Nan Golz Archives - Cleveland Classical

Baldwin Wallace Opera presents Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress

March 19, 2019 by Jarrett Hoffman

by Daniel Hathaway and Mike Telin

Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress is based on a series of 18th-century engravings of the same name by William Hogarth and boasts a libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman. The opera chronicles the moral and physical demise of Tom Rakewell, who deserts Anne Trulove for London’s decadent delights. After many adventures initiated by Nick Shadow, a.k.a. the Devil, Tom ends up in a hospital for the insane. The moral of the story: the Devil will find work for idle hands. Click here to read a short synopsis.

On Thursday, March 21 at 7:30 pm at the Klais Drama Center, Baldwin Wallace Opera Theater takes on this entertaining tale of Tom and his pact with the Devil. The double cast includes Ethan Burck and Benjamin Krumreig as Tom Rakewell, faculty members Benjamin Czarnota and Marc Weagraff as Nick Shadow, DeLaine Crutchfield and Giuliana Bozza as Anne Trulove, and Nan Golz and Sarah Antell as Baba the Turk. Scott Skiba directs and Domenico Boyagian conducts the Baldwin Wallace Orchestra. Performances continue on March 22 and 23 at 7:30 pm and March 24 at 2:00 pm. Tickets are available online.

We spoke with Marc Weagraff by telephone and began by asking him how it feels to play the Devil?

[Read more…]

Cleveland Opera Theater & Baldwin Wallace: Threepenny Opera at the Maltz (Oct. 29)

October 31, 2017 by Daniel Hathaway

by Daniel Hathaway

Cleveland Opera Theater got top billing, but students from the Baldwin Wallace Conservatory covered most of the singing and acting duties in Brecht & Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, which received its second and final performance at the Maltz Performing Arts Center in University Circle on Sunday afternoon, October 29. Directed by Scott Skiba, the joint production was supported by a seven-piece instrumental ensemble conducted by Domenico Boyagian. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: Mozart Requiem, A Tapestry, at Severance Music Center (Nov. 8)

by Daniel Hathaway

There’s a long history in Western sacred music of extending and enriching liturgical forms and texts by adding new material. That’s how we got mass movements titled Kyrie cunctipotens genitor: medieval monks added words to decorate long chains of untexted notes called melismas. J.S. Bach tucked five extra pieces in between movements of his first version of the Magnificat to more clearly place them in the context of Christmas celebrations in Leipzig.

More recently, in 1962 Benjamin Britten added devastating verse by World I “war poet” Wilfrid Owen to the traditional funeral rite of the western Christian Church in his War Requiem, written for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, built next door to the bombed-out shell of the previous church.

Jeannette Sorrell has now added to that tradition with her Mozart Requiem: A Tapestry, which cleverly expands and comments on the composer’s work, left unfinished at his death in 1791, with works by Black composers. I heard the premiere of her Tapestry in an often brilliant performance by Apollo’s Fire at Severance Music Center on November 8.

For more than 230 years, Mozart’s work has been generally accepted as complete in the version his widow commissioned from his student Franz Xavier Sussmayr, who had the benefit of access to the composer and his sketches in Mozart’s final hours. More recently, conductors have found the work of Sussmayr and his assistants to be less than edifying, and there are to date some 18 different pairs of hands who have sought to do better both with the musical material and its orchestration.

Sorrell’s scholarly re-imagining of the Mozart Requiem is more radical than creating plausible replacements that second-guess Mozart, and she has chosen wonderful excerpts from works by Eric Gould (from his Apollo’s Fire commissioned work, 1791: Requiem for the Ancestors), Damien Geter (from An African American Requiem), and Jesse Montgomery (from Five Freedom Songs), as well as her own Voices of 1791 to weave into the warp and woof of her Tapestry.

Apollo’s Singers and Orchestra sounded wonderful all evening, beginning with Mozart’s Introitus expanded into the narrative of a typical slave ship that embarked from the west coast of Africa in 1791 as told by bass baritone Kevin Deas and soprano Sonya Headlam underscored by strings and harp with a repeated bass line. Mozart’s Kyrie eleison of the mass elicited gripping playing from the orchestra.

