by Daniel Hathaway
The second of two performances by contemporary flute guru Carlton Vickers sponsored by No Exit under the aegis of NEOSonicFest took over most of the available space in the Heights Arts gallery on Saturday evening, March 5. The audience, tucked in among a variety of exhibits of culinary-themed art, heard an intense hour’s worth of recent music written for one of the most ancient of musical instruments. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
The avant-garde flutist Carlton Vickers last played in here in March of 2013. “I’m looking forward to being back in Cleveland — I’ll be stepping things up a bit this time,” he said during a telephone conversation. Vickers, who specializes in the most demanding works of the contemporary and electro-acoustic repertoire, will give two concerts as part of NEOSonicFest. Vickers’ appearances, once again presented by the Cleveland-based new music ensemble No Exit, are scheduled for March 4 at SPACES Gallery and March 5 at Heights Arts. His program for both performances will include music by Jason Eckardt, Marc Yeats, James Erber, and Brian Ferneyhough. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
“In the words of John Cage, Satie is indispensable,” No Exit artist director Tim Beyer said during a telephone conversation. “As iconic as Satie is, you don’t often see a concert presented in his honor.” On Friday, October 30 at Heights Arts, No Exit will launch their seventh season with what will be a year-long tribute to the music of Erik Satie.
“With Satieʼs 150th birthday approaching it seemed like an ideal time to showcase music from a composer who many see as the original musical dadaist,” Beyer said. The program will include Satie’s Nocturnes Nos. 1 and 2 as well as “Idylle” from Avant–dernières pensées. Additional performances will be held at Cleveland State University’s Drinko Recital Hall on Monday, November 9, and at SPACES on Saturday, November 21. All three concerts begin at 8:00 pm. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
No Exit’s third performance of its 2015 spring program on Monday, April 20 at Cleveland State University’s Drinko Recital Hall included a wide range of contemporary sounds and video, ranging from an almost elderly work (dating from 1994) to the first performances of newly-minted pieces. The emphasis was on electronic music, either all by itself or in combination with live performance, and there wasn’t a boring moment. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
This weekend, Cleveland-based new music ensemble No Exit will present three concerts that showcase an eclectic mix of avant-garde electronic and electro-acoustic works. “This is a really exciting series,” No Exit’s artistic director Tim Beyer said during a telephone conversation. “We’re fortunate to have performers who are not only amazing ensemble players, but virtuosic soloists as well. And these pieces will allow each member of the ensemble to shine.”
The first performance is scheduled for Friday, April 17 at Heights Arts. The program will be repeated on Saturday, April 18 at SPACES and on Monday, April 20 at Cleveland State University’s Drinko Recital Hall. All concerts will begin at 8:00 pm. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
The new music ensemble No Exit will launch their 2014-15 concert season next week by shining a spotlight on the works of area composers, including the debut of two world premiere pieces. The performances will take place on Saturday, November 22 at 8:00 pm in Spaces Gallery and on Monday, November 24 at 8:00 pm in Cleveland State University’s Drinko Auditorium.
No Exit artistic director Timothy Beyer says that, “While we have always been very passionate in our focus on Cleveland-area composers, this concert is unique in that with the exception of the Jacob Druckman piece, the entire program consists of living composers from our area. I think that we live in an age where ʻregionalismʼ, in regard to art music, is not such a meaningful term anymore. Itʼs become a much bigger world than that. However, there is still something quite singular and extraordinary about so much music coming out of our neck of the woods. We wanted to present a program that reflected this.” [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
On Friday, April 11 in SPACES, the contemporary music ensemble No Exit begins their spring concert series, three extraordinary evenings of music. In addition to SPACES, concerts will take place at Heights Arts on Saturday, April 12, and in Cleveland State University’s Drinko Hall on Monday, April 14. All performances begin at 8:00 PM. Performances include two world premieres performed by Cara Tweed, violin, James Rhodes, viola, Nicholas Diodore, cello, Sean Gabriel, flute, Nicholas Underhill, piano, and Luke Rinderknecht, percussion.
