Musical Offering Archives - Cleveland Classical

Les Délices: a conversation with Mark Edwards about performing J.S. Bach’s Musical Offering

September 24, 2026 by Daniel Hathaway

by Daniel Hathaway

One of the few documented face-to-face encounters with Johann Sebastian Bach produced one of his most intriguing works. The Musical Offering is the subject of the opening concerts of Les Délice’s new season, which will be performed on Thursday, October 1 at 7:30 pm at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Akron, on Saturday, October 3 at 7:30 pm in Gamble Auditorium at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, and on Sunday, October 4 at 3:00 pm in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

As artistic director Debra Nagy writes in her program notes, “The story goes like this: On May 7, 1747, J.S. Bach was visiting his son Carl Philipp in Potsdam, where he was invited to an audience with the Prussian King, Frederick the Great. A devoted musical amateur, the King hoped to impress — and perhaps intimidate — the great Bach. To begin, the King showed off his recently-acquired Silbermann fortepianos. He then proposed that Bach improvise a three-voice ricercar on a theme of the King’s own invention.” [Read more…]

Verona Quartet: American dialects at Federated Church (Oct. 3)

by Kevin McLaughlin

In a program titled “American,” the Verona Quartet — Jonathan Ong and Dorothy Ro, violins, Abigail Rojansky, viola, and Jonathan Dormand, cello — spent much of their concert at Federated Church in Chagrin Falls on Saturday, October 3 moving among American musical dialects: Philip Glass’s minimalism, Samuel Barber’s lyricism, along with early jazz and popular song.

Antonín Dvořák was the outlier, though his American years supplied a plausible connection, and his final quartet gave each member of the ensemble (who are quartet-in-residence at the Oberlin Conservatory) more room to speak.

Philip Glass’s Company began as four musical interludes for a stage adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s prose work. Glass later wrote that he chose the string quartet for its ability to be both “introspective and passionate.” The Verona treated repetition as something active rather than static. [Read on…]

Relic journeys with Venus and Adonis in “The Blood of the Rose” (Sept. 30)

by Stephanie Manning

For the New York-based Baroque chamber orchestra Relic, a program themed around an opera requires a deliberately operatic presentation.

Although there were no singers, sets, or costumes present in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art on September 30, Relic combined an intriguing collection of music with a suggestion of scenes and characters, topped off with a few dramatic readings. This curated experience told a short, cohesive story in a little over an hour.

“The Blood of the Rose,” the ensemble’s latest program, is based on La púrpura de la rosa by Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco. The first opera ever to be performed in the Americas, it tells the mythological story of Venus and Adonis, whose romance ends in a tragic demise engineered by Mars. [Read on…]

Cleveland Chamber Choir makes pilgrimage along the “Path of Miracles” (Sept. 26)

by Stephanie Manning

In the hands (and voices) of the Cleveland Chamber Choir, Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles became both a piece about a pilgrimage and a piece that felt like one.

As it happens, those two activities — concert and pilgrimage — share more common qualities than not. Even without a religious element, each provides an opportunity for people to participate in a shared experience, go on a journey (physical and/or emotional), and arrive at a destination before going their separate ways.

The specific pilgrimage that inspired Talbot was the Camino Frances, part of a network of pilgrimages called the Camino de Santiago, which lead travelers to the city Santiago de Compostela in western Spain. The choir’s September 26 performance brought the composer’s hour-long work to Trinity Cathedral, perhaps the perfect venue to hear this music. [Read on…]

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