Ray Charles Archives - Cleveland Classical

DIARY: Thursday, April 6, 2023

April 6, 2023 by Jarrett Hoffman

by Jarrett Hoffman

IN THIS EDITION:

•Today: Cleveland Orchestra & Oberlin Orchestra

•Interesting reads: Rachmaninoff at 150

•Job listings: Senior Strategist (Arts, Culture, and Creative Economy) at City Hall, and Conservatory Event Publicity and Marketing Specialist at Oberlin

•Honors for a CWRU composer

•Almanac: Carlos Salzedo, André Previn, Igor Stravinsky, Ray Charles

HAPPENING TODAY:

At 7:30 pm at Severance Music Center, Rafael Payare (pictured) leads The Cleveland Orchestra in Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony and Bernstein’s Second (“The Age of Anxiety”), which features pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet as soloist. Tickets are available here.

And at that same hour at Finney Chapel, pianist Annie Qin, one of the winners of Oberlin Conservatory’s Concerto Competition, will play Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto with the Oberlin Orchestra, led by Raphael Jiménez. The program also includes Pierre Jalbert’s Passage and the world premiere of Michael Frazier’s la flor nopal. It’s free, and you can catch the stream here.

[Read more…]

Diary: Wednesday, April 6, 2022

April 6, 2022 by Daniel Hathaway

by Daniel Hathaway

ON TODAY:

Trinity Cathedral’s Brownbag Concert at high noon today will feature the Amethyst String Quartet – Mary Beth Ions and Carol Ruzicka, violins, Laura Kuennen-Poper, viola, an Kent Collier, cello in a “spring bouquet” of Classical favorites by Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Dvořák & Mozart. The hybrid concert will also be livestreamed and archived for later, on-demand viewing.

NEWS BRIEFS:

On Wednesday, the New York Times announced the appointment of Zachary Woolfe, a freelancer at the paper since 2011, as its classical music critic. In an article in Editor and Publisher, his Times colleagues Gilbert Cruz and Sia Michel wrote

Zack often engages with the major issues confronting the field — editing and writing pieces about the continuing obstacles female conductors face; the lack of diversity in major orchestras and on podiums; the ways classical music should change in an era of racial reckoning; and the field’s complex, fraught relationship with Asian and Asian American musicians. [Read more…]

Oberlin Opera stages a Cendrillon of professional quality (Nov. 10)

by Daniel Hathaway

Any regional opera company would be popping its buttons with pride to have produced such an impressive performance of Jules Massenet’s Cendrillion (Cinderella) as Oberlin Opera did in Hall Auditorium on Sunday afternoon, November 10.

Imaginative staging by Stephanie Havey, skillful pacing by conductor James Feddeck, beautiful set design and costuming by Laura Carlson-Tarantowski and Chris Flaharty, respectively, plus dramatic and — for the fairies — enchanting lighting by Jeremy K. Benjamin provided a supportive environment for splendid singing by the cast and brilliant playing by the Oberlin Chamber Orchestra.

Literally thousands of versions of the Cinderella tale exist in cultures around the globe, but many of the details of Massenet’s opera date back to Charles Perrault’s 1697 Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre, which adds what have now become essential elements to the tale: a young girl mistreated by her stepmother and stepsisters, who temporarily attracts the attention of a handsome prince at a royal ball and is eventually reunited with him to become a princess herself. [Read on…]

Seraph Brass dances through musical travels in Rocky River (Nov. 11)

by Stephanie Manning

Before Seraph Brass arrived in Ohio on November 11, the group’s fall touring season had taken them on the road to Missouri, Florida, New York, and even Peru. And at the Rocky River Chamber Music Society, they gave the audience a taste of the traveling life right from the first piece.

The “Prelude” from Edvard Greig’s Holberg Suite whisked listeners away to Norway, with a melody surely familiar to many. It was extra familiar to the brass quintet themselves, who launched into their opening number without sheet music. Playing memorized is part of the group’s trademark, and they smoothly alternated using music and no music throughout the evening. Either way, the wide-ranging program had those at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church spellbound.

Trumpet players Mary Elizabeth Bowden and Raquel Samayoa, horn player Layan Atieh, trombonist Lauren Casey-Clyde, and tuba player Robyn Black sounded equally comfortable in Romantic and contemporary repertoire, flipping between both with practiced ease. [Read on…]

Cleveland Orchestra’s Beethoven Concerto Cycle performance featured pairing of rising star and mentor (Nov. 15)

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

By Daniel Hathaway

CLEVELAND, Ohio — For the third program in The Cleveland Orchestra’s Beethoven Piano Concerto Cycle, the pairing of 20-year-old Korean pianist Yunchan Lim with his mentor Minsoo Sohn was an astute programming decision.

Well-established names on the concert circuit — Orion Weiss, Sir Stephen Hough, and Garrick Ohlsson — had already filled the empty solo spots for the composer’s Triple Concerto and solo concertos 2, 3, and 4. But the choice of the youngest pianist ever to win the Van Cliburn Competition to close out the Cleveland series packed Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center on Friday evening, November 15, with a near-capacity audience teeming with enthusiastic young people.

[Read on…]

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