Artistic director Timothy Beyer said, “Music is perhaps inherently the most abstract medium amongst the arts. And yet, it has the ability to evoke and convey a very real visual world. There is this remarkable synergy between organized sound and what our minds do with it. It’s profound, really. A composer such as Morton Feldman has been able to sonically represent what a painter like Mark Rothko accomplished visually. So in this respect, there is, or at least can be, a very iconographical element to certain music. This is the very thing that the ensemble will be focusing on in this series of concerts.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Today’s genre-bending musicians have nothing on Raymond Scott (born Henry Warnow in 1908), possibly one of the most eclectic musicians ever to have come out of Juilliard. Before suffering a debilitating stroke in 1987 — he died in 1994 — Scott had transformed swing music with the intricate, improvisation-suppressing compositions he crafted for his six-man band, called the Raymond Scott Quintette because it sounded “crisper,” made breakthrough experiments with electronic music, and somewhat inadvertently contributed to the soundtracks of Warner Bros. cartoons, through which you may have heard Scott’s music without knowing it.
Cleveland’s classy and enterprising new music ensemble, No Exit, led by Timothy Beyer and comprised of violinist Cara Tweed, violist James Rhodes, flutist Sean Gabriel, percussionist Luke Rinderknecht, cellist Nicholas Diodore, pianists Nicholas Underhill and James Praznik and assistant artistic director and composer Eric M.C. Gonzalez, invited guest performers Russ Gershon, saxophones and flute, percussionists Dinesh Joseph and trumpeter Scott McKee to celebrate Scott’s legacy in three concerts last weekend in Cleveland and Buffalo. I caught the third show on Monday evening in Drinko Recital Hall at Cleveland State University. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway & Mike Telin
Even before the Labor Day weekend, many of Northeast Ohio’s universities, colleges and conservatories were already up and running. Because students have only just moved in, concerts at the beginning of the term usually feature faculty recitals and performances by visiting ensembles, and there are several of them scheduled for the early days of September.
The first faculty event at the Oberlin Conservatory this fall will feature violist Michael Strauss (left) and his colleagues Alexa Still, flute, and pianists Monique Duphil and James Howsmon in Dmitri Shostakovich’s Viola Sonata, op. 147, Maurice Duruflé’s 1928 Prélude, Récitatif, et Variations for Flute, Viola, and Piano, Op. 3, and Paul Hindemith’s Viola Sonata, op. 11, no. 4, in a free concert in Kulas Recital Hall at the Oberlin Conservatory on Saturday, September 7 at 8.
“The staff discussed who would perform the first recital of the semester”, Strauss told us by phone. “I said, yeah, I can do that. I’m sure that many of the faculty would have been fine with the slot, it’s just that no one had made the move.”
Now in his second year as associate professor of viola and chamber music, Strauss admits that opening with Shostakovich’s last work is a little risky. “It’s quite a dark piece and it is a big test in keeping your wits about you. I started looking at music that would fit and I thought of going heavy and then lightening up.” [Read more…]
by Jarrett Hoffman
A wide spectrum of new music, by turns casual and intense, pre-determined and spontaneous, was on display in a performance by the new music ensemble No Exit on March 23 at SPACES Gallery. It was the final concert of the group’s March series, which included performances of the same program the previous two nights at MOCA Cleveland and Cleveland State University’s Drinko Auditorium.
SPACES provided a small, intimate setting, with three rows of chairs for the audience located only feet from the performers in the first room of the gallery. This, along with the art visible in the next room such as the “Twinkling Tricycle”— an antique tricycle wrapped in an absurd length of lights — lent a casual atmosphere to the concert.
The first piece, however, was anything but casual. Guest artist and virtuoso flutist Carlton Vickers performed Brian Ferneyhough’s first essay for solo flute, Cassandra’s Dream Song. Ferneyhough is known for his stunningly deliberate, complex pieces, and this one was no different. [Read more…]