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ChamberFest Cleveland: “A Musical Feast” at Heights Theater & in Nate’s World (June 14)

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by Daniel Hathaway

ChamberFest Cleveland’s season theme of “Lost and Found” extended to the choice of venue for its program “A Musical Feast” on June 14.

Heights Theater opened in 1919 as a motion picture theater with 1,200 seats. Renamed Coventry Theater, then Centrum, it eventually closed in 2003. The space was repurposed as a church, following a period as a comedy club, and is now being used as a performance venue.

The sound carries well, but the large space has an odd acoustic which suits some styles of music better than others. [Read more…]

ChamberFest Cleveland: a conversation with pianist/composer Michael Stephen Brown

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by Mike Telin

Season thirteen of ChamberFest Cleveland gets under way on Wednesday, June 11 at 7:30 pm in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

The program — “Lost and Found” —  features J.S. Bach’s Concerto for Two Keyboards in C major, Felix Mendelssohn’s String Octet, and Michael Stephen Brown’s The Lotos-Eaters (with the composer at the piano). Executive director Jessica Peek Sherwood presents the pre-concert festival welcome at 6:30 pm. Although this concert is sold out, the Festival runs through June 28. Tickets are available online.

I caught up with composer/pianist Michael Stephen Brown on Zoom and began our conversation by asking him if this year would be his second or third visit to ChamberFest.

Michael Stephen Brown: This will be my second, but I’ve known Roman and Diana for a long time, so I look forward to returning. I met them both at the Ravinia Festival, and with Roman being a fellow pianist, we had a lot in common. We became fast friends and loved to play for each other and play four-hand music together. Then he came to Juilliard — I was already there — and we both studied with Robert McDonald.

[Read more…]

ChamberFest Cleveland: “Vortex” (June 25)

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by Mike Telin

If you are familiar with William Cowper’s 1785 poem The Task, then you know the famous line “Variety is the very spice of life, that gives it all its flavor.” On Sunday, June 25 at Harkness Chapel, ChamberFest Cleveland presented a program that was steeped in musical variety and spices for the ear.

Written in 1977, Alfred Schnittke’s Moz-Art (after the fragment K. 416d) is based on the first violin part from Mozart’s unpublished pantomime, with dollops of the opening theme of his 40th Symphony stirred into the mix. The quirky five-minute work for two violins asks the players to throw caution to the winds as they seemingly compete to see who can turn a classical line into something absurd faster than the other.

The performance by Itamar Zorman and Diana Cohen was bust-your-gut funny. Bowed notes turned into plucked ones, then scratchings, in tune became out of tune, and slow tempos became fast enough to break the sound barrier. Hilarity ensued when the players swapped out their instruments, Zorman grabbing a very tiny violin while Cohen opted for a viola. After reclaiming their rightful fiddles, the players mischievously walked away whistling.

[Read more…]

ChamberFest Cleveland:
“Es muss sein” — it must be (June 29)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Fate — as represented by “Es muss sein” (it must be), Beethoven’s enigmatic motto tucked in the last movement of the String Quartet No. 16 in F — was the guiding light for ChamberFest’s program on Thursday evening, June 29 at CIM’s Mixon Hall. A passage from Milan Kundera’s book The Unbearable Lightness of Being was read aloud by co-artistic director Roman Rabinovich, who went on to explain the text’s Beethoven reference and how it aligns with the Festival’s overall Lightness theme. In addition to the Beethoven, works included Lera Auerbach’s compact Piano Trio No. 1 and the monumental Piano Quintet by Sergey Taneyev.

What seems by now to be ChamberFest’s “inevitability” of excellence also played a role. Like some sort of magic trick, each disparately assembled group — mostly made up of musicians who don’t frequently play together — conjured miracles of coalescence in every work.

[Read more…]

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