Kasey Shao Archives - Cleveland Classical

The Oberlin Cooper Competition: a conversation with Kasey Shao

July 9, 2018 by Mike Telin

by Mike Telin

This year’s sole competitor from Ohio in the Cooper International Piano Competition, fourteen-year-old Kasey Shao began her studies at age six. During a recent telephone conversation from her home in Cincinnati, the Walnut Hills High School sophomore said that she has known about the Cooper Competition from the time it began. “I’ve watched the live streams and broadcasts, and I’ve always wanted to compete in it. Now that I’m finally old enough, I applied and got in. I’m very excited to compete and to meet the other contestants.”

No stranger to the competition world, Shao is a two-time grand-prize winner of the National League of Performing Arts. She has been awarded first prize at the Crescendo International Music Competition, West Chester Piano Competition, and Princeton Festival Piano Competition, as well as grand prize and first place at the Steinway Society of New Jersey Young Pianist Competition. [Read more…]

CIM Opera’s engaging Puccini double bill prompts both laughs and tears (Nov. 7)

by Stephanie Manning

The three one-act operas that make up Giacomo Puccini’s Il trittico (The Triptych) are typically connected by theme, rather than location. Although the trio of works take place in 13th-century Paris, 17th-century Siena, and 20th-century Florence respectively, they all deal with keeping someone’s death a secret — whether tragically or comedically.

CIM Opera Theater’s recent production of two-thirds of the triptych brought the action into one particular place and time, as director Dean Southern moved both Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi into 1918’s New York City. What stood out more, however, were the impressive performances from across the large cast, which I heard on November 7 in Kulas Hall.

[Read on…]

Oberlin Orchestra with the Poiesis Quartet in Finney (Oct. 31)

by Daniel Hathaway

Fresh from winning the grand prize at the prestigious Banff Competition on the last day of August, the Poiesis Quartet (Sarah Ying Ma & Max Ball, violins, Jasper de Boor, viola, and Drew Dansby, cello) took a late October victory lap at the Oberlin Conservatory, returning to their place of birth as an ensemble to give master classes and solo with the Oberlin Orchestra.

Judging from the turnout in Finney Chapel on Friday, it might not have been a prizewinning idea to schedule a major orchestra concert on a college campus on Halloween, but there was nothing slim about the sound that the stage full of musicians produced. Brilliantly scored works by Carlos Simon, John Adams, Angélica Negrón, and Zhou Tian, were conducted with precision by Rafael Jiménez.

[Read on…]

Cleveland Orchestra makes a sinister showing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (Nov. 5)

by Peter Feher

A violin bow is an unlikely murder weapon. But in the hands of composer Bernard Herrmann, the slashing motion of a string instrument seems almost one and the same with the stabbing knife onscreen in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho.

The infamous soundtrack to secretary Marion Crane’s final moments in the shower — and also to private investigator Milton Arbogast’s stumbling death down the stairs later in the film — is horrifyingly simple. A series of screeching down-bows begins in the first violins and then stacks in dissonant intervals as the remaining string sections join in. The gesture is more like a Foley effect than music per se, evoking something between a human scream and the shriek of metal against metal.

[Read on…]

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