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Apollo’s Fire gives a sublime performance of Bach’s Mass in b minor (Apr. 5)

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by Peter Feher

The 2024–2025 season for Apollo’s Fire may be coming to a close, but the group’s performances of J.S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor will continue to resound throughout Northeast Ohio. Just like those listeners who are forever returning to the work for comfort, cogitation, or a glimpse of transcendence, Cleveland’s Baroque orchestra isn’t finished with this all-embracing masterpiece.

On Saturday, April 5, at Trinity Cathedral, the consoling final notes of the “Dona nobis pacem” — Bach’s “vision of peace,” as AF artistic director Jeannette Sorrell has described it — seemed to linger in the stone vaulting long after the music had died away. The effect was a sublime example of the ensemble making the most of the space, the combined period-instrument forces of woodwinds, brass, strings, and organ supporting the uplifting message sung by the chorus.

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Apollo’s Fire: “Classical Sparks” at St. Raphael, Bay Village (Feb. 28)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Three composers whose lives intertwined and whose music inspired one another — Wolfgang Amadé Mozart, Joseph Bologne, and Joseph Haydn — were the subject of Apollo’s Fire’s latest series of concerts, “Classical Sparks.” I attended the performance on Friday, February 28 at St. Raphael Catholic Church in Bay Village, for which artistic director Jeannette Sorrell had assembled a full classical orchestra of period instruments.

Mozart was represented with a delightful overture from his three-act opera La Finta semplice (“The Fake Innocent”), plus an aria from Don Giovanni, and the supreme Violin Concerto no. 3 in G, K.216. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: festive, virtuosic Bach (Apr. 26)

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by Peter Feher

Apollo’s Fire resurrected its take on J.S. Bach’s Easter Oratorio over the weekend, returning to this choral masterpiece that the ensemble last presented almost two decades ago.

Performances of the Easter Oratorio don’t exactly abound every year, and the reason is less than straightforward. Staging the work is something of a production, approaching the monumental scale of similar Bach compositions — the Passions, the B-Minor Mass, the Christmas Oratorio — but nowhere near as imposing. This contrast has meant that a great piece of music has sometimes been treated as not quite great enough.

Which is a shame because the Easter Oratorio is one of Bach’s most consistently uplifting scores. [Read more…]

DIARY: Thursday, April 25, 2024

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by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING TODAY:

Beginning tonight at 7:30 pm at Federated Church in Chagrin Falls, Apollo’s Fire — under the direction of Jeannette Sorrell —  reaches back a mere 300 years to celebrate Easter with the closest Johann Sebastian Bach came to penning opera: the Easter Oratorio and an Easter Cantata with soloists Andréa Walker, soprano, Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, countertenor, Haitham Haidar, tenor, and Edward Vogel, baritone, taking on dramatic roles. Festive baroque trumpets add to the celebration. Performances continue on Friday (7:30 at St. Raphael, Bay Village), Saturday (8 pm at St. Paul’s, Akron), and Sunday (5 pm at Church of the Gesu, University Hts.) Tickets available online.

For more performances, visit our Concert Listings.

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Apollo’s Fire: “¡Hispania! A Voyage from Spain to the Americas” — a conversation with Sophia Burgos

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by Mike Telin

This week Apollo’s Fire will present “¡Hispania! A Voyage from Spain to the Americas.” Designed by Jeannette Sorrell, this new production features the music of Spanish composers Diego Ortiz, Gaspar Sanz, and Santiago de Murcia, blending virtuosity with lively dance rhythms. The ensemble of strings, plucked instruments, and percussion includes musicians from Mexico and Costa Rica, with flamenco guitarist Jeremías García and Puerto Rican soprano Sophia Burgos featured as soloists.

Performances are on Wednesday, March 20 at 7:30 pm at St. Bernard Catholic Church in Akron, Thursday the 21st at 7:30 at St. Rocco Parish, and Friday the 22nd at 7:30 and Saturday the 23rd at 8:00 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. A pre-concert conversation with guitarist Jeremías García begins one hour before each performance. Tickets are available online.

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CD Review: violinist Alan Choo with Apollo’s Fire in Biber’s Mystery Sonatas

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by Daniel Hathaway

At its most recent concerts this month, Apollo’s Fire unveiled its newest recording on the Avie label. Mystery Sonatas by the early Baroque Bohemian composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber feature concertmaster and assistant artistic director Alan Choo.

One of the most significant rediscoveries from the fascinating period when flights of fancy — dubbed the stylus fantasticus — dominated early Baroque music, Biber’s Rozenkranz-Sonaten lay hidden in the Bavarian State Library in Munich until they came to light in 1905.

