Overviews Archives - Cleveland Classical

Northeast Ohio gears up for a busy classical season during September

September 6, 2016 by Daniel Hathaway

by Daniel Hathaway

As summer fades after the Labor Day weekend, the Northeast Ohio concert season begins a gradual crescendo. By the middle of September, concertgoers will once again have to make difficult choices among several attractive events.

Take Saturday evening, September 17 for example, when Burning River Baroque, a Bascom Little Fund anniversary concert, and season openers of BlueWater Chamber Orchestra and the Oberlin Artist Recital Series will be competing for your attention.

Burning River Baroque’s 7:00 pm program, “Twisted Fate: Famed and Forgotten Female Composers,” will take place at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights. Sopranos Malina Rauschenfels and Josefien Stoppelenburg, viola da gambist Phillip W. Serna, and harpsichordist Paula Maust will perform music by Hildegard von Bingen, Jacquet de la Guerre, Princess Anna Amalia, Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, Barbara Strozzi, Isabella Leonarda, and Martha Bishop.

Meanwhile, the Cleveland-based chamber music ensemble Panorámicos and friends will mark the 50th year of the Bascom Little Fund’s service to composers and new music. [Read more…]

Akron Symphony looks forward to 2026 with composers new and old (Jan. 17)

by Stephanie Manning

The musical journey of a concert can’t always be summed up by its title. The Akron Symphony’s January 17 performance certainly delivered on its promise of “Beethoven’s Seventh” with a dignified reading of that famous work. But the headline did not hint at the more intriguing pieces on offer — nor the idea that this program aimed to spark enthusiasm about the year ahead.

“Hope and optimism” were the words that conductor Christopher Wilkins used to describe the musical choices to the audience in E.J. Thomas Hall on Saturday.

This idea of looking toward the future appeared right away with a piece by Sarah Hegenderfer, a composition student at The University of Akron. Her lovely little gem of a piece, Clearing of Snow, paints a winter scene at sunset in lush textures.

[Read on…]

Cleveland Jazz Orchestra & Musical Theater Project at the Maltz (Jan. 24)

By Kevin McLaughlin

On Saturday at the Maltz Performing Arts Center, the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra and The Musical Theater Project offered a timely reminder: Hoagy Carmichael wasn’t just the composer of “Stardust.” He was one of America’s great musical storytellers — a songwriter with a midwestern plainness that could turn suddenly tender, funny, or wise in the space of a single line.

Star Dust: The Songs of Hoagy Carmichael, part of the two organizations’ tenth season of collaboration, folded biography and performance into a single leisurely program. The format has become a signature of these shows: songs set in context by narration, supported by projected slides and film excerpts. Here those visuals — Carmichael portraits, footage of Carmichael in motion, stills from To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) — were discreet, and perhaps too few. But they reinforced the point that this music came from a particular life, and a full one.

[Read on…]

Brownbag Concert: Madness & Melancholy at Trinity (Jan. 21)

By Kevin McLaughlin

At noon on alternate Wednesdays, Trinity Cathedral becomes a refuge from the workweek. On January 21, the Cleveland Chamber Choir’s Brownbag Concerts continued a downtown tradition started in 1978 by Cleveland Classical.com’s own Daniel Hathaway — a series that offers listeners a midday pause, with informal, high-quality performances and a welcome sense of community.

The Cleveland Chamber Choir has recently been part of this tradition as artist-in-residence, offering programs that complement the cathedral’s acoustic and reward an audience listening closely over the lunch hour. For this concert, a subset of the full choir performed: Abigail Hakel-Garcia (soprano and violin), Kira McGirr (mezzo-soprano) Gregory Ristow (tenor and harpsichord), Dominic Aragon (baritone), and Adrian Murillo (theorbo).

[Read on…]

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