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Apollo’s Fire in Vivaldi, Bach & Telemann (March 8)

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by Timothy Robson

Despite the lurid title of last weekend’s Apollo’s Fire concerts — Three Duels and a Funeral — no blood was shed onstage at St. Paul’s Church in Cleveland Heights on Friday evening, March 8. The entertaining program concocted by director Jeannette Sorrell was a set of concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach and Antonio Vivaldi, plus a humorous solo cantata by Georg Philipp Telemann eulogizing a talented, but murdered, canary. Each of the works had its own imaginative character. [Read more…]

Sulayman, Sorrell & Apollo’s Fire win Grammy for Songs of Orpheus

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by Daniel Hathaway

Apollo’s Fire was among the Grammy winners for classical music announced in Los Angeles on February 10. The award in the Best Solo Vocal Album category was given for the ensemble’s Avie recording, Songs of Orpheus, featuring tenor Karim Sulayman. Conductor Jeannette Sorrell led an ensemble that included Julie Andrijeski, Johanna Novom, Karina Schmitz, René Schiffer, Rebecca Landell Reed, William Simms, and Brian Kay.

[Read more…]

Four Apollo’s Fire violinists in Biber’s Mystery Sonatas (Feb. 3)

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by David Kulma

Is it possible to take the standard song and dance forms of your time and turn them into virtuosic devotional meditations on the life of Christ? The composer and master violinist Heinrich Biber answered this question in the affirmative back in the 1670s with a set of 16 violin works — 15 sonatas with continuo and a solo passacaglia — meant to take the musicians through the Mysteries of the Rosary. And not only are these works demanding in scope, they require complex scordatura — retuning the violin’s strings to new notes for each sonata and giving each work its own color and resonance.

[Read more…]

Four Apollo’s Fire violinists take on Biber’s Mystery Sonatas

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by Daniel Hathaway

Tell your friends you’re headed to a Biber concert and their thoughts will immediately turn to a certain Canadian pop star. There’s another Biber, of course, probably famous only in early music circles, and Apollo’s Fire will treat its audiences to a good chunk of one of his violin masterworks this weekend.

Violinists Carrie Krause, Johanna Novom, Adriane Post, and Karina Schmitz will take turns playing nine of the fifteen virtuosic pieces that make up Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s “Rosary” Sonatas — musical meditations on the five Joyful Mysteries, the five Sorrowful Mysteries, and the five Glorious Mysteries of the life of Christ. Probably written in the 1670s, but unknown to modern ears until first published in 1905, the devotional work is preserved in a beautiful manuscript held in the Bavarian State Library.

The sonatas are pictorial and expressive, but a special feature of the collection is Biber’s requirement that the violin strings be re-tuned for most of the pieces after the first sonata. This practice is called scordatura. “What I love about it is that it changes the resonance of the instrument so much,” Karina Schmitz said in a telephone conversation. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: Handel’s Messiah at First Baptist, Shaker Hts. (Dec. 1)

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by David Kulma

Performances of Handel’s Messiah are as sure a sign that Christmas time has arrived as lights decorating homes and mailboxes stuffed with holiday sale advertising. So it’s no surprise that the evening of Saturday, December 1 found this reviewer at First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights for an absorbing rendition of Handel’s classic oratorio from Jeannette Sorrell and Apollo’s Fire alongside Apollo’s Singers. [Read more…]

ACRONYM in The Battle of Vienna on Pipino Series in Youngstown (Oct. 5)

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by Robert Rollin

On Friday, October 5, the Baroque string band ACRONYM presented The Battle of Vienna in Youngstown’s Ford Family Recital Hall on Youngstown State University’s inaugural Donald P. Pipino Performing Arts Series. The program was a mélange of inventive 17th-century works employing novel techniques brought by Italian composers to the German-speaking lands, including Venetian polychoral effects. ACRONYM’s consistently fine intonation and exceptional ensemble were nothing short of amazing all evening. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: “Three Duels and a Wedding” at St. Paul’s, Cleveland Hts. (Feb. 9)

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by David Kulma

AF ForsytheThe Apollo’s Fire concert on Friday, February 9 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights, “Three Duels and a Wedding” — with a surprise — highlighted three double concertos and the well-known Wedding Cantata by J.S. Bach. First, about the duels. The concert opened with Georg Philipp Telemann’s Concerto in e for flute and violin. Flutist Kathie Stewart’s pearly tone and concertmaster Olivier Brault’s joie de vivre were excellently complemented by harpsichordist/conductor Jeannette Sorrell and the ensemble. [Read more…]

Tenor Nicholas Phan & Apollo’s Fire (November 10)

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by Timothy Robson

Phan-EncoreAmerican tenor Nicholas Phan led members of Cleveland’s Baroque orchestra Apollo’s Fire in a stunning live performance of Phan’s English Baroque lute song album, A Painted Tale, this weekend at several local venues, including St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights on Friday night. [Read more…]

Tenor Nicholas Phan to guest direct & sing in next Apollo’s Fire concerts

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by Daniel Hathaway

PHAN-NicholasNicholas Phan will certainly be no stranger to Northeast Ohio when he arrives to guest direct and perform in Apollo’s Fire’s next production. The versatile tenor has appeared with The Cleveland Orchestra in Orff’s Carmina Burana in 2013, and in Bach’s B-minor Mass in 2014. In his previous engagements with Apollo’s Fire in 2016, he covered both the Evangelist and the tenor solos in Bach’s St. John Passion. He got off a bit easier in the Cleveland Orchestra’s St. John last March, only singing the role of the Evangelist. And in between those gigs, Phan stepped in for John Relyea on Oberlin’s Artist Recital Series in February, 2016.

This time around, Phan will be performing a program adapted from A Painted Tale, a 2015 recording of Elizabethan lute songs in which he collaborated with lutenist Michael Leopold and gambist Ann Marie Morgan. The album takes its name from the Thomas Morley piece that introduces it, and Phan wrote in a preview that “The songs are structured so that when one listens to them in order, they tell the story of a young man who falls passionately in love for a woman and who is ultimately destroyed by the fire of that passion.” [Read more…]

A trip to Venice with Apollo’s Fire (Nov. 20)

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by Nicholas Jones

love-in-veniceVenice can be pretty wet in November, but the music of Apollo’s Fire this weekend took us there and back with shoes dry and hearts warmed. With music director Jeannette Sorrell as tour guide, “Love in Venice: A Multicultural Fiesta” took us not only to  palazzi on the Grand Canal, but also ushered us safely through the crowded streets and tiny squares where Jews and Arabs traded and mixed — not always comfortably — with the ruling Christians. I attended the Sunday, November 20 performance at Rocky River Presbyterian Church. [Read more…]

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