The torso of a Requiem mass from the late middle ages onward has been the Sequence, Dies irae, a long, fear-inspiring poem about the Last Judgment that began with Headlam’s beautiful singing of Eric Gould’s A Mother’s Pain, and concluded with Deas’ heartfelt Sometime I feel like a motherless child.

Tuba Miram was regally sung by Kevin Deas and accompanied by a smooth trombone solo by Greg Ingles..

Apollo’s Singers sounded fearsome in the over-dotted rhythms of Rex Tremendum majestatis, Elora Kares sang sweetly of freedom in Gould’s Phillis’ Song, and tenor Jacob Perry led Geter’s Sanctus Kum ba yah, spiced up with tambourine (Katy LaFavre) and congas (Luke Rinderknecht) to end the first half of the program.

After intermission, the Sequence resumed with Geter’s Lacrimosa, Mozart’s Confutatis, and the first eight bars — all that Mozart wrote — of his own Lacrymosa, the conclusion of the lengthy Dies irae.

Presumably taking the place of a sermon, Headlam’s arresting performance of Jesse Montgomery’s arrangement of the traditional Black Spiritual, My father, how long will my people suffer here, ended what might be called the literary half of the Requiem, before bread and wine are offered as sacrifice and consecrated as the body and blood of Christ.

That action was accompanied by Mozart’s Offertorium, Domine Jesu Christe, his hostias et preces tibi, and the repetition of the former. In the middle, Charles Wesley Evans soloed dramatically in the traditional Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. A Sanctus went missing.

Only Mozart’s own Agnus Dei and the customary repetition of the Lux Aeterna from the beginning of the Requiem were left, but Sorrrell added two more movements: Geter’s Agnus Dei, and Jesse Montgomery’s arrangement of The Day of Judgment sung by Deas, Headlam, and company as a grand finale.

Still to some extent a work in progress, a bit of tweaking with the Tapestry might turn a very good idea into a brilliant one. Taking an intermission only served to stop the progress of a Requiem mass in its tracks, and performing only the eight bars of Mozart’s Lacrymosa robbed. the Sequence of a suitable ending. Performing Montgomery’s Day of Judgment after the fragment of Mozart’s Lacrymosa vanishes might make for more drama.

And it’s not quite clear what the Tapestry wants to be, but the audience clearly enjoyed it and decided it wanted to begin applauding early in the piece. At the conclusion the capacity crowd rewarded Sorrell and her colleagues with a long ovation.

Published on ClevelandClassical.com November 16, 2025

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CIM Opera’s engaging Puccini double bill prompts both laughs and tears (Nov. 7)

by Stephanie Manning

The three one-act operas that make up Giacomo Puccini’s Il trittico (The Triptych) are typically connected by theme, rather than location. Although the trio of works take place in 13th-century Paris, 17th-century Siena, and 20th-century Florence respectively, they all deal with keeping someone’s death a secret — whether tragically or comedically.

CIM Opera Theater’s recent production of two-thirds of the triptych brought the action into one particular place and time, as director Dean Southern moved both Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi into 1918’s New York City. What stood out more, however, were the impressive performances from across the large cast, which I heard on November 7 in Kulas Hall.

[Read on…]

Oberlin Orchestra with the Poiesis Quartet in Finney (Oct. 31)

by Daniel Hathaway

Fresh from winning the grand prize at the prestigious Banff Competition on the last day of August, the Poiesis Quartet (Sarah Ying Ma & Max Ball, violins, Jasper de Boor, viola, and Drew Dansby, cello) took a late October victory lap at the Oberlin Conservatory, returning to their place of birth as an ensemble to give master classes and solo with the Oberlin Orchestra.

Judging from the turnout in Finney Chapel on Friday, it might not have been a prizewinning idea to schedule a major orchestra concert on a college campus on Halloween, but there was nothing slim about the sound that the stage full of musicians produced. Brilliantly scored works by Carlos Simon, John Adams, Angélica Negrón, and Zhou Tian, were conducted with precision by Rafael Jiménez.

[Read on…]

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