by Daniel Hathaway
Mignarda, the longstanding soprano-lute duo of Donna Stewart and Ron Andrico, doubled its forces at St. John’s Cathedral on Sunday afternoon, February 24 for “Byrd songes,” a program of devotional and liturgical music by William Byrd. By adding José Gotera and Malina Rauschenfels to their roster, Mignarda created a splendid vocal quartet who sang revelatory versions of Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices and Ave verum corpus in the second half of the concert. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Stevens
The story of Jesus of Nazareth’s final hours is necessarily an unpleasant one, concluding hints of optimism aside. But the Passion can be beautiful in its own way, as Trinity Cathedral’s Good Friday Concert demonstrated. Suffering and salvation, grit and grace, horror broken by a spark of hope: under director Todd Wilson on March 30, Trinity’s Choir and Chamber Orchestra incorporated all of these into a program built around Arvo Pärt’s monumental Passio. [Read more…]
By Daniel Hathaway
Ross W. Duffin led Quire Cleveland in the first of three concerts in its annual “Carols for Quire from The Old & New World” series at Trinity Cathedral on Friday evening — a performance that will surely be counted as one of the brightest choral highlights of the holiday season.
Taking a new tack for the series’ fifth edition, Duffin constructed an intriguing program pairing older and newer carols on the same or similar texts that brought freshness to what is becoming a cherished Cleveland holiday tradition — and setting some new challenges for his excellent, 20-voice chamber choir, founded to sing period music but which has recently been stretching its vocal wings in the direction of more modern repertoire. [Read more…]