by Timothy Robson
For their Saturday evening concert on April 20, the Baldwin Wallace University Bach Festival presented Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. John Passion in Gamble Auditorium on the BW campus. Festival Director Dirk Garner conducted the Motet Choir and a professional orchestra that included members of Chatham Baroque, who had performed earlier in the Festival. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Though the composer wasn’t around to blow out the candles on his 333rd birthday cake in March, Johann Sebastian Bach’s music lives on in both traditional and surprising ways. The Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival, whose 86th edition will be celebrated in Berea on April 20 and 21, will touch both the historic and the innovative poles of all things Bach, hosting a period instrument ensemble as well as a saxophone quartet.
“Chatham Baroque sits at the center,” Festival director Dirk Garner said in a telephone conversation. “They’ll be doing their own concert of music by Bach and earlier composers on Friday night, and they’re sharing their expertise by helping prepare the orchestra for Saturday evening’s performance of the St. John Passion.”
This year, the Bach Festival has hired a professional orchestra for the major Bach work. “Chatham’s Andrew Fouts will be the concertmaster, Scott Pauley is playing lute, and Patricia Halvorsen viola da gamba. They’re great musicians and really cool people,” Garner said. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
American tenor Nicholas Phan led members of Cleveland’s Baroque orchestra Apollo’s Fire in a stunning live performance of Phan’s English Baroque lute song album, A Painted Tale, this weekend at several local venues, including St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights on Friday night. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Nicholas Phan will certainly be no stranger to Northeast Ohio when he arrives to guest direct and perform in Apollo’s Fire’s next production. The versatile tenor has appeared with The Cleveland Orchestra in Orff’s Carmina Burana in 2013, and in Bach’s B-minor Mass in 2014. In his previous engagements with Apollo’s Fire in 2016, he covered both the Evangelist and the tenor solos in Bach’s St. John Passion. He got off a bit easier in the Cleveland Orchestra’s St. John last March, only singing the role of the Evangelist. And in between those gigs, Phan stepped in for John Relyea on Oberlin’s Artist Recital Series in February, 2016.
This time around, Phan will be performing a program adapted from A Painted Tale, a 2015 recording of Elizabethan lute songs in which he collaborated with lutenist Michael Leopold and gambist Ann Marie Morgan. The album takes its name from the Thomas Morley piece that introduces it, and Phan wrote in a preview that “The songs are structured so that when one listens to them in order, they tell the story of a young man who falls passionately in love for a woman and who is ultimately destroyed by the fire of that passion.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Apollo’s Fire crowned its 25th anniversary season over the summer with sold-out performances at Tanglewood, Ravinia, and Cain Park. I reached Artistic Director Jeannette Sorrell to ask what’s ahead for Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra in 2017-2018.
Daniel Hathaway: You’ve planned some big works to begin and end your new season — Handel’s Israel in Egypt in the fall, and Monteverdi’s Orfeo in the Spring. I understand that you’ve created a special version of Handel’s famous, double-chorus oratorio for the October 12-15 performances in Northeast Ohio.
Jeannette Sorrell: I’ve always felt that Israel in Egypt is a great work, but performances I’ve heard didn’t always work for me. The original piece was in three parts, beginning with the “Lamentation on the Death of Jeremiah” and continuing with “Exodus” and “The Song of Moses.” Audiences today usually only hear the second and third parts, but the “Lamentation” contains some beautiful, poignant funeral music.
by Daniel Hathaway
Under the direction of Franz Welser-Möst on Thursday evening, members of The Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus and an excellent team of soloists made a strong case for a not-so-historically informed approach to Bach’s sacred vocal works. The quality of Welser-Möst’s interpretation and the excellence of its execution got right to the heart of the composer’s Passion According to St. John and left a powerful emotional impression. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Jones
Like all great drama, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Passions — his settings of the gospel accounts of Jesus’s crucifixion — present conflicting points of view. We see the Passion through so many characters in the story — the disciple Peter, who denies knowing Jesus; the conflicted Roman governor Pilate, who finds no guilt in Jesus and yet sends him to the cross; the angry crowd, which demands his crucifixion; and Jesus himself, suffering and yet transcending his suffering. At every point, Bach demands our involvement with the conflicting ways in which each of these actors interpret the crucial event of the Christian story. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
When Apollo’s Fire presents its four area performances of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. John Passion later this week under the direction of Jeannette Sorrell, the burden of storytelling will fall to tenor Nicholas Phan.
Although Bach assigned individual parts to singers who will take the roles of Jesus, Pilate, and other individual characters, Phan will narrate the Passion of Jesus Christ from the Gospel According to John. Bach’s two extant Passion settings are the closest the composer came to writing opera, and Apollo’s Fire promises to offer an especially dramatic version of the St. John.
by Timothy Robson
The rising young American tenor Nicholas Phan joined pianist Myra Huang in a musically substantial and intellectually satisfying recital on the Oberlin Artist Recital Series in Finney Chapel on Wednesday, February 3. Phan has a clear, well-managed lyric voice, with surprising heft at musical climaxes. Myra Huang, a sensitive collaborator, played with technical mastery and supportive musicianship. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
What makes a great art song composer? “They need to have a strong appreciation for literature,” tenor Nicholas Phan answered without hesitation during a recent telephone conversation. “I know it sounds strange to say, but there is a literacy to their compositions — they have to be able to paint the words through music.” On Wednesday, February 3 at 8:00 pm in Oberlin College’s Finney Chapel, Nicholas Phan and pianist Myra Huang will present a program of works by four great art song composers as part of the Oberlin Artist Recital Series.
Named one of National Public Radio’s Favorite New Artists of 2011, Phan has quickly garnered attention for his performances with many of the leading orchestras in North America and Europe. A rising star of the opera world, Phan is also a champion of vocal chamber music. As a recording artist, his 2011 debut solo album, Winter Words, was included on the “Best of 2011” lists of The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, TimeOut NY, and the Toronto Star. [Read more…]