by Mike Telin
There are competitions for everything, so why not one for snare drummers? Anyone who might have scoffed at the notion need only to have attended the final rounds of the Modern Snare Drum Competition on Saturday afternoon, May 28 in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The eight finalists competing in two divisions all brought superb artistry to their performances of a required work as well as a solo of their choice. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Strange to tell, but in its nearly hundred-year history, The Cleveland Orchestra never got around to playing two major works by Antonín Dvořák and Leoš Janáček until last Thursday evening. On May 19, Franz Welser-Möst led the orchestra in their first-ever performance of Dvořák’s The Wood Dove and their first performance of more than the overture from Janáček’s opera The House of the Dead. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The three programs scheduled by The Cleveland Orchestra last weekend were each colorful in their own right, but the blueprint of works being performed was complicated enough that the program book color-coded each evening to keep patrons apprised about what they were hearing, and in what order. Come to think of it, the orchestra and stage crew probably appreciated those navigational aids as well. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
An evening of string quartet music can be a beautiful thing, but with a whole cast of musicians in residence, ChamberFest Cleveland enjoys the luxury of being able to field a variety of different ensembles on a single program. On Thursday, June 25 in CIM’s Mixon Hall, a concert that began with a Haydn quartet took on new sonorities with a Britten piece for oboe and three strings, expanded to include more strings plus harmonium and piano for a Johann Strauss Jr. waltz, then involved two pianists, two percussionists and a stage full of sound-generating devices in George Crumb’s Music for a Summer Evening. It was an amazing program. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
You’ve seen him performing with The Cleveland Orchestra in back of a hundred of his colleagues, wielding a comically oversized hammer in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, playing stunning mallet duets in Messiaen’s Chronochromie, or providing a rock-solid snare drum cadence for Ravel’s Bolero. But on Thursday, June 25 in Mixon Hall at CIM, TCO’s principal percussionist Marc Damoulakis will be featured in a chamber music performance, when he joins fellow percussionist Scott Christian and duo-pianists Orion Weiss and Roman Rabinovich for George Crumb’s Music for a Summer Evening on ChamberFest Cleveland’s seventh concert of its fourth season.
The five-movement piece forms the third part of the composer’s Makrokosmos, a work that received its premiere at Swarthmore College in 1974 and was last performed in Cleveland in November of 2010 by members of Chamber Music at Lincoln Center on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series. “I’ve played it a number of times,” Damoulakis said in a telephone conversation. “At Tanglewood in the late ‘90s, then with Manny Ax and his wife on the ‘Great Performances’ series in New York, I think in 2001. I find this piece to be one of the greats. It’s a masterpiece like Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony, a piece everyone should hear.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Franz Welser-Möst led the apparently indefatigable musicians of The Cleveland Orchestra in the third of four challenging, all-in-a-row concerts on Friday evening, May 29, major attractions on the agenda for the League of American Orchestras Cleveland meeting. Olivier Messiaen’s dazzling Chronochromie and Antonín Dvořák’s infrequently performed fifth symphony made different but compelling connections to the natural world, while Messiaen’s theologically-infused Hymne opened a portal to the heavenly realms. [Read more…]