by David Kulma
It’s a rare treat to hear two excellent orchestra members out front as soloists in a single concert. In a program titled “The Four Seasons” on November 16 at E.J. Thomas Hall, the Akron Symphony and music director Christopher Wilkins featured concertmaster Tallie Brunfelt and principal horn Meghan Guegold in well-loved concertos by Antonio Vivaldi and Richard Strauss alongside works by Joseph Haydn and Gabriela Lena Frank.
by Jarrett Hoffman
This weekend, the Akron Symphony will spotlight two of its own. Concertmaster Tallie Brunfelt will take on the quadruple challenge of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, and principal horn Meghan Guegold will play Richard Strauss’s early Concerto No. 1 on Saturday, November 16 at 8:00 pm at E.J. Thomas Hall.
When Guegold was an 18-year-old student at the University of Akron, she was determined not only to learn the Strauss, but to play it memorized on that uncommon and ambitious event: the freshman recital.
“I thought, you know, I want to perform for a living, so I might as well jump right on in,” the hornist said during an interview.
That work, a pillar of the horn repertoire, wasn’t a surprising choice. “It’s definitely one of the best concertos we have,” Guegold said, adding that it might be the best from the Romantic era. The lyricism and the heroic quality of the writing attracted her. “I think it was the start of my real love of Strauss’s music.”
by Jarrett Hoffman
The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in August of 1920, and leading up to the 100th anniversary of that event, the Akron Symphony is highlighting six women composers through a project called “Stand Beside Her.”
I spoke to concertmaster Tallie Brunfelt and principal horn Meghan Guegold — who will both be featured as soloists in the Orchestra’s November 16 concert — and asked what this programming initiative means to them.
“I’m just so thrilled that the ASO is doing this, especially in light of the centennial,” Brunfelt said by telephone. Being a woman at her position in the Orchestra makes this project all the more exciting for her. “There aren’t many female concertmasters, and I think representation and visibility are extraordinarily important,” she said.
by Nicholas Stevens
Shakespeare is everywhere these days: not just at the roots of today’s literature, poetry, philosophy, pop culture, and theatre, but as the ultimate canonic figure in the arts. His fame helps keep him famous. Titles of novels riff on the fact that his work remains required reading; Supreme Court justices make headlines for doubting his authorship; tempests in teapots brew when people move his portrait. Classical music, with its piano-adorning composer busts, boasts figures of comparable monumentality. In presenting music on Shakespearean themes and scenarios in a recent concert, however, the Akron Symphony seized a chance to savor works of rarer vintages. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Stevens
As any brass, woodwind, or low-string player in an orchestra may confess under mild pressure, it can feel profoundly liberating to play music that draws the spotlight away from their colleagues in the violin section, especially for extended periods. Rare though this repertoire may be — Stravinsky favored winds and percussion, and Glass wrote a whole opera without violins — pieces that foreground these parts of the classical instrumentarium do appear at the heart of the canon. Filling the stage for its 60th-Anniversary Gala concert, the Rocky River Chamber Music Society placed conductor James Feddeck at the helm for an event featuring 21 musicians — violists, cellists, bassists, and wind players.
by Nicholas Stevens
E.J. Thomas Hall looms and soars, cradling audiences in a colossal yet cozy acoustic shell. The mechanism that allows for adjustments in the ceiling height — a system of suspended counterweights — dominates one lobby like a giant’s carillon. The hall hosts performances of all sizes, but truly comes alive when a given theatrical or musical production offers art of comparable scale, scope, and solidity, spanning the spectrum from soft speech to symphonic swells. The Akron Symphony offered just such a program earlier this month. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
“I like to play great music and I consider Mathis to be one of the greatest 20th-century works. And Pictures, especially in the Ravel orchestration, is a classic,” conductor Christopher Wilkins said by telephone. “Like the other two, Burchfield is a wonderful piece with a dazzling orchestration.”
On Saturday, November 18 at 8:00 pm in E.J. Thomas Hall, the Akron Symphony will present three works inspired by masterpieces of art: Eric Benjamin will conduct Morton Gould’s Burchfield Gallery, and Wilkins will lead Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler and Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Tickets are available online.
The concert will also include projected visual images of the art that inspired the music. “Because showing a single image is a static thing to do, I think it’s more artistically honest to show and talk about the paintings and then perform the work,” Wilkins said. “In all three cases that is what we’re going to do.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Music by Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, and Dvořák gave the Akron Symphony audience a window into “The Slavic Soul” in both its Russian and Czech manifestations on Saturday evening, September 23 in E.J. Thomas Hall. At the center of the program was a brilliant performance of Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto led by Music Director Christopher Wilkins and featuring the young Boston cellist Tony Rymer — although the composer might well have named the work “Concerto for Cello, Horn, and Orchestra,” so prominent a role that brass instrument plays in the piece. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Pianist Antonio Pompa-Baldi joined Christopher Wilkins and the Akron Symphony in E.J. Thomas Hall on Saturday, September 24 to open the orchestra’s new season with Rachmaninoff’s third concerto — a 40-minute adventure in Slavic lyricism laced through with enough physical challenges to tie a lesser pianist in knots. Pompa-Baldi played it with the fingers of a virtuoso, the soul of a poet, and the stamina of a marathon runner. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Carl Orff intended his immensely popular “Scenic Cantata” Carmina Burana to be a staged work with dancers rather than just a concert piece — the form in which we usually encounter it today. On Saturday, May 7 at E.J. Thomas Hall, the Akron Symphony and Chorus joined with David Shimotakahara’s GroundWorks Dance, Ballet Excel Ohio, the Dance Institute at the University of Akron, soprano Grace Kahl, tenor Timothy Culver, baritone Brian Keith Johnson, and the Cleveland Orchestra Children’s Choir in a performance that splendidly fulfilled the composer’s original vision. [Read more…]