by Robert Rollin
Last Sunday afternoon, May 8, in Severance Hall, the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra presented the third and final season concert of its 30th-anniversary season under its talented music director, Brett Mitchell. The concert’s stylistic range was remarkable given the age of its participants. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
Recognized for his prodigious output of symphonic film scores during the 1930s and 40s, Viennese composer, conductor, and arranger Erich Wolfgang Korngold was well-known in Europe for his concert and chamber music, operas and stage works before arriving in Hollywood. After the end of World War II, the composer retired from film music in order to dedicate himself to writing music for the concert hall. One of the first works he penned was his Violin Concerto, which received its premiere on February 15, 1947 by Jascha Heifetz and the St. Louis Symphony.
On Sunday, May 8 at 3:00 pm at Severance Hall, Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra competition winner Jieming Tang will perform Korngold’s virtuosic concerto as part of the concluding concert of COYO’s 30th-anniversary season. Under the direction of music director Brett Mitchell, the program will also include Adam Schoenberg’s Finding Rothko, and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
Youth orchestras have long provided the inspiration for young musicians to decide whether to make music their career goal. Sometimes they’ve had an important impact on conductors, as well. Such is the case with Jahja Ling, who founded two notable youth orchestras during his career: those of The Cleveland Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony.
On Sunday, May 8 at 3:00 pm at Severance Hall, the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra will present the concluding concert of its 30th-anniversary season under the direction of current music director Brett Mitchell. The program will include Adam Schoenberg’s Finding Rothko, Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, and Erich Korngold’s Violin Concerto, featuring COYO concerto competition winner Jieming Tang. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
As many conductors and orchestras have learned through experience, capturing the essence and style of French music is not easy unless you’ve been blessed with Gallic genes. On Sunday evening at Severance Hall, Brett Mitchell and the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra and Chorus won honorary membership in Le Panthéon with convincing performances of challenging scores by Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy and Gabriel Fauré.
by Guytano Parks
BlueWater Chamber Orchestra, conducted by founder and Artistic Director Carlton R. Woods presented an enlightening and entertaining program of works by John Corigliano, Carl Maria von Weber, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Peter Maxwell Davies on Saturday evening at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights. The featured soloists were Amitai Vardi, principal clarinet of BWCO, and fifteen year-old St. Ignatius High School sophomore Jieming Tang, violin, who made his orchestral debut on this occasion.
Opening the program was Corigliano’s Voyages for Strings, an instrumental version of an a cappella choral work that was a setting of Baudelaire’s L’Invitation au voyage. Plymouth Church proved to be the ideal space for this sensual music — beautifully played with wondrous blend and balance — to breathe and soar. Points of resolution were heavenly as the players mused and ambled through Corigliano’s sometimes ambiguous harmonic territory.
Jieming Tang impressed with his lovely, lyrical playing of Beethoven’s Romance No. 2, Op. 50. Projecting clearly and effortlessly above the orchestra at all times, his tone was sweet and clear in the upper register and deep and rich in the lower. Beethoven’s well-crafted piece benefitted from Mr. Tang’s expressive delivery of every detail, and Woods and the orchestra gave him fine and graceful support. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
“I’m very excited,” says 16 year old violinist Jieming Tang. “It’s my first time ever to play with an orchestra.” On Saturday, November 16 at 7:30 pm in Plymouth Church, BlueWater Chamber Orchestra, under the direction of Carlton Woods presents a concert that features Jieming Tang in Beethoven’s Romanze No. 2. The program also includes Weber’s Concertino with clarinetist Amitai Vardi, along with works by Peter Maxwell Davies, John Corigliano and Felix Mendelssohn.
Jieming Tang was born in 1997 in Hefei, China and began his violin studies at age three. When he was eight, he began to study at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, and entered the Conservatory’s pre-college division the following year. In April 2010, Tang came to the United States to be part of the Junior Young Artist Program of the Cleveland Institute of Music.
