Qin Ying Tan Archives - Cleveland Classical

Resonance Project presents: Songs of Nature

May 29, 2025 by Mike Telin

by Mike Telin

With the mission to make classical music accessible for first-time listeners by engaging with the audience in ways that extend beyond normal concert settings, The Resonance was the first classical music series on Seattle’s Eastside associated with a dedicated performance space, Resonance at Soma Towers.

Now based in Cleveland, The Resonance Project will continue that audience engagement on Sunday June 1 at 5:00 pm in Forest Hill Church with “Songs of Nature.” Baroque instrumentalists join West African drummer and vocalist Assane M’Baye for a program combining Vivaldi’s Violin Concerto in g, “Summer,” with Senegalese folk song. Also on the playlist is Davide Perez’s Sinfonía, “La tempestad del Mar,” and Jean-Féry Rebel’s Les Élémens. Pay-what-you-can, tickets are available online.

CityMusic Cleveland:
“Baroque Reflections” (Dec. 6)

December 14, 2020 by Jarrett Hoffman

by Jarrett Hoffman

On December 6, CityMusic Cleveland continued its season-long chamber series celebrating 100 years of the 19th amendment with “Baroque Reflections,” streamed live from the Maltz Performing Arts Center.

Here are the numbers: seven masked performers (including several period-instrumentalists and, notably for these times, a soprano) alternated through multiple configurations from duo to sextet as they explored music by eight composers of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Cleveland Museum of Art debuts Cenk Ergün’s Formare (May 8)

May 21, 2019 by Daniel Hathaway

by Daniel Hathaway

Cleveland audiences had their first live encounters with the music of Turkish-born composer Cenk Ergün in March of 2016, when the JACK Quartet premiered his commissioned works Sonare and Celare in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Ergün’s second appearance at the Museum earlier this month came in the form of a Cleveland Foundation Creative Fusion project. On Wednesday evening, May 8, the composer (seated on the pavement above) unveiled his hour-long Formare, turning the Ames Family Atrium into a vast sound installation. [Read more…]

Blossom Festival Band spotlights new and old favorites in ‘Salute to America’ (July 3)

By Stephanie Manning | Cleveland Classical

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CUYAHOGA FALLS, Ohio — For an outdoor concert on July 3, you could hardly have asked for a nicer summer evening — or a more expert conductor.

“How about this weather!” Michelle Rakers cheerfully boomed from the podium, greeting the audience who had packed the lawn and pavilion at Blossom Music Center.

Under Rakers’ direction, the Blossom Festival Band presented “Salute to America,” a memorable take on the annual Fourth of July program that favored some lesser-known selections without ignoring the classics.

Kent/Blossom Music Festival: WindSync with Jon Kimura Parker (June 25)

by Peter Feher

What do you call a concerto for six soloists? There’s no punchline here — just a delightful question posed by the first faculty concert of this year’s Kent Blossom Music Festival.

On Wednesday, June 25, in Ludwig Recital Hall, pianist Jon Kimura Parker and the five members of WindSync came together in a dynamic performance of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue that somewhat confounded categories.

“Piano sextet” is the usual name for this combination of instruments, and Gershwin’s composition could easily be subtitled “a concerto in one movement.” Yet neither designation would do justice to the spirit of this collaboration, in which every musician shone.

Errollyn Wallen braves the storm to share her Songbook at ChamberFest (June 18)

by Stephanie Manning

Errollyn Wallen is many things — composer, vocalist, and published author, just to name a few. But you could also say she’s a little bit of a psychic.

As the sky outside the floor-to-ceiling windows in Mixon Hall rapidly darkened with storm clouds on June 18, she launched into her song “Tree.” “I’m perplexed by rooted trees,” she crooned over pizzicattos from her accompanying string quartet, as lightning flashed and the real-life trees bent and twisted in the fierce wind.

Shortly after, ChamberFest co-artistic director Diana Cohen stopped the concert to make a rare request: that everyone in the room make their way down to the Cleveland Institute of Music basement to shelter from the storm. This unusual little detour was just one way the Wednesday evening program lived up to its name, “Mood Swings.”

ChamberFest Cleveland: “Sing Hallelujah!” (June 26)

by Daniel Hathaway

Sometimes the only thing that connects works in a concert is that they all appear on the same program page. That certainly characterized the mix of two Brahms songs, the premiere of a violin and piano work, a “repetitive music” classic for duo pianists, and a well-known piano trio that were featured in ChamberFest Cleveland’s sold out program “Sing Hallelujah!” on June 26 in Mixon Hall.

Johannes Brahms was partial to works that explore the lower, more mellow range of voices and instruments, as represented here by a pair of songs. Throughout both Gestillet Sehnsucht and Geistliches Wiegenlied, mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron, violist Kim Kashkashian, and pianist Amy Yang produced rich, expressive musical lines that projected beautifully into the hall. The “Sacred Crib Song” was especially endearing for quoting the well-known 14th-century Christmas song “Joseph lieber, Joseph mein,” a little joke referring to the work’s dedicatee, Joseph Joachim.

ChamberFest Cleveland: “Inventions of Memory (June 27)

by Kevin McLaughlin

ChamberFest Cleveland’s June 27 program, Inventions of Memory, offered three distinct meditations on musical remembrance. Presented in the tranquil setting of Harkness Chapel at Case Western Reserve University, eight of the festival’s standout artists illuminated works by Claude Debussy, Brett Dean, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

The program opened with Debussy’s Trois Chansons de Bilitis, a cycle of idealized and slightly prurient visions of antiquity. Mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron and pianist Roman Rabinovich offered a reading attuned to the music’s erotic undertow and bathed in Lydian and whole-tone harmonies.

In La Flûte de Pan, Rabinovich’s shimmering textures evoked the strumming of a lyre as Barron spun out the tale of a young girl’s intimate flute lesson. Her voice, pliant and sumptuous, moved easily between innocence and seduction. La Chevelure opened with a searching piano line that gave way to vocal reverie in Barron’s smokiest lower register. The cycle closed with Le Tombeau des naïades, a frostbitten elegy that replaced summer sensuality with wintry loss. Here, Barron’s voice turned inward, haunted and still, evoking a mythic world where nymphs and satyrs are long gone and innocence is left behind.

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