by Daniel Hathaway
BlueWater Chamber Orchestra’s “Strings After Sundown” program at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights on Saturday, February 3 was advertised — as late as the afternoon before in an email blast — as a conductor-less performance to be led by concertmaster Kenneth Johnston. Instead, the audience was greeted by a program insert noting that the concert would be conducted by Erie Philharmonic music director Daniel Meyer. [Read more…]
by J.D. Goddard
On Saturday evening, February 28 at the Breen Center for the Performing Arts, the BlueWater Chamber Orchestra, under the baton of guest conductor Raphael Jiménez, performed a sumptuous program of two works by giants of the Romantic era, Gabriel Fauré and Johannes Brahms. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Carlton Woods and BlueWater Chamber Orchestra had a fine time celebrating the Halloween weekend in their concert at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights on Saturday evening. The featured work on the program was Jon Deak’s The Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow, an action-packed concerto for string quartet and orchestra, with narration read by WCLV president Robert Contrad. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
It’s that time of year when jack-o-lanterns are seen illuminating front porches, and scary tales of ghosts and goblins are told. One of those tales is “The Headless Horseman,” which has been popularized in Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” On Saturday, November 1 at 7:30 pm in Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights, Carlton R. Woods will lead the BlueWater Chamber Orchestra in Jon Deak’s Concerto for String Quartet, Narrator and Orchestra, The Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow, featuring violinists Kenneth Johnston and Charles Morey, violist Kirsten Docter, cellist Bryan Dumm and narrator Robert Conrad. [Read more…]
by Guytano Parks
Blue Water Chamber Orchestra concluded its 2013/2014 season on Saturday evening at Plymouth Church in Shaker Hts. with a concert billed as “Iron Composer and Iron Violinist”. Conducted by Carlton R. Woods, the program featured BWCO concertmaster Kenneth Johnston as soloist in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and included Two Pieces for Small Orchestra by Delius and Around the Blue-S by 2013 Iron Composer Competition winner Jakub Polaczyk.
Iron Composer is an instant composition contest held at Baldwin Wallace. Five composers are invited to compete in person. On the morning of the event, the finalists are assigned an instrumentation and a secret musical ingredient. They have just five hours to write a piece of music that incorporates those two elements. Their work is then performed and judged on a public concert that same evening. Blue Water Chamber Orchestra and the Iron Composer Competition have a collaborative venture in which works by competition winners are given a performance on its regular concert series. [Read more…]