Tang was asked by BlueWater to choose one of the two Beethoven Romanzes and he chose No. 2 because he has performed it several times before with piano. “I’m glad I picked this one because right now there are so many things going on. I can’t imagine if I would have had to learn a new piece.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The last hurdle on the way to Severance Hall for competitors in the Oberlin Cooper International Violin Competition is the recital round, where six performers revisit their solo repertoire in 30-minute recitals chosen by the jury from the semi-final round. A large crowd turned out to hear the three-and-a-half hour program in Warner Concert Hall at the Oberlin Conservatory on Wednesday evening, a highly-structured event carried live on WCLV, 104.9 FM and hosted by Robert Conrad.
A second hearing confirmed a lot that these ears noted in the concerto round the day before, but there were also some pleasant surprises.
Kyumin Park (16, Seoul, South Korea) maintained his rather cautious approach in pieces by Beethoven, Paganini and Chausson. His Beethoven (Op. 12, No. 1, Allegro) was strong and clean, his Paganini (Caprice No. 24) brilliant enough, his Chausson (Poème) perhaps more calculated than spontaneous despite expansive collaborative playing from Elizabeth DeMio. Here’s a talented player who just needs to be fearless and go for it. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Unless you’re an audiophile on a mission, you’re not likely to sit down and listen to ten complete performances of violin concertos in one day (much less three of Tchaikovsky’s, two each of Brahms’s and Sibelius’s and single performances each of Mendelssohn’s, Shostakovich’s first and Prokofiev’s second). Or unless you’re a judge or audience member at an international violin event like the Oberlin Cooper Competition.
On Tuesday afternoon and evening, July 23, that unlikely possibility became a reality as ten violinists, ages 15 to 18, played the concerto round of the Cooper Competition in Oberlin’s Warner Concert Hall, giving a fascinating look into the musical personalities and technical prowess of the competitors, who were vying for the opportunity to become one of three finalists to play these pieces with The Cleveland Orchestra on Friday evening in Severance Hall.
All ten players, having passed the entrance auditions and survived the semi-final rounds, have certified that they are fine musicians who have the technical wherewithal to play every note of their chosen concertos. [Read more…]
Oberlin, OH, July 24 — The jury announced this evening the sixth, fifth, and fourth place winners, the recipient of the audience prize for the recital final and the three contestants who will play the final round with Jahja Ling and The Cleveland Orchestra in Severance Hall on Friday, July 26 at 8:00 pm. The concert will be broadcast live over WCLV, 104.9 FM and WCLV.com
6th place – Angela Wee
5th place – Jieming Tang
4th place- Gallia Kastner
Audience Prize: Ching-Yi Wei
Finalists who will play at Severance Hall (order to be announced):
Kyumin Park: Tchaikovsky concerto
Ming Liu: Prokofiev second concerto
Ching-Yi Wei: Tchaikovsky concerto
by Mike Telin and Daniel Hathaway
The first round of the Oberlin Cooper International Violin Competition got underway on Saturday, July 20 — the first step in the process that begins with twenty-four young violinists aged 13-18 and will ultimately bring three finalists together for concerto performances with Jahja Ling and The Cleveland Orchestra next Friday evening, July 26 at Severance Hall. On Friday, we spoke with jury members Gregory Fulkerson and David Bowlin and four of the competitors — Gallia Kastner, Kristie and Karen Su and Jieming Tang — to gain their insights into what makes music competitions worthwhile and to learn a bit more about what makes four of the young players tick (links to audio at the end).
Oberlin violin professor Gregory Fulkerson, who is chair of the competition, is excited about the field of competitors. “We could not be happier with the quality of this year’s contestants,” he told us in his studio at the Oberlin Conservatory. “These are the future stars of the violin world.”
We asked David Bowlin, assistant professor of violin at Oberlin, why it’s important for young musicians to play in such competitions. “Good question, because on the surface it’s easy to think that competitions are something that brings out the worst in us, but I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. If students go in with the idea that they are entering a competition as a challenge to themselves – to learn repertoire, to perform in front of an audience, to perform in front of a jury from whom they have the opportunity to receive feedback — the intensity of a competition makes it powerfully educational.” [Read more…]