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Apollo’s Fire: “Tapestry — Jewish Ghettos of Baroque Italy” (video)

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by Daniel Hathaway

With each of its themed programs, Apollo’s Fire is becoming more than just a period instrument ensemble that gives concerts. Its March program, “Tapestry — Jewish Ghettos of Baroque Italy,” which replaces performances of Handel’s Israel in Egypt, finds Jeannette Sorrell and her colleagues moving seamlessly out of their usual roles to morph into singing actors and dancers, all in order to bring the subject at hand to vibrant life.

The latest program, which visits the ghetto and palace at Mantua and the ghetto and church at Venice, uses expressive instrumental music by Salamone Rossi, Giuseppe Sammartini, Antonio Vivaldi, and Alessandro Marcello, two of Benedetto Marcello’s 50 psalm settings, and Hebrew prayers and songs associated with Passover and Purim to evoke the rich cultural life of those towns. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: “Elegance: The Harper’s Voice” (video)

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by Daniel Hathaway

With the novel coronavirus surrounded but not yet defeated, Apollo’s Fire’s February program “Elegance: The Harper’s Voice” morphed from in-person performances to a recording session at First Baptist Church on February 27 that yielded a fine video of a high-quality concert, released on March 10. A few invited souls sprinkled throughout the pews provided enough of an audience to make a brave noise when cheering was called for, and that was often.

Apollo’s Fire moves so seamlessly from Baroque art music to folk tunes in programs like this one that Purcell and Playford sound like natural bedfellows, and Irish traditional music loses none of its allure when historically informed musicians take it on. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: “Allure” at First Baptist (Nov. 8)

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by Daniel Hathaway

You’d be fortunate enough these days to be able to field three sopranos who could successfully channel the celebrated singing of the Three Ladies of the Court of Ferrara, but to find a trio of singers who all happen to be named Amanda would really be pushing your luck.

Jeanette Sorrell did just that for Apollo’s Fire’s “Allure” programs earlier this month, and the results are stunning. Sopranos Amanda Forsythe and Amanda Powell and mezzo-soprano Amanda Crider deliver the kind of jaw-dropping performances of virtuosic works that might well have landed them jobs at the 17th-century Ducal court.

[Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: Resilience, filmed at First Baptist, Oct. 20

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by Daniel Hathaway

After the novel coronavirus brought live concerts to a standstill in March, Apollo’s Fire was among the first of Cleveland’s performing organizations to formulate a clear plan for 2020-2021. Cleveland’s Baroque orchestra proposed a hybrid subscription season that would permit in-person audiences at its various venues — at 15% of capacity — but alternatively, promised professionally-produced videos for viewing by subscribers about a week after the live performances.

The first such video, capturing the October 20 performance of Resilience at First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights, delivered handsomely on that promise. Erica Brenner’s sensitive videography and audio mixing preserved brilliant performances of music that illuminated two troubled periods in history: the plague of London in 1665, and the outbreaks of cholera and dysentery that dampened but failed to defeat the human spirit at the end of the American Civil War two centuries later. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire offers “Resilience” both In-Person and On-Demand

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by Daniel Hathaway

After the novel coronavirus stopped the concert world in its tracks last March, Apollo’s Fire was among the first performing organizations to offer its constituents a choice about how to engage with the ensemble moving forward. On May 6, Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra announced a 2020-2021 season titled “A Pilgrimage of Hope” that allowed subscribers to choose between attending performances In-Person, or receiving a password to watch an exclusive concert video one week later.

“They expressed an overwhelming preference for edited videos,” Founder and Artistic Director Jeannette Sorrell said in a Zoom conversation last week. “That gives us the opportunity to tweak audio quality and change up camera angles. My media team and I will be extremely busy the week after each concert this year. It’s going to be an adventure.”

