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[VIDEO] Les Délices debuts The Aesop Project

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by Stephanie Manning

This isn’t the first time Les Délices has brought puppets to the party. Following up on their 2022 Baroque opera The White Cat, the ensemble will present The Aesop Project in Cleveland and Akron on November 22.

The free, family-friendly program features puppets created by Ian Petroni, who talks about the design process in the video below. Soprano Elena Mullins Bailey also shares her thoughts on the new narration, written by local Ohio poet laureate Dave Lucas.

The Aesop Project will be presented at 11:30 am on November 22 at the CMA Community Arts Center, 2937 W. 25th St, Cleveland. Arrive at 10:30 am to join the art-making activities. Les Délices will then repeat the program at 3:30 pm that same day at the Akron Public Library Main Branch, 60 S. High St., Akron.

Watch the video below and find it on Instagram and Facebook. [Read more…]

Les Délices: “Bohemian Rhapsody” at West Shore UU Church (Oct. 19)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Although Les Délices’ most recent subscription program actually featured music by composers from what is now the western part of the Czech Republic, it borrowed its marketing title from an American rock anthem and culminated in a major work by a celebrated Austrian.

Never mind a slight bit of confusion. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which I heard on Sunday, October 19 in the agreeable space of West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church in Rocky River, provided the welcome opportunity to focus in on the classical oboe artistry of director Debra Nagy, and to make at least a nodding acquaintance with historical composers Franz Krommer, Georg Druschetzky, and Katerina Veronika Dusikova-Cianchettini (whose name should be appear on classical radio hosts’ audition scripts), as well as the more recent Nathan Mondry. [Read more…]

Les Délices opens new season with “Bohemian Rhapsody”

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by Mike Telin

The first thing you may think of when you hear the words “Bohemian Rhapsody” is that 1970’s iconic Rock song by Queen.

But when Les Délices launches their new season on Friday, October 17 at 7:30 pm at Westminster Presbyterian Church in  Akron their “Bohemian Rhapsody” will feature music by Bohemian and Moravian composers Franz Krommer (1759-1831), Georg Druschetzky (1745-1819), and Katerina Veronika Dusikova-Cianchettini (1769-1833).

Performed by oboist Debra Nagy, violinist Shelby Yamin, violist Allison Monroe, and cellist Rebecca Landell, the program also includes Mozart’s Oboe Quartet and a new work by Nathan Mondry.

“We’re opening with Franz Krommer’s Quartet no. 2 in F major for oboe & strings, and he is probably the best-known of these lesser-known composers,” Debra Nagy said during a telephone conversation. “He was a very popular composer during his time along with Beethoven. He wrote 100 string quartets, but today he’s known mostly for his wind partitas.”

[Read more…]

Les Délices delights with “The Mermaid” in Rocky River (Apr. 27)

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by Daniel Hathaway

As their name implies, the rarefied music of the French baroque is the pain quotidien of Cleveland’s period instrument ensemble Les Délices, but artistic director Debra Nagy occasionally points her excellent and variable group in other directions.

The latest crossing of genres at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church on Sunday afternoon, April 27,  took Nagy and her colleagues out of the salons of Paris across the Channel to the docks of Portsmouth.

Wielding her baroque oboe and recorder, Nagy joined soprano Elena Mullins Bailey, violinist Allison Monroe, cellist Rebecca Landell, percussionist Anthony Taddeo, and special guest Sean Dagher, shantyman and Irish bouzouki artist, in slightly more than an hour’s worth of rollicking sea shanties, plus oceanic tunes by Henry Purcell, Joseph Haydn, and Maurice Green.

[Read more…]

Seán Dagher’s sea shanties return for Les Délices “The Mermaid”

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by Stephanie Manning

Sea shanties might make you think of the ocean, not Lake Erie. But the freshwater ships that sailed the Great Lakes in the 19th century held a rich musical tradition of their own. So when Les Délices artistic director Debra Nagy found a song that mentioned Cleveland in the book Windjammers: Songs of the Great Lakes Sailors, she knew the group had to perform it.

“ When I was learning it, I really fell in love with the tune,” said Seán Dagher, a shanty singer and guest performer with Les Délices. The lyrics of “Red Iron Ore” tell the tale of a ship setting out from Cleveland to pick up some of the ore before returning home. “ Debra found a different set of lyrics and melody than people usually sing. So it’s nice to come up with something new with old source material.”

