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Michelle Cann at Severance: smiles, laughter, and learning something new (May 19)

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by Stephanie Manning

What’s the best part about attending a dinner party? Maybe it’s the friendly conversation, the relaxed atmosphere, or a lovely musical performance. Michelle Cann’s recital had all three.

On May 19, the pianist welcomed the audience into her (temporary) home at Severance Music Center, entertaining with both elegant musicianship and cheerful dialogue. The warm lighting, low ceiling, and plush seats of Reinberger Chamber Hall helped make it feel as if the packed crowd was listening from inside Cann’s living room.

Presented in Cleveland as part of the 2025 Mandel Opera and Humanities Festival, “The Women of Chicago’s Black Renaissance” is a program as much about education as it is about performance. [Read more…]

Gregorio Benítez takes flight in Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux (Oct. 11)

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by Peter Feher

Some of the best birdwatching in Cleveland this season has, unusually, been at Severance Music Center.

The songs of dozens of different species could be heard in Reinberger Chamber Hall on Friday evening, October 11, when Spanish pianist Gregorio Benítez presented selections from Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux (Catalog of birds).

This just happened to be the same weekend that The Cleveland Orchestra, upstairs in Mandel Concert Hall, was performing two avian-inspired works: Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Cello Concerto, which ends with an echoing seagull effect, and Jean Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony, whose finale is meant to depict swans in flight.

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Marc-André Hamelin at Severance (Nov. 19)

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by Peter Feher

If Marc-André Hamelin had never studied music, he might have become a great novelist instead. At least, that was the impression that the expert Canadian pianist gave during an engrossing solo performance in Reinberger Chamber Hall on November 19.

Hamelin’s program, perhaps the most ambitious entry in The Cleveland Orchestra’s recital series at Severance Music Center this season, offered a master class in sensitive storytelling.

And the narrative brilliance had everything to do with the alchemical mix of performer and repertoire. On Sunday, Hamelin tackled three multi-movement works whose composers shared a couple of important inclinations. They all were good, but not great pianists themselves, and they all wrote programmatic music, or pieces that tell a story. [Read more…]

Víkingur Ólafsson brings
“Mozart & Contemporaries” to Severance (Nov. 30)

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by Peter Feher

Mozart got top billing on pianist Víkingur Ólafsson’s November 30 recital in Reinberger Chamber Hall, but another composer should have had the honor. Haydn’s musical sensibility was the key to understanding the bold claims and idiosyncratic style of the evening’s program, “Mozart and Contemporaries.”

Happily, both composers — along with several lesser-known figures of the Classical era — featured in Ólafsson’s performance, the first in a series of high-profile piano recitals that The Cleveland Orchestra will present at Severance Music Center this season. It was an up-close look at one of classical music’s more thought-provoking soloists in recent years — and at one of his signature projects.

[Read more…]

The Cleveland Orchestra: Honoring Black Composers

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by Jarrett Hoffman

It was disappointing in January when The Cleveland Orchestra’s Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Concert had to be postponed due to a surge in COVID. But there’s good news, and it’s two-fold.

First, time has passed, and the rescheduled date is not far away: early next month. Second, the concert’s companion program, “Honoring Black Composers,” has found a new setting of its own, or rather three new settings. A very good thing, because the first date, an hour-long program on May 24 at Karamu House, has already sold out.

That still leaves you with two options. On Friday, May 27 at 6:30 pm and Saturday, May 28 at 7:00 pm, the program will move to Reinberger Chamber Hall at Severance, albeit in a slightly different form: a half-hour concert of music by Brian R. Nabors, Dolores White, George Walker, Melika Fitzhugh, H. Leslie Adams, and William Grant Still.

[Read more…]

Padmore and Uchida bring the emotional essence of Lieder to Reinberger Hall (Mar. 6)

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by Stephanie Manning

For Mark Padmore and Mitsuko Uchida, the idea to perform a recital together came about naturally — starting with making music together simply for the pleasure of it. That natural transition from practice to performance was evident on March 6, when The Cleveland Orchestra presented the tenor and pianist in an afternoon of earnest music making.

Divided evenly into two halves, the first part of the program was dedicated to Beethoven — who composed quite the collection of Lieder in addition to his symphonic works. In the opening “An die Hoffnung,” the up-close acoustic of Reinberger Chamber Hall allowed for every nuance to shine through, with Padmore’s precise diction imbuing each stanza with a different feeling. And even without words of her own, Uchida remained fully engrossed in the emotions and phrasing of the music, often mouthing along with the German lyrics in the expressive “Resignation” and the stirring “Abendlied unterm gestirnten Himmel.”

[Read more…]

CIPC Concert Series culminates in Wosner-Weiss piano duo (Sept. 14)

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by Daniel Hathaway

In the last event in its concert series before it turns its attention to the 2020 contest, the Cleveland International Piano Competition presented duo-pianists Shai Wosner and Orion Weiss in a viscerally thrilling and intellectually stimulating recital on Saturday evening, September 14 in Reinberger Chamber Hall at Severance Hall.

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Simon Keenlyside two ways at Severance Hall (May 19 & 23)

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by Daniel Hathaway

British baritone Simon Keenlyside made the most of his recent visit to Severance Hall, offering an impassioned odyssey through Schubert’s Winterreise with pianist Natalia Katyukova on May 19 in Reinberger Chamber Hall, and bringing revelatory performances of eight Sibelius songs to his guest appearance with Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra on Thursday evening, May 23.

[Read more…]

COYO: a conversation with concerto competition co-winner Célina Béthoux

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by Jarrett Hoffman

There are certain people in the world who amaze you with how deeply they feel about what they do. After my recent telephone conversation with fourteen-year-old violinist Célina Béthoux, I can say that she’s one of them.

A member of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra, Béthoux is also a co-winner of its 2018 concerto competition. That’s earned her a solo appearance in the Samuel Barber Concerto during the ensemble’s 8:00 pm concert this Friday, November 16 at Severance Hall, led by music director Vinay Parameswaran.

And it might be what Béthoux says, or maybe it’s something that comes across in her voice, but it’s clear that her interest in classical music isn’t at all obligatory, self-important, or resumé-stuffing. It’s just love.

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The End of Time: ChamberFest performers discuss Messiaen’s Quartet

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Drafted into the French army at the start of World War II, Olivier Messiaen soon found himself captured by the Germans and held at the prisoner-of-war camp known as Stalag VIII-A. There, a guard with a love of music provided the composer with the necessities of his craft — paper, pencils, erasers, and a quiet place to work — and he set about writing his Quatuor pour la fin du temps, which he and three fellow musician-prisoners would premiere in the camp’s Barrack 27.

You can’t overstate the contrast in time and place between that barrack at Stalag VIII-A in Görlitz, Germany, 1941, and Reinberger Chamber Hall at Severance Hall in Cleveland, Ohio, 2018. But perhaps the two settings will be linked by some small thread on Friday, June 29 at 7:30 pm, when Reinberger plays host to ChamberFest Cleveland’s concert titled “Behind Bars” — and four performers close out the evening by contending with those marