor of voice at Kent State, has put together a program that interleaves Gregorian chants of the Requiem Mass with mass movements by several different Renaissance composers, and memorial motets written in honor of Machaut, Ockeghem, Josquin, and Tallis. The concert will be repeated on Saturday, November 3 at 7:30 pm at St. Sebastian Church in Akron.
In a telephone conversation from his office at the University, White noted that his long experience as a professional vocalist gave him a lot of repertory to choose from. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The professional singers of Quire Cleveland will end their 10th anniversary season this Saturday evening May 26 at 7:30 pm, with a free concert at St. John’s Cathedral featuring favorite pieces from the ensemble’s repertoire. The event will also mark the retirement of Quire’s founders, Ross W. Duffin and Beverly Simmons, who plan to take up residence both in California and Washington D.C. to be close to their children and grandchildren.
Duffin and Simmons have been catalysts for early music in Cleveland since Duffin’s arrival at Case Western Reserve University in 1978. Among other activities, they produced the Chapel, Court and Countryside concert series at CWRU, and Duffin hosted the National Public Radio program Micrologos: Exploring the World of Early Music. Under his tutelage, a constant stream of early music specialists has emerged from Case over the decades, and Duffin was named Distinguished University Professor last year.
Crowning their achievements, on May 23, Early Music America named Duffin and Simmons as the recipients of the 2018 Howard Mayer Brown Award for lifetime achievement in the field of early music. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The board of Quire Cleveland has announced that countertenor Jay White will succeed founder Ross W. Duffin as artistic director of the professional choir at the end of Quire’s tenth anniversary season in July 2018.
Duffin, who is Distinguished University Professor of Musicology at Case Western Reserve University, and Beverly Simmons, Quire’s executive director, will move on “to pursue new artistic and familial adventures in California and Washington, D.C.,” according to a December 19 press release.
White, who joined Quire Cleveland in 2012, serves as professor of voice at Kent State University, where he is also music director of Kent State Opera. He sang for eight seasons with Chanticleer, and during his more than 35-year career has performed with the Men and Boys Choir of Washington Cathedral, Grace Cathedral San Francisco, the Folger Consort, the Carmel Bach Festival, and Apollo’s Fire Singers. [Read more…]