by Daniel Hathaway
Expanding its reach around the region, Ross W. Duffin and Quire Cleveland took their survey of rounds and canons to Painesville United Methodist Church on Sunday afternoon, November 8. “Sing You After Me: Wondrous Rounds & Canons” showed the variety of ways that melodies combined with themselves can produce larger pieces of music. The cleverly-devised program featured two dozen works ranging from the 13th to the 19th centuries in expert performances by Quire’s 19 professional singers. [Read more…]
The singers of Quire Cleveland will spend next weekend’s concerts vocally chasing each other through eight hundred years’ worth of rounds and canons — those clever contrapuntal constructions that produce their own textures and harmonies by combining a tune with itself at different intervals of time, and sometimes at different pitches.
A program of twenty-one settings of poetry from a single source might seem to be much of a muchness, but Quire Cleveland’s concert “The Song of Songs: Medieval to Modern” on Friday evening at St. John’s Cathedral proved to be thoroughly varied, endlessly fascinating, and sung with style and total commitment. 
“Rise up, my love, my fair one, my dove, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.”
When the Jesuit church of Saint-Louis in Paris asked for music for their 1694 Christmas Eve mass, their music director Marc-Antoine Charpentier took inspiration from an unlikely source — popular Christmas music of the sort sung in farmhouses and country churches far from Paris. 
For its sixth annual round of Christmas concerts on December 19, 20 and 21, Quire Cleveland under the direction of its founder, Ross W. Duffin, will feature music from a single national tradition. French Christmas carols, or Noëls, have a long, folk-based history both in their country of origin and wherever French culture has been spread — including by Jesuit missionaries in what is now French-speaking Canada.
On Friday evening, September 26 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights, Ross W. Duffin led the 22 professional singers of Quire Cleveland in a splendid survey of music by fifteenth and sixteenth-century composers who were born in the region we now call Belgium. 
Quire Cleveland will begin its 2014-2015 season under its founder and artistic director Ross W. Duffin with three performances of “The Flower of Flanders: Masterpieces of Renaissance Polyphony.” The concerts, which will concentrate on Franco-Flemish composers of the fifteenth and sixteenth century including Josquin, DuFay, Lassus and Ockeghem, will take place on Friday, September 26 at 7:30 pm at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights, on Saturday, September 27 at 7:30 pm at Mary Queen of Peace Church in Old Brooklyn, and on Sunday, September 28 at 4:00 pm at Historic St. Peter’s Church in downtown Cleveland. 
“I always knew that Bach was my favorite composer,” said CityMusic artistic director Avner Dorman, “but these days I think it’s Schubert. That’s how much I like this piece!”