by Daniel Hathaway
Quire Cleveland’s live recording from its May 2016 concerts featuring the sacred music of William Byrd is distinguished by any measure, but it also comes with more than a little nostalgia. This is one of the last recordings to be engineered under the sure hand of Tom Knab, who died in August. The album is dedicated to his memory. (Read an appreciation here.) [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Most choirs do well to take on one or two non-English languages in their programs. Quire Cleveland handily dispatched Christmas music from five centuries in Latin, Finnish, Latvian, Spanish (in several of its dialects), Wendat, Abenaki, Mohawk, and Afro-Portuguese in the eighth edition of “Carols for Quire” at Trinity Cathedral on Friday evening, December 2. Whatever the language, they sounded terrific. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Fans of Quire Cleveland’s annual Carols for Quire performances know that the ensemble’s singers are adept at wrapping their tongues around any number of languages in the same program. But as co-founder and artistic director Ross W. Duffin notes, the forthcoming performances may well set a new record. In three performances next weekend, his nineteen professional vocalists will treat their audiences to carols in Finnish, Abenaki, Afro-Portuguese, Mohawk, and Wendat, as well as in English, Latin, and Spanish.
“I’m always challenging the singers, but I think they were looking askance at me this time just because of all the special requirements,” Duffin said in a telephone conversation from his office at the music department of Case Western Reserve University.
One of those special requirements centers around the longest work on this year’s program, an Ensalada or musical salad by the 16th century composer Bartolomé Carceres. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Think of the early Baroque Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi, and images of Venice and its highly photogenic Piazza San Marco inevitably pop up — especially if the work in question is the Vespers of 1610. But he didn’t write his most famous piece for the Most Serene Republic. Monteverdi composed the Vespers, along with the opera Orfeo, his first five books of madrigals, and the Missa in illo tempore when he was in the employ of the Gonzaga family in Mantua, until the family’s declining economic situation made him a free agent in 1612.
Ross W. Duffin and his twenty professional singers of Quire Cleveland will explore Monteverdi’s Mantuan legacy in a free concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in downtown Cleveland on Friday evening, September 30 at 7:30 pm. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Constructing a concert devoted to the work of a single composer is like curating a gallery retrospective. On Sunday afternoon, May 22 at Historic St. Peter Church in downtown Cleveland, Ross W. Duffin and the 24 professional singers of Quire Cleveland treated a large audience to a well-chosen selection from the sacred music of “England’s Phoenix,” William Byrd, a composer who led a charmed life. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
This weekend, Ross W. Duffin will lead the professional singers of Quire Cleveland in two concerts celebrating the sacred music of English Renaissance composer William Byrd (1540-1623). The programs — on Saturday, May 21 at 7:30 pm in St. Bernard’s Church in Akron, and on Sunday, May 22 at 4:00 pm in Historic St. Peter’s Church in downtown Cleveland — will include a selection of Byrd’s English and Latin motets interspersed between movements of his Mass for Five Voices.
Byrd has always puzzled historians. Considered by many to be the greatest English composer of his era, he skillfully navigated the troubled religious currents of the time, remaining staunchly Roman Catholic during the several waves of the Protestant Reformation. Others lost their heads while Byrd survived — and thrived, first as organist of Lincoln Cathedral, then as a member of the Chapel Royal, where he enjoyed close connections with the Protestant courts of both Elizabeth I and James I while clandestinely writing Latin music for private households and chapels. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Now that winter has finally arrived and the excitement of the holidays has subsided, it’s tempting to burrow in and hibernate for a few weeks. But there’s plenty to do during January. Let’s have a look at some of what the month has to offer, beginning with orchestra concerts.
Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra are back at work early in the month with a round of all-Beethoven concerts from January 7-9 featuring pianist Yefim Bronfman (left) in the third piano concerto, and Bronfman and the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus in the Choral Fantasy. Soprano Barbara Hannigan will be featured in the U.S. premiere of Hans Abrahamsen’s let me tell you on January 14 and 15, sharing a program with Dmitri Shostakovich’s fourth symphony. On Saturday the 16th, Robert Porco will lead the annual Martin Luther King Jr Celebration, followed by a Severance Hall Open House on Monday the 17th from 12 Noon to 5 pm. Community ensemble performances will be bracketed by the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Chorus (12:30) and Youth Orchestra (4:15). The Cleveland Philharmonic will host its own MLK Observance at Tri-C Metro Auditorium on Sunday, January 17. [Read more…]
The Power of Love: Arias from Handel Operas. Amanda Forsythe, soprano, with Apollo’s Fire, Jeannette Sorrell, conducting (Avie).
Start with the second track of this excellent survey of George Frideric Handel’s expertise in writing for the soprano voice and its realization through the supple vocal chords of Amanda Forsythe. “Geloso tormento,” from Almira, the 19-year-old composer’s first opera, shows how ravishingly Handel and Forsythe can depict both rage and lament in the course of a single aria. (The soprano stunned audiences with such vocal prowess in the role of Edilia in the same opera during the 2013 Boston Early Music Festival.)
Arias from nine operas are featured in this collection, plus four wildly contrasting orchestral movements from Terpsichore (Il Pastor fido) — a graceful chaconne, a skittering entrée depicting jealousy, a delightful air, and a ballo for recorders and violins. Those interludes give Forsythe a virtual breather between her exhausting representations of the many emotions of a soprano in love (now she’s like a butterfly hovering around a lamp, now she’s a calculating temptress, now she’s a cruel traitor, finally, she’s a shattered ship reaching safe harbor). [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
When you’ve presented a Christmas program every December for seven years, it could become a routine event — your institutional Nutcracker. Happily, Quire Cleveland has taken its “Carols for Quire” program in new directions and infused it with new twists every year. The 21-voice professional ensemble’s concert on Sunday afternoon in the chaste, Gothic space of St. Peter’s Church in downtown Cleveland just might have been its best edition yet. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
When Anglophones sing in a choir, they expect to encounter Latin, and perhaps some German. Spanish and French not so much, and rarely Finnish or Latvian. The 21 members of Quire Cleveland will find all those languages tripping off their collective tongues this weekend as the ensemble presents the seventh edition of “Carols for Quire from the Old & New Worlds.” Quire will sing three identical programs under the direction of founder Ross W. Duffin on Friday, December 4 at Trinity Cathedral and on Saturday and Sunday, December 5 and 6 at Historic St. Peter’s Church, all in downtown Cleveland (tickets available online.)
“This program harks back to two years ago when we paired classical and modern carols with related texts,” Duffin said in a telephone conversation from his office at CWRU. “This time there are larger groups of related pieces.” [Read more…]