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Quince Ensemble at CIM: patience pays off (Oct. 16)

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by Stephanie Manning

The Quince Ensemble doesn’t specialize in instant gratification. The vocal quartet likes “slow music,” as soprano Amanda DeBoer Bartlett has explained in interviews, and she repeated that sentiment onstage on October 16. “Not slow in tempo, but slow in development.”

That ethos can also form the arc of entire programs, as Quince demonstrated to its audience at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Before the concert in Mixon Hall reached its apex with Courtney Bryan’s Requiem, the quartet built up to the finale by demonstrating just what their voices can do.
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ChamberFest Cleveland: a four-course meal during “Innocence and Experience” (June 26)

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by Stephanie Manning

ChamberFest Cleveland’s June 26 concert had stiffer competition than usual, with The Cleveland Orchestra simultaneously performing for Wade Oval Wednesdays right down the street. But you wouldn’t have known it from the packed house that filled Mixon Hall that evening at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

The program, titled “Innocence and Experience,” marked the long-awaited festival debut of guitarist Jason Vieaux. (Although the venue was no doubt familiar to him — he’s taught at CIM since 1997.) Vieaux and his fellow musicians kicked off the program with Luigi Boccherini’s Guitar Quintet No. 4 in D, a lively piece with the subtitle “Fandango.”

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ChamberFest Cleveland: Lost in Paradise (June 21)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

The theme of the June 21 ChamberFest concert may have been “Paradise Lost,” but the performances and repertoire were of such high caliber, there was nowhere you would rather have found yourself.

A joyful noise opened the concert. J.S. Bach’s Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen featured soprano Sarah Shafer and trumpeter Brandon Ridenour in a sparkling account of the cantata Bach liked so much that he designated it as suitable for performance “in ogni tempo” — at any time.

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CIM New Music Ensemble: Cerrone the guest, Saariaho the dedicatee

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by Jarrett Hoffman

There are two main elements to the CIM New Music Ensemble’s program on Sunday, November 12 at 4:00 pm in Mixon Hall.

First there is the guest composer: Christopher Cerrone, who in the last decade has been both a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the Rome Prize.

Second is the program’s dedicatee: Kaija Saariaho, who was considered one of the greatest living composers until her passing in June from brain cancer.

I reached the Ensemble’s director, Keith Fitch (pictured), to learn about how that idea came together, and how Cerrone and Saariaho mesh.

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Come As You Are —
Banks & Bjerken at CIM

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by Jarrett Hoffman

In one way, saxophonist-composer Steven Banks’ Come As You Are is straightforward: it’s about family, and it’s about church. Its movements are dedicated to his mother and three sisters, and inspired by their favorite spirituals and works of sacred music.

In another way, the piece — which will conclude his free program with pianist Xak Bjerken on October 5 at 7:30 pm in Mixon Hall at CIM, where Banks is a visiting faculty member — is about something more abstract: a merging of different parts of his identity that previously didn’t feel as if they could coexist.

“As a classical musician, the vast majority of my colleagues have little knowledge or understanding of Black culture or how it influences my music-making,” Banks writes in his program note from 2021, when he performed the piece as part of his Young Concert Artists debut recital. “As a Black man from North Carolina, many of my family and friends don’t have a true sense of what I do and love as a classical performer and composer. I have also spent an incredible amount of time and energy on keeping these worlds separate and trying to show up in each as if the other didn’t exist.”

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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.

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Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival: 
a recital by Hao Yang (June 4)

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by Mike Telin

The presentation of young and emerging artists has always been a priority for the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival. And for Festival followers it’s an opportunity to be made aware of young guitarists, and then watch them mature as musicians.   

In 2017 CICGF introduced Cleveland audiences to Hao Yang (China). “[She] attended two years ago as a student [and] impressed everyone with the way that she played in the master classes,” Festival founder and artistic director Armin Kelly recalled during an interview that year with this publication. 

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Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival: the Patterson-Sutton Duo (June 4)

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by Mike Telin

The best chamber music performances are the ones where the synergy of the players is so captivating that you simply sit back, relax, and let yourself get lost in the music. Such was the case when the Patterson-Sutton Duo — Kimberly Patterson (cello) and Patrick Sutton (guitar) — made a return visit to the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival on Sunday afternoon, June 4.

With the spring sunshine flowing through the windows of the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Hall, the Duo led listeners down a path of musical delights drawn from the late 20th and 21st centuries. 

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Jason Vieaux opens the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival (June 1)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

On Thursday, June 1 at the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Hall, guitarist Jason Vieaux opened the 2023 Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival with a sparkling display, mixing assured technique with an impressively broad guitar ethos. In a program stretching from Albéniz to Metheny, Vieaux acquitted himself with ease and authority, setting a high bar for every festival recital to follow.

The night began with one of Andrés Segovia’s favorite works, Albéniz’s Torre Bermeja, a short piano piece that, in the hands of a skilled player like Vieaux at least, seems more suited to the guitar. His touch throughout was light, particularly in the repeated sixteenth-note triplets, which imparted buoyancy and optimism. 

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Stanislav Khristenko unites friends new and old for PianoDays @CLE

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by Stephanie Manning

Local audiences may remember Stanislav Khristenko from his electrifying performances at the 2013 Cleveland International Piano Competition, where his performance of the Brahms Concerto No. 1 with The Cleveland Orchestra helped him to take home the grand prize. This summer, competition organizer Piano Cleveland has invited him back to perform as part of the inaugural PianoDays @CLE.

Winning the CIPC is not Khristenko’s only connection to Cleveland — the pianist also earned an artist diploma from the Cleveland Institute of Music. “Cleveland is really my home here in the U.S.,” he said in a recent Zoom interview. On Sunday, August 7, he’ll return to his alma mater for his PianoDays program at 2:00 pm in Mixon Hall. Titled “Stanislav and Friends,” the performance will include a number of musicians that he met as a student. Purchase in-person or virtual tickets here. [Read more…]

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