by Daniel Hathaway
As busy as they are at Severance Hall, members of The Cleveland Orchestra still find time to form a number of chamber music ensembles to perform around the region. One of the newest groups is the Cleveland Wind Octet, who played their inaugural concert on the Rocky River Chamber Music Series last spring. They’ll play their second engagement on Friday, March 20 at 7:30 pm on the Chagrin Arts Series at Chagrin Falls Methodist Church (tickets available here.)
The Octet includes Cleveland Orchestra members Alan DeMattia & Richard King, horns, Daniel McKelway, clarinet, Jeffrey Rathbun, oboe, & Barrick Stees & Jonathan Sherwin, bassoons, together with friends Richard Hawkins (clarinet professor at Oberlin) and Michele Smith (who plays oboe in the Toledo Symphony.) The March 20 program will feature Rathbun’s Rocky River Music, in addition to Edvard Grieg’s Four Lyrical Pieces, arranged by the late Chicago Symphony bassoonist Willard Elliot, and Wolfgang Amadè Mozart’s Serenade in c, K. 388. [Read more…]
Cleveland Orchestra second trumpet Jack Sutte has been busy recently compiling a second CD, Fanfare Alone. This time Sutte appears all by himself — but in the company of a sizeable cast of Schilke brass instruments. Recorded last May in Gamble Auditorium at Baldwin Wallace University by Five-Four Production’s Robert Friedrich, the eighty-three minute, two-disc set features twenty-eight tracks of music for solo trumpet, cornet and flugelhorn comprising pieces by twenty individuals. 
“A Taste of Spain” at Blossom on Saturday July 19 featured The Cleveland Orchestra and guest conductor Bramwell Tovey in Iberian-inspired music by two Frenchmen and one authentic Spaniard who went into self-exile in Argentina after Franco won the Spanish civil war. Sunny as the music was, the weather in Cuyahoga Falls was damp and chilly: in his jovial remarks at the beginning of the second half, Tovey welcomed the audience to what indeed felt like a Spanish winter.