by David Kulma
Severance Hall was filled to the brim with Beethoven lovers for the first four installments of The Cleveland Orchestra’s 100th-season-capping festival. Framed as an exploration of Ludwig van Beethoven’s nine symphonies through ancient Greek myth, The Prometheus Project began with dazzling performances of the first eight symphonies and four overtures led by music director Franz Welser-Möst from Thursday, May 10 through Sunday, May 13. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Stevens
The sun is shining, the leaves regenerating — and something wonderfully alive is stirring in Severance Hall. The Cleveland Orchestra billed its programs on April 12 and 13 as “sneak previews” of the concert cycles that close its 100th season: windows into the ensemble’s preparations for The Ecstasy of Tristan and Isolde and The Prometheus Project. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
For his next-to-last appearance with The Cleveland Orchestra before taking up his new duties with the Colorado Symphony, associate conductor Brett Mitchell presided over a program of American music on Friday evening at Severance Hall. Two “Third” works were on the program: Aaron Copland’s stirring Third Symphony, and Augusta Read Thomas’s elusive Third Violin Concerto with concertmaster William Preucil as soloist. [Read more…]
Daniel Hathaway
The amusingly-named Factory Seconds Brass Trio — all second-chair players in The Cleveland Orchestra — will have a busy schedule in February. Trumpeter Jack Sutte, hornist Jesse McCormick, and trombonist Richard Stout will start out the month with two different concerts on Sunday, February 12.
At 3:00 pm, the Trio will play a faculty concert in Gamble Auditorium at Baldwin Wallace titled “Well-Tempered Hindemith: Modernist, Traditionalist, Pragmatist, Artist.” Pianist Christine Fuoco will join each of the players for a solo sonata by Paul Hindemith, and pianist Christina Dahl will take over the bench for Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis, “a counterpoint homage to J.S. Bach.”
At 7:00 pm on the 12th, Factory Seconds will be the featured performers at the Bop Stop as the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival presents its latest edition of Bach Haus and Brews. The music will include bluegrass, broadway, jazz, and — of course — Bach. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
While half of The Cleveland Orchestra was busy downtown providing incidental music for The Good Peaches at the Cleveland Play House on Thursday evening, April 14, the rest of the ensemble played a scintillating concert of music by Haydn and Mozart uptown at Severance Hall under guest conductor Jane Glover, featuring principal flute Joshua Smith and harpist Yolanda Kondonassis. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The names Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Johannes Brahms are ubiquitous on concert programs. But Marius Flothuis, Arthur Meulemans, Norman Sherman, Robert Marek, and Arthur Frackenpohl? Not so much. So it was refreshing to encounter a whole set of new compositional personalities on the concert by Factory Seconds Brass Trio on Sunday afternoon, February 21, part of the 33rd season of Music from the Western Reserve at Christ Church, Hudson. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Jones
The opening concert of the Cleveland Philharmonic Orchestra season on Sunday, October 11 was an exuberant memorial to long-time Philharmonic music director William Slocum. Maestro Slocum, who conducted the orchestra for twenty-six years, passed away in the spring of 2015. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
A full evening devoted to the music of Joseph Haydn is sure to be filled with sophisticated musical rhetoric, and at least a good handful of surprises. Last Thursday evening at Severance Hall, visiting British conductor Matthew Halls and The Cleveland Orchestra dug deeply into the fabric of an overture and a symphony, and with the help of the fastidiously exciting pianist Marc-André Hamelin, into one of the Austrian master’s piano concertos. Though the fourth work was obviously not by Haydn, its performance by duo hornists Richard King and Jesse McCormick would have deeply impressed whoever actually wrote it. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
PAND — Performers and Artists for Nuclear Disarmament — was formed in 1984 during the height of the U.S.-Soviet arms race, which threatened, even in the case of a limited nuclear war, to destroy human civilization and much of life on the Earth.
“Today,” the organization states, “our goal is to work for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Our willingness to devote our time, talents and reputations to achieve this springs from our belief that art can contribute not only to aesthetics, but to ethics; not only to beauty, but to peace.”
The local chapter of PAND, which is part of Cleveland Peace Action, annually presents a concert in early August to commemorate the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This year, which marks the 69th anniversary of an event that changed the course of human history, members of The Cleveland Orchestra and friends will perform at Nighttown, 12387 Cedar Road in Cleveland Heights, on August 6 at 7:30 pm. [Read more…]