by Nicholas Stevens
As any brass, woodwind, or low-string player in an orchestra may confess under mild pressure, it can feel profoundly liberating to play music that draws the spotlight away from their colleagues in the violin section, especially for extended periods. Rare though this repertoire may be — Stravinsky favored winds and percussion, and Glass wrote a whole opera without violins — pieces that foreground these parts of the classical instrumentarium do appear at the heart of the canon. Filling the stage for its 60th-Anniversary Gala concert, the Rocky River Chamber Music Society placed conductor James Feddeck at the helm for an event featuring 21 musicians — violists, cellists, bassists, and wind players.
Most famous orchestral composers are people who either conduct or listen to orchestras rather than play in them. But there is a small cohort of professional orchestra musicians who step into the composer spotlight. 
Kent Blossom presented its fifth and final faculty series program in Ludwig Recital Hall last Wednesday, August 1. The evening’s highlight was the gorgeous performance of Charles-Marie Widor’s 
Wind players take every opportunity to play Mozart, and when they are musicians at the highest level, it’s easy to come away smiling. That was the case on the Kent Blossom faculty concert on Wednesday, July 25 in Kent State’s Ludwig Recital Hall, where an array of Mozart’s works for winds made for a splendid evening.
Two big works more than filled The Cleveland Orchestra’s Thursday evening program on April 5, one of them a standard concerto that crosses all international boundaries, the other a Czech symphony receiving only its third performance by the Orchestra, all three of those led by Czech conductors.
It was hot and humid on the evening of July 22, but that didn’t stop concertgoers from flocking to Blossom Music Center to hear the Kent/Blossom Chamber Orchestra and The Cleveland Orchestra.