That unique and beautiful manuscript from the 1670s contains fifteen solo violin sonatas and a concluding Passacaglia (below) by the prolific Biber, himself a virtuoso violinist. Identified only by a copperplate engraving illustrating its subject, each piece is a meditation on one of the sacred mysteries in the lives of Christ and the Virgin Mary. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire — “Wassail! an Irish Appalachian Christmas” at CMA (Dec. 17)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Apollo’s Fire’s 2023 Christmas Show, “Wassail! an Irish Appalachian Christmas,” was a reworking of its earlier crossover shows, “Christmas on Sugarloaf Mountain” and “Sugarloaf Mountain: an Appalachian Gathering” — attractive programs of folk music wrapped around the narrative of immigrants from the British Isles who brought their tunes with them to the New World. I saw the most recent version in its final performance in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Sunday, December 17.

The narrative, delivered by Derdriu Ring (also credited with theatrical direction) opens in an Irish village on Christmas Eve of 1849 during the Great Famine, then fast forwards to immigrants’ new homes in Appalachia on Christmas Day of the following year. A Wassailing segment captures the tradition of boozy, door-to-door caroling, followed by Winter by the Hearth, a celebration of coziness in the face of winter, then a segue into a telling of the Christmas story and preparations for the sea journey to America. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: “Wassail! An Irish-Appalachian Christmas” — Tina Bergmann talks about the hammered dulcimer

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by Mike Telin

Imagine that it’s Christmas night in Ireland, 1849. Families and friends gather for an evening of singing, storytelling, and due to the Potato Famine, tearful farewells. 

This setting serves as the inspiration for Apollo’s Fire’s “Wassail! An Irish-Appalachian Christmas.” Written and designed by artistic director Jeannette Sorrell, this theatrical concert follows the journey of the Irish immigrants who crossed the Atlantic to America through carols, reels, and stories.  

Led by Sorrell, the program features Irish singer Fiona Gillespie, vocalist Sam Kreindenweis, Kathie Stewart on wooden flutes, fiddlers Susanna Perry Gilmore, Emi Tanabe, and Caitlin Hedge, Tina Bergmann on hammered dulcimer, and Anna O’Connell on vocals and Celtic harp. Performances begin on Wednesday, December 6 at 7:30 at Bath Church UCC and run through December 17. Irish actress Derdriu Ring joins the company December 14-17. See our Concert Listings for times and locations. Tickets are available online.  

Bergmann, who is a regular on Apollo’s Fire crossover programs, first met Sorrell nearly 30 years ago while the conductor was looking for a hammered dulcimer player for an early American program. “She went to the Kent State Folk Festival, which is sort of my home festival, and came to one of the workshops where a good handful of hammered dulcimer players were presenting,” Bergmann recalled during a telephone conversation. “She approached me afterward and I invited her to my apartment. She had me play for her, and that’s how it started. I think it was in 1994, so it’s been an incredible journey.”

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Apollo’s Fire at Lakewood Methodist — “Fire & Joy: from Bach & Vivaldi” (Nov. 17)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Baroque music reaches some of its loftiest heights in concertos, and those by Antonio Vivaldi (who left us some 500) and Johann Sebastian Bach (who seeded his cantatas with concerto-like movements, wrote a collection of six famous concertos, and rearranged — or lost — goodness knows how many others) are among the most popular with ensembles like Apollo’s Fire.

On Friday, November 17, the ensemble brought its program “Fire & Joy: from Bach & Vivaldi” to Lakewood Methodist Church as a stop on its local tour that included performances in Akron, Cleveland Heights, and University Circle. Artistic Director Jeannette Sorrell chose concertos by Vivaldi and Bach, pairing them with brief Bach cantata sinfonias.

The concert began with Vivaldi’s D-minor Double Violin Concerto — which Bach arranged for organ during his time at Weimar, when Italian orchestra concertos were all the rage. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire presents Fire and Joy: Nicole Divall talks about the ‘Viola of Love’

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by Mike Telin

“The first time I played the viola d’amore it was a bit of a rush job,” Apollo’s Fire principal viola Nicole Divall recalled. “It was for the St. John Passion and I borrowed an instrument and just fell in love with it. Its sound was just so sweet and beautiful I couldn’t stop practicing.”

On Thursday, November 16 at 7:30 pm at First United Methodist Church in Akron, Divall will be the featured soloist in Vivaldi’s Concerto in d for viola d’amore and orchestra.

Directed by Jeannette Sorrell, the program also includes Bach’s Oboe Concerto in F with Debra Nagy as soloist, Vivaldi’s Concerto in d for Two Violins & Cello, and three Bach Sinfonias as well as Brandenburg Concerto No. 4

The program will be repeated on Friday at 7:30 at Lakewood United Methodist, on Saturday at 8:00 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights, and Sunday at 4:00 at University Circle United Methodist Church. Violinist Andrew Fouts will give a pre-concert talk one hour before each performance. Tickets are available online.

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