After his special appearances with the group in March, Dagher returns to Cleveland next week for a regular season program with Les Délices “The Mermaid,” a family-friendly concert combining classical and folk traditions, visits Akron on April 25, Cleveland Heights on April 26, and Rocky River on April 27. Tickets are available online. [Read more…]

Les Délices: music fosters meaningful conversation at Cleveland’s VA Medical Center (Feb. 21)

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by Stephanie Manning

Navigating dementia — a common, yet devastating part of aging — requires confronting all sorts of complex emotions. People with memory loss, their caregivers, and the medical teams who interact with them all understand this well. So when Les Délices commissioned a piece tackling this difficult topic, they made a special effort to bring the music to those who would resonate with it the most.

The Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center hosted the early music ensemble for two performance-discussion sessions on February 21, a moving and emotional afternoon of empathetic, honest conversations about memory loss all framed by the solace of music.

At 12:00 pm, medical professionals and providers gathered in the rec hall, where flags of the U.S., the Department of VA, and the military’s many branches now provided a backdrop to a harpsichord and a collection of music stands. As part of the “Bioethics at Noon” series, the Les Délices musicians performed François Couperin’s La Visionnaire and selections from Viet Cuong’s world premiere, A Moment’s Oblivion. [Read more…]

Les Délices contemplates what makes us human in “A Moment’s Oblivion” (Feb. 23)

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by Stephanie Manning

“How wretched to forget,” sings the son in A Moment’s Oblivion — a character whose father now struggles to recognize members of his own family. “For all we were forms who we are.”

But the miracle cure that restores his father’s memory turns out to be a more fraught solution than it appears. Such is the conflict at the heart of Les Délices’ recent commission, with music by Viet Cuong and libretto by Cleveland poet Dave Lucas. The early music ensemble’s latest program surrounded the world premiere of A Moment’s Oblivion with more musical opportunities to reflect on the complex, and sometimes contradictory, emotions that make us human. [Read more…]

Les Délices unveils “The Mythology Project”

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By Mike Telin

When Debra Nagy asked Nicholas Phan to think about a non-Western, specifically non-European, myth that could be a fit for Les Délices’ The Mythology Project, he knew exactly where to turn.

“I had been spending a lot of time in Ann Arbor at my parents’ place because their health was starting to decline. And in my childhood bedroom was this very tattered book of Chinese myths that I had as a child,” the Grammy-winning tenor said on a recent Zoom call from Lisbon, Portugal.

“So I thumbed through the book and “The Loss of Memory Myth” jumped out at me. Probably because of what I had been experiencing with my parents’ decline in health and my needing to step up to take care of them. That role reversal really spoke to me.”

This weekend Les Délices will present A Moment’s Oblivion, the first instalment of “The Mythology Project,” a three-year initiative that will bring new life to the secular cantata that was popular in 17th and 18th-century France.

On Saturday at 4:00 pm at Heights Theater and Sunday at 4:00 pm at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church, tenor Nicholas Phan, oboist Debra Nagy, violinist Shelby Yamin, violist da gamba Rebecca Landell, and harpsichordist Mark Edwards will perform Michel de Montéclair’s La Bergère & Le Dépit généreux, Marin Marais’ “Le Labyrinthe” from Livre 4ème, and François Couperin’s “Barricades mistérieuses” and “Les Langueurs tendres” from Sixième Ordre. Tickets are available online.

[Read more…]

Les Délices visits 14th Century Avant-garde at Pivot Center (Nov. 24)

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by Daniel Hathaway

As the historian Barbara Tuchman revealed in her book A Distant Mirror, the 14th century in Europe was both eventful and full of contradictions.

On the traumatic side, the Great Famine and the bubonic plague claimed a great swath of the population, the Hundred Years’ War raged, and the  papacy moved from Rome to Avignon in France, marking the beginning of the decline in influence of the Catholic Church.

On the positive side came the flowering of experiments in music, a subject that Debra Nagy and her Les Délices colleagues charmingly explored in their “14th Century Avant-garde” program on Saturday, November 23 at the Pivot Center on Cleveland’s West Side, a converted 1919 building once used for making ships’ sails and awnings. [Read more…]

Les Délices explores music of the 14th Century Avant-garde

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by Mike Telin

“My heart always comes back to Medieval music — it’s just so beautiful,” Les Délices artistic director Debra Nagy said during a telephone conversation. “This wonderful program is full of my favorite pieces from that repertoire.”

On Friday, November 22 at 7:30 pm at First Congregational Church in Hudson, Les Délices will present “14th Century Avant-garde.” The evening features music by Guillaume de Machaut, Jacob Senleches, and Johannes Suzoy performed by mezzo-soprano Sophie Michaux, tenor James Reese, Scott Metcalfe (vielle & gothic harp), and Debra Nagy (recorders, douçaines, harp, and voice).

The program will be repeated on Saturday, November 23 at 7:30pm at Inlet Dance Theater in Cleveland and Sunday, November 24 at 4:00pm at Disciples Christian Church in Cleveland Heights. Tickets are available online.

[Read more…]

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