by Mike Telin
For the recent set of concerts in their season-long celebration of the surreal, No Exit turned to two pivotal events in the history of dadaism for inspiration — the 1920 Festival Dada and the 1923 Soirée du Coeur à Barbe. This program, “Piano Dada,” included works of poetry, theater, and music that were performed at those historic Paris festivals. I attended the performance on March 16 at Heights Arts.
As the title suggests, the program featured a healthy dose of music for the piano. And Shuai Wang proved to be a worthy interpreter with her impressive and committed performances throughout the evening.
A clarinet and a string quartet are the traditional components of a clarinet quintet, an instrumentation that has spawned widely performed works by composers such as Mozart, Brahms, and Coleridge-Taylor.
The third iteration of No Exit’s fall program took the ensemble to an intimate venue — the gallery of Heights Arts on Lee Road in Cleveland Heights, where space is at such a premium that percussionist Luke Rinderknecht’s big marimba was nearly marooned offstage, and a few dozen audience members added up to a packed crowd.
New music concerts can run the risk of sinking under the weight of their own self-importance, especially when “world premieres” are involved. Happily, while No Exit takes itself seriously, it goes about its business with a redemptive playfulness, as demonstrated in several of the entries in the hour-long concert that debuted on the ensemble’s YouTube channel on January 29.
With the onslaught of streamed concerts, whether live or pre-recorded, ensembles are now faced with the task of deciding how to present themselves on-screen to an at-home audience.