by Peter Feher
If you missed the tail end of ChamberFest Cleveland’s season, don’t be too worried. The highlights from each summer of brilliant, collaborative performances have a way of sticking around — online on the Festival’s YouTube channel and, more recently, on the radio with WCLV. Certainly this year’s finale, on July 2 at the Maltz Performing Arts Center, was full of such memorable musical moments.
The program, titled “An Enchanting Celebration,” made good on its promise of a special event. ChamberFest put two large ensembles on stage for a pair of works brimming with instrumental and stylistic variety.
Classical music concerts in Cleveland usually thin out in July as festivals outside the city get under way, most notably The Cleveland Orchestra’s Blossom season. So it is a welcome turn of events to see a new international summer festival supported by University Circle institutions arrive for two weeks in mid-July. I attended the first weekend of Music in the Circle concerts that brought musicians from around the world to the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Hall on Friday, July 11 and to the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium on Sunday, July 14.