Allesandro Deljavan, Ran Jia, and Marcos Madrigal, three pianists who represent the International Piano Academy Lake Como, will play the opening concert of this season’s Oberlin Artist Recital Series in Finney Chapel on Sunday, September 27 at 8:00 pm. Their visit to Oberlin also marks the beginning of a partnership that establishes Oberlin as the North American outpost of the famous Italian piano academy. Read the Oberlin News Center story here.
by Daniel Hathaway
Philippe Lefebvre, one of three tenured organists (titulaires) at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, made his impressive Oberlin debut on Wednesday, September 16 in a 70-minute, straight-through recital in Finney Chapel at Oberlin College. His program paid homage to the great bloodline of French organist-composers established by the Belgian-born master César Franck, as well as to the long and distinguished tradition of improvisation that continues to live and prosper in the organ galleries of France. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway & Mike Telin
The pressure was on in Warner Concert Hall at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music on Wednesday evening, July 29, when six young violinists played 30-minute recitals to determine who would advance to perform concertos with Jahja Ling and The Cleveland Orchestra on Friday, July 31 at 8:00 pm in Severance Hall. The concert, hosted by Jacqueline Gerber, and emceed by Robert Conrad, was carried live over WCLV, 104.9 FM and wclv.com. [Read more…]
Oberlin, April 30, 2015 — Beginning in the fall of 2015, three piano students will be selected from a worldwide pool of applicants to take part in the Oberlin-Como Piano Academy, a two-year program at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music which will result in the awarding of an artist diploma. Oberlin Conservatory Dean Andrea Kalyn and the piano faculty announced the new program today.
Based in a 17th century palace on Italy’s Lake Como, the International Piano Academy Lake Como was created in 2002 by William Naboré and Martha Argerich. The academy is dedicated to developing young pianists without regard to financial resources or country of origin. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hautzinger
Opera in a dance club? Why not? Opera can be intimidating and ridiculous, with its gilded houses, extravagant length, fantastic plots, and the bewildering phantasmagoria that generally appears onstage. There’s a reason why it’s parodied so frequently. So it was refreshing to see digestible, one-act operas about everyday people presented by Oberlin Opera Theater in the basement Dionysus Disco, better known to the sweaty college revelers who are its normal customers as the ‘Sco. [Read more…]
by Jarrett Hoffman
January has been all about chamber music at Oberlin. On Friday, January 23 in Stull Recital Hall, the school gave a taste of the media side of the field with the help of three Cleveland-based music critics, also Oberlin faculty members: Mike Telin and Daniel Hathaway serve as editors of ClevelandClassical.com, while Donald Rosenberg is editor of Early Music America magazine and former chief music critic at The Plain Dealer. [Read more…]
by Jarrett Hoffman
Listening to a concert is like hugging: you can tell when someone is into it and when they aren’t. A performer might revel in a slow movement or delight in a fast one — or every now and then they might just go through the motions. Both ways of playing were on display Wednesday night, January 21 in Oberlin’s Kulas Recital Hall. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The first faculty concert of Oberlin’s Winter Chamber Music Festival on January 9 brought a capacity-plus crowd to Kulas Recital Hall and gave students in the program the first of several opportunities to hear how things are done by the veteran chamber players who are coaching them this month. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hautzinger
If you had to guess the composers of two of the pieces performed by the Wasmuth Quartet on January 6 by sound alone, you would almost certainly guess wrong. As part of Oberlin Conservatory’s Chamber Music Intensive & Festival, the young string quartet presented music by Haydn, Webern, and Ligeti in Kulas Recital Hall, but probably not the Ligeti or Webern you would easily recognize. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
Chartreuse: a French liqueur made by Carthusian Monks since 1737.
Chartreuse: a color halfway between yellow and green.
Chartreuse: a contemporary music ensemble formed at the Oberlin Conservatory in 2011 by violinist Myra Hinrichs, violist Carrie Frey and cellist Helen Newby.
Chartreuse Plus/Minus: The title of the ensemble’s six-concert tour.
On Wednesday, January 7 at 8:00 pm in Clonick Hall at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Chartreuse will present a concert featuring the premiere of Theophilus Chandler’s Image Deposition. The evening will also include Joan Arnau Pamies’s [IVflbclVIvln/c] for flute, bass clarinet, violin, and cello, the full premiere of Kurt Isaacson’s as a family of civilian ghosts phase-shifts through the fog lights, David Bird’s pluck.divide.cut, and Katherine Young’s graveled crumbled strewn with video projection (premiere of this version). Hinrichs, Frey and Newby will be joined by flutist Hannah Hammel, clarinetist Zachary Good and bassoonist Ben Roidl-Ward. The concert is part of Oberlin’s Winter Term Chamber Music Festival. [Read more…]