That adventure begins this week, when Apollo’s Fire presents five live performances of “Resilience” in Akron, Shaker Heights, and Bay Village from October 8-11. “Three of the concerts sold out immediately through subscriptions,” Sorrell said, but under Ohio guidelines, the Orchestra can sell only 15% of a venue’s capacity. [Read more…]

Cleveland Film Festival to stream Allan Miller’s Jeannette Sorrell documentary

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by Daniel Hathaway

Playing With Fire, Allan Miller’s 70-minute documentary about Apollo’s Fire artistic director Jeannette Sorrell that made its debut in New York last October, will be streamed through April 28 by the Cleveland International Film Festival — which has now moved online. Click here to watch a trailer.

The film follows Sorrell as she rehearses and performs with her Baroque orchestra in Cleveland and at Tanglewood, as she works with the conducting class at the Aspen Festival, and as she prepares for a Messiah performance with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in Minnesota. Testaments to her leadership by a number of her musicians are seeded through the narrative.

Miller, who has received Academy Awards for his documentaries about Isaac Stern (From Mao to Mozart) and Zubin Mehta (The Bolero), and has filmed the musical activities of Kurt Masur and Valery Gergiev, was inspired to follow Sorrell around after hearing a New York performance by Apollo’s Fire. The conductor and harpsichordist told me about that encounter in a recent Skype conversation. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: “O Jerusalem!” at the Cleveland Museum of Art (Mar. 11)

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by Timothy Robson

Jerusalem, sacred city of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The location of horrific violence and oppression for over two millennia. But yet a magical city in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims have lived and interacted with each other in harmony. It was the latter aspect of Jerusalem that Jeannette Sorrell and Apollo’s Fire highlighted in their sensational program “O Jerusalem! Crossroads of Three Faiths.” I heard the performance on Wednesday, March 11 at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Gartner Auditorium was well filled, and it now turns out that Apollo’s Fire gave the last major performance at the Museum for an unknown period of time, due to precautions around COVID-19. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: “L’Amore — an Old Italian Valentine” (Feb. 14)

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by Timothy Robson

Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra celebrated the Valentine’s Day weekend with four performances of “L’Amore: An Old Italian Valentine.” I heard the second concert on the evening of Valentine’s Day itself at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights. Apollo’s Fire conductor and harpsichordist Jeannette Sorrell greeted the audience with the adage, “Italian is the language of music, of the angels, and of love.” [Read more…]

Julian Wachner to lead Apollo’s Fire
in J.S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio

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by Daniel Hathaway

Christmas was a major inspiration for church music in Leipzig in J.S. Bach’s time, as evidenced by the six festive cantatas he wrote for the celebrations of 1735 — one each for December 25, 26, and 27, New Year’s Day, the first Sunday of the new year, and the feast of the Epiphany. This week, Apollo’s Fire will perform four of the cantatas that comprise Bach’s Christmas Oratorio in five venues around the city under guest conductor Julian Wachner, with soprano Molly Netter, countertenor Daniel Moody, tenor Stephen Soph, baritone Jesse Blumberg, and Apollo’s Singers.

Julian Wachner has spent his distinguished career with one foot in church music and the other in the concert world. A native of California, he began as a boy chorister at New York’s St. Thomas Choir School and currently serves as Director of Music and the Arts at Trinity Church, Wall Street. An acclaimed conductor of early music, contemporary music, and opera, he also finds time to compose. I spoke with him by telephone last week in Missouri, where he was leading performances of Handel’s Messiah with the Kansas City Symphony.

The Christmas Oratorio holds a special place in Wachner’s career — it’s the first work he recorded 20 years ago, and that recording has recently been re-engineered and re-released. “Jeannette Sorrell told me to pick four of the six cantatas for Cleveland,” Wachner said, “so I thought I’d choose five and six, the ones that aren’t often done, in addition to one and two. There’s such glorious music in the last pair that I thought it would be wonderful to spring those on the audience.” [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: “Echoes of Venice” at Trinity Cathedral (Oct. 18)

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by Daniel Hathaway

The special, spatial music of the Gabrielis and their early Baroque successors at San Marco in Venice has been famous for a long time. But until modern performers took up and mastered the instruments and playing style of the mixed wind and string ensembles that held forth from the galleries of that Byzantine basilica, replicating the timbres of 17th-century polychoral music that drew Northern composers like Heinrich Schütz to the Most Serene Republic just wasn’t possible. [Read more…]

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