by Daniel Hathaway
It’s Valentine’s Day all week this week, and aside from the obvious gifts — flowers, chocolates, and shiny bling — there are a number of ways to take to heart the new advice of gifting your love interest experiences rather than things.
Our Concert Listings have been providing such a service since the website was launched in 2008. Consider this message from one of our readers way back in 2009:
I’m grateful for ClevelandClassical.com for so many reasons. In fact, I learned about Nathan Gunn’s performance at Oberlin through you, which has now become the central feature of my surprise Valentine’s Day date with my fiancée! I owe you big time now.
Here are some suggestions for your own Valentine.
The musicians’ collective Urban Troubadour offers not mere concerts, but 
January has been all about chamber music at Oberlin. On Friday, January 23 in Stull Recital Hall, the school gave a taste of the media side of the field with the help of three Cleveland-based music critics, also Oberlin faculty members: Mike Telin and Daniel Hathaway serve as editors of ClevelandClassical.com, while Donald Rosenberg is editor of Early Music America magazine and former chief music critic at The Plain Dealer. 
The Oberlin Trio, Oberlin Conservatory’s excellent faculty piano trio, brought three busy weeks of chamber music coachings and performances to a rousing conclusion on Saturday evening in Warner Concert Hall. 
Listening to a concert is like hugging: you can tell when someone is into it and when they aren’t. A performer might revel in a slow movement or delight in a fast one — or every now and then they might just go through the motions. Both ways of playing were on display Wednesday night, January 21 in Oberlin’s Kulas Recital Hall. 
Northeastern Ohio has some fantastic musicians. Case in point: the chamber concert in Oberlin’s Kulas Recital Hall on January 14, part of the conservatory’s Winter Chamber Music Festival. Featuring the abundant talents of members of The Cleveland Orchestra, Oberlin faculty, and one student, it offered a cornucopia of musicality, passion, and delight. 
The first faculty concert of Oberlin’s Winter Chamber Music Festival on January 9 brought a capacity-plus crowd to Kulas Recital Hall and gave students in the program the first of several opportunities to hear how things are done by the veteran chamber players who are coaching them this month. 
It appears that Northeast Ohio’s classical music organizations are going to be wasting no time getting back into full swing after the holidays. A quick check of our Concert Listings page reveals that almost as soon as 2015 is upon us, audiences will have plenty of concerts to choose from. However, the prize for being first out of the blocks goes to the Oberlin Conservatory.
