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Quire Cleveland: creating an entire program of “Our Fathers”

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by Daniel Hathaway

Well-known for crafting interesting programs, Quire Cleveland’s artistic director Jay White has done that once again for the 19-voice professional ensemble’s forthcoming concerts in Cleveland, Chesterland, and Rocky River from April 21-23.

“Pater Noster” will feature seventeen settings of Christianity’s most famous prayer in six languages by known and anonymous composers dating from the last 400 years.

The Lord’s Prayer is the supplication that Jesus taught his disciples when they asked him how they should pray to God the Father. His answer is preserved in slightly different versions in two of the Gospels: Matthew 6:9–13 and Luke 11:1–4.

To learn more, I reached Jay White by telephone in his studio at Kent State University, where he had just celebrated the first balmy breezes of spring by opening all the windows. [Read more…]

Quire Cleveland — Carols for Quire XII: Angels and Shepherds

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by Mike Telin

For the past eleven years, Quire Cleveland’s Carols for Quire concerts have become a holiday tradition. Over the years, the program — which began with pairing old and new carols — has explored numerous facets of the festive songs that are sung around the world during the Christmas season.

“Carols for Quire VI” featured French Noëls while “Carols VIII” presented a multitude of languages including Finnish, Abenaki, Afro-Portuguese, Mohawk, and Wendat, as well as English, Latin, and Spanish. The ninth edition was titled “Carols of Yore,” and the tenth highlighted the “O Antiphons.” This year the program will examine the Christmas story from the point of view of the angels and shepherds.

On Thursday, December 1 at 7:30 pm at Our Lady of Peace Church in Cleveland, Jay White will conduct the ensemble in “Carols for Quire XII: Angels and Shepherds.” The program will be repeated on December 2 at 8:00 pm at St. John Cantius Church in Tremont, and on December 3 at 8:00 pm at St. Paschal Baylon Church in Highland Heights. The concerts are free. Click here to view the program booklet.

“Last year we focused on Mary,” White said during a telephone conversation. “We haven’t left Joseph out of the story — he’s been there every so often. But when I was looking at possible topics for this year, I started thinking about who received the message” — the news of the birth of Jesus — “after Mary had figured it out and she and Joseph went to Bethlehem. And it was the shepherds who received it from the angels. I was also thinking of how amazing it must have been for the shepherds to have witnessed this celestial event, with the angels telling them it was happening and they should go see it.” [Read more…]

Quire Cleveland: “Resonant Glory” at St. John’s Cathedral (May 15)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Of the three venues that Quire Cleveland’s artistic director Jay White chose for the ensemble’s “Music for Grand Spaces” trilogy, none fits the description quite so aptly as the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in downtown Cleveland. It was there that Quire opened its series of programs designed for churches with a resonant acoustic on Friday, May 13 with a splendid selection of pieces.

You wouldn’t expect that acoustic from a glance at the nave, which is wide and long, but not especially lofty. But when I guest conducted a local amateur choir and professional orchestra in Beethoven’s Mass in C there a few years back, during the first rehearsal we released the final chord of the “Gloria” and listened in astonishment for the next several seconds. The sound continued to roll down the space like the big wave that surfers dream about. [Read more…]

Quire Cleveland— Resonant Glory: Music for Grand Spaces 

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by Mike Telin

Have you ever walked into a Cathedral and heard music coming from some place and you needed to find out where? While your ear told you to proceed down the left side of the building, as you got closer you discovered that the sound was actually originating from the other side of the space.

While scientifically this phenomenon is known as the acoustic, “more importantly it’s the concept of having the space become the nth member of the ensemble,” artistic director Jay White said during a recent telephone conversation. =

On Friday, May 13 at 7:30 pm in the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, White will lead Quire Cleveland in “Resonant Glory: Music for Grand Spaces.” The program, which celebrates the union of music and architecture, will be repeated on Saturday at 8:00 pm at St. Noel Church in Willoughby, and on Sunday at 5:00 pm at St. Sebastian Church in Akron. The concerts are free.

White said that his inspiration for the program came while he was making a list of his favorite pieces for double choir. “I thought, wait a minute, why do we have double choir works to begin with?” Answering that question led White to alter his approach to making the list. [Read more…]

Quire Cleveland: Jay White talks about Demantius’ Passion music

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by Daniel Hathaway

When you’re looking for neglected music to program, it’s helpful to have friends with wide-ranging tastes who are cleaning out overflowing collections of recordings. That’s how Quire Cleveland artistic director Jay White stumbled across a major work by the 17th-century Bohemian composer Christoph Demantius.

“My spouse and I were visiting a friend who is an early musician in Texas,” White said in a recent telephone conversation. “He and his partner, who passed away recently, had collected hundreds of recordings during their 60 years together, and he was painstakingly going through them to see what he wanted to keep. The three of us were able to whittle it down quite a bit, but we had to look at every single recording, because there were some real treasures.

