by Jarrett Hoffman
On Tuesday, December 3 at 7:30 pm at Plymouth Church, the Dover Quartet will return to the Cleveland Chamber Music Society bearing a healthy, six-week-old piece of music by David Bruce alongside works by Britten and Brahms.
The group premiered Bruce’s The Lick Quartet in October on the Dallas Chamber Music Society, then played it again at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and the Stadthaus in Ulm, Germany. That makes this the fourth performance of the piece, and if you want to get geographic about it, the East-of-the-Mississippi U.S. premiere.
And about that title — it has nothing to do with anyone’s tongue, but rather it’s the word for a melodic fragment in jazz. According to Bruce’s notes on the piece, the term “lick” has become a cliché, an Internet meme, and an inside joke among musicians. But after he noticed the resemblance of a lick in his early sketches for the piece, he decided to challenge himself to use it unironically.
Violinist Jinjoo Cho was born in Seoul and lives in Montreal, but you could easily say she’s from Northeast Ohio. She moved here as a teenager and enrolled in the Cleveland Institute of Music’s young artist program, and she didn’t leave the area until last year, when she joined the faculty of the 
You might expect that someone who’s a leader in their field was hooked from their initial encounter with it. Colin Lawson, described as 
This weekend gives concertgoers the chance to hear one guitarist from France who will be making his Cleveland debut, and another from Bay Village who in the past several years, as he told me over the phone, has been re-solidifying his identity as a Clevelander.
BlueWater Chamber Orchestra entered an exciting second era with the final concert of its 9th season on Saturday, May 4 at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights. Last month, conductor Daniel Meyer was named the orchestra’s artistic director, so now this important Northeast Ohio institution can chart a course into its second decade.
The decision to pursue the path of a professional musician came late for 
Over the past ten years the music of Jean-Féry Rebel has become familiar to 
“To live with this piece is to imagine a genius at the absolute height of his powers, yet virtually isolated from the world,” Cuarteto Casals violist Jonathan Brown said. “Beethoven was deaf in his disorderly room in Vienna where few people wanted to be associated with him. There he was struggling with his artistic demons. He wrote, and rewrote this quartet extensively, but he was working with his own criteria — there’s no other model, there’s no other work like this.” 
Variety can be the salvation or the undoing of a concert. A century and a half ago, most Americans would have heard what we now think of as the bedrock repertoire of the classical tradition in bewildering shows that often included comedy and drama as well. In recent decades, however, even diversity of historical period and musical style — let alone type of entertainment — has become optional, rather than expected. In a recent concert led by Daniel Meyer, BlueWater Chamber Orchestra successfully embraced stylistic pluralism, mixing new music and a rarity with standard audience favorites.
Armed with both a new first violinist, Areta Zhulla, and a new piece by Lembit Beecher, the Juilliard String Quartet will head to Plymouth Church