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Virtu(al)oso Piano Competition: Questions for Arseniy Gusev

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by Daniel Hathaway

Russian pianist Arseniy Gusev was born in St. Petersburg in 1998, where he studied both piano and composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.

He came to the U.S. in 2018 to study at the Cleveland Institute of Music — piano with Sergei Babayan, and composition with Keith Fitch.

Gusev will play selections by Schönberg, Schubert, and J.S. Bach in Session 3 of Piano Cleveland’s virtual competition on Saturday, August 1, beginning at 7:00 pm. At his request, we sent him some questions by email, and received delightful and thoughtful responses.

The pandemic has upset everyone’s lives. I hope your family in Russia is safe and well. How long has it been since you last saw them?

I am grateful for a chance to see and communicate with my family in my dreams. Even though we are in touch through email and social media, and it’s been a lot of months since we saw each other in person, for me the most important bond which helps to keep the family together is to cherish each of the family members in my heart like a treasure. [Read more…]

Responding, or not, to the pandemic: conversations with eight composers

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by Jarrett Hoffman

During the COVID-19 pandemic, performers and presenters have grappled with cancellations by giving virtual performances and releasing videos from the past.

Composers have been flying a little more under the radar — and in a way, that’s natural. “Sheltering in place isn’t that much different than being on deadline for a piece,” Oberlin Conservatory professor Stephen Hartke wrote by email. Cleveland Institute of Music professor Keith Fitch agreed: “A quarantined composer is not so different from a non-quarantined composer.”

Hartke and Fitch are two of the eight composers — including professors, freelancers, and young professionals — who agreed to share their thoughts for this article. After establishing that all things considered, they’re healthy and well, we delved into how — or whether — the pandemic has impacted their writing.

[Read more…]

“A rip-roaring good time”:
Yolanda Kondonassis talks about
Jennifer Higdon’s Harp Concerto

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by Rory O’Donoghue

For Yolanda Kondonassis, premiering a new concerto is an on-going project. 

“The whole mechanism of getting pieces played isn’t always factored into the commissioning of a piece,” the world-renowned harpist said by phone from New York. “You’ve got to premiere music, and then launch it. It’s like the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where after risking everything, the precious artifact gets hoisted up on a forklift and chucked onto the top shelf of the National Archives to gather dust — that’s sadly what happens to so many pieces of music. There’s a big difference between having the music, and having the music stay alive.”  [Read more…]

No Exit: premieres by Cleveland composers at SPACES (Feb. 16)

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by Nicholas Stevens

In a Northeast Ohio music world recently energized amid multiple anniversary seasons, ensembles have faced the challenge of honoring their histories while plunging headlong into the future. Leave it to No Exit new music ensemble, ten years young this season, to prove itself among the most forward-thinking of all. In a concert of world premieres on Saturday, February 16, the chamber collective played a program defined more by promise than by pomp.

[Read more…]

No Exit: 5 composers, 5 premieres, part 2

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by Jarrett Hoffman

If you ask a bunch of composers how they dreamed up their latest pieces, they’ll all have something completely different to say.

That’s what I learned this past week, when I spent time on the phone with five of them to ask about their new chamber works being premiered by No Exit this weekend.

That new music ensemble, directed by Tim Beyer, will give free performances of these pieces at Heights Arts (Friday, February 15 at 7:00 pm), SPACES gallery (Saturday, February 16 at 8:00 pm), and WOLFS gallery (Friday, March 1 at 7:00 pm) in this second installment of the group’s Cleveland Composers Series.

[Read more…]

CIM New Music Ensemble to celebrate “L’Histoire at 100”
with new film by Kasumi

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by Jarrett Hoffman

There’s nothing quite like Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale. And there will really be nothing like the performance this Friday, October 26 at 8:00 pm in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

The conservatory’s New Music Ensemble, directed by Keith Fitch, will celebrate the 100th birthday of that classic work with the premiere of a new film: a commission from Cleveland-based video artist Kasumi, to be played simultaneously with the music. (The concert is free, and will also be live-streamed.)

And if you’re at all familiar with the work of Kasumi, you know you’re in for a fascinating, perhaps harrowing ride.

The trailer gives a taste of her style, in which she splices together images from mid-century B-movies, commercials, and training films from the public domain — images which are “completely direct,” as Kasumi told us during an interview last year. “The acting is so bad and corny that it conveys emotion in shorthand — it becomes a symbol, like a stop sign. If you weave together these tiny gestures, you get all kinds of nuances of emotion.”

[Read more…]

NEOSonicFest: CIM New Music Ensemble at Bop Stop (April 7)

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by David Kulma

CIMNewMusicEnsemble2Concerts by CIM’s New Music Ensemble have such startlingly high levels of performance that it’s hard to remember that the musicians are, in fact, students. In their concert on Saturday night, April 7 at the Bop Stop as a part of this year’s NEOSonicFest, the ensemble gave immaculate performances of works selected from their 2017-2018 repertoire. [Read more…]

CIM, CIA, and Natural History Museum to team up for 360° of Sight + Sound: The Planetarium Project

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by Jarrett Hoffman

PlanetariumIt’s an epic feeling when three superheroes, from separate stories and with their own distinct powers, team up. The real-life, artsy, and Cleveland-related parallel to that? A collaboration next week among three prominent local institutions from three different disciplines.

Next Wednesday, April 18 at 7:00 pm and 7:45 pm, the Cleveland Institutes of Music and Art will join the Museum of Natural History for the fourth edition of 360° of Sight + Sound: The Planetarium Project. Five-minute films by students of CIA, scored with electronic music by student composers of CIM, will be given their world premiere screenings inside the dome of Shafran Planetarium at the Museum.

[Read more…]

NEOSonicFest 2018 to present five concerts April 5 through 11

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by Mike Telin

CCS-Y&EC-040614Since 2014, the Grammy Award-winning Cleveland Chamber Symphony has sponsored NEOSonicFest, a festival of new music performed by musicians from Northeast Ohio and beyond. The 2018 festival will run from April 5 through 11 (see below for concert dates and times).

Clarinetist Carol Robinson and trumpeter Nate Wooley will kick things off by performing selections from Éliane Radigue’s Occam Ocean on April 5 at MOCA. The composer describes her work as “an ongoing acoustic work with influences ranging from electromagnetic waves, to William of Ockham’s philosophies, to science fiction mythologies.”

The always creative No Exit will return to the Festival on April 6 at Heights Arts. The ensemble was founded by composer Timothy Beyer as an outlet for the commissioning and performance of contemporary avant-garde concert music. No Exit is committed to promoting the works of living composers, particularly the music of young and emerging artists who haven’t yet received either the opportunities or exposure of their better-known counterparts. (Works by Leo Ornstein, Ty Emerson, Per Nørgård, James Praznik, Andrew Rindfleisch & Tristan Murail).

[Read more…]

CIM New Music Ensemble features Fitch’s The Range of Light (Feb. 7)

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by Nicholas Stevens

FITCH-KeithIn a recent concert by the Cleveland Institute of Music’s New Music Ensemble, Keith Fitch — CIM’s composition department chair, and the ensemble’s director — demonstrated his penchant for effective curation. His own new composition, The Range of Light, illuminated the work and words of John Muir, a visionary in American history, and cast the other pieces on the program into sharp relief.

[Read more…]

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