“I looked at this one recording and said, ‘Wait a minute. A St. John Passion I’ve never heard of before?’ About a month later, I found the score and decided that Quire needed to perform it.”

Perform it they will, at free concerts in three historic Catholic churches whose parishes were created in the last years of the 19th century by immigrants from Eastern Europe: St. John Cantius, established by Poles (Friday, March 4), St. Vitus, founded by Slovenians (Saturday, March 5), and St. Elizabeth of Hungary, organized by Hungarians (Sunday, March 6). [Read more…]

Quire Cleveland in “Mary’s Song” at St. Ignatius of Antioch (Dec. 4)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Emerging from a dispiriting silence of twenty months, Quire Cleveland raised its eighteen voices in bright music written in honor of the Virgin Mary on Saturday evening, December 4. The third and last performance of its program “Mary’s Song” took place in the impressive, marble-columned nave and resonant acoustic of St. Ignatius of Antioch Church on Cleveland’s West Side.

“Mary’s Song” refers to the Magnificat (“My soul doth magnify the Lord”), sung by the soon-to-be mother of Jesus in response to the message the angel Gabriel delivered to her in the Gospel according to Luke. The text has been set countless times by composers in all eras, largely because the Magnificat is one of the invariable texts in the daily service of Vespers, as well as its Anglican relative, Choral Evensong. [Read more…]

Quire Cleveland: Jay White talks about returning to live singing

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by Daniel Hathaway

Quire Cleveland will resume live concerts this weekend, with three performances of the 11th edition of its annual Carols for Quire scheduled for December 2, 3, and 4 in great ecclesiastical spaces around the city.

I reached conductor Jay White by phone in his studio at Kent State University and began by asking him what was involved in restarting a choral machine that’s been silent for two seasons.

“It’s been interesting,” he said. “As you can imagine, many of the singers, unless they had any kind of a church job over the course of the pandemic — when they were recording something and sending it in — there’s been very little if any ensemble work at all, or it’s been one singer on a part. Most of the members of the ensemble, myself included, haven’t had much opportunity to sing in the past 20-some-odd months.

“That said, what has been working well is that the enthusiasm and excitement for wanting to do this work is infectious to the point where people are really stepping up,” he said. [Read more…]

A guide to staying home and streaming videos of concerts

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Live streams, re-broadcasts, digital archives, and YouTube channels — here are some videos of performances to keep you occupied during social distancing.

Beginning locally, some performances are still taking place via live stream, without an audience. On Thursday, March 19 at 4:30 pm, Oberlin Conservatory will stream a faculty and guest concert from Stull Recital Hall. Flutist Alexa Still, cellist Mihai Tetel, and pianist Evan Hines come together in Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Assobio a Játo (“Jet Whistle”) and Valerie Coleman’s 2019 Amazonia.

Piano Cleveland, the presenting organization of the Cleveland International Piano Competition, has announced a new weekly series called The Quarantine Concerts, to be streamed every Thursday at 7:30 pm from Steinway Piano Gallery Cleveland. The first concert, on March 19, will feature pianist Yaron Kohlberg as well as the piano duo of Natsumi Shibagaki and Irwin Shung. Online audience members have the opportunity to offer their support directly to these artists by donating to Piano Cleveland’s Musicians’ Fund.

[Read more…]

Quire Cleveland at St. John Cantius (Feb. 28)

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by Peter Feher

Quire Cleveland doesn’t box itself into one time period. True, the early music vocal ensemble sang a program of exclusively 16th-century music on February 28 at Cleveland’s St. John Cantius Church (the first of two performances). But the music’s inspiration was older, even while the performers’ sensibility was thoroughly new.

[Read more…]

Quire Cleveland to sing Lamentation settings in two local churches founded by immigrants

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by Daniel Hathaway

Jay White will lead Quire Cleveland in two performances of “Journey Home: Finding Unity after Loss,” a program of music based on the theme of exile, on Friday, February 28 at 7:30 pm at St. John Cantius Church, and Saturday, February 29 at 5:30 pm at St. Vitus Church. The performances are free, but freewill offerings will be received (suggested donation, $25) and each will be followed by a reception.

The concerts will be bookended by settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah by 16th-century English composers Thomas Tallis and Robert Whyte that mourn the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem under Nebuchadnezzar in the late 6th century BCE.

In his program notes, White writes, “Those who were important to the king were taken into captivity in Babylon. The remainder either fled for their lives or were killed. Those fortunate to escape became refugees in their own land, feeling forsaken by God.”

In a recent telephone conversation, White noted that Quire’s program grew out of his interest in engaging with Cleveland’s immigrant communities. “The idea of programming music about leaving home and moving miles away was a way of tying into those immigrants.” [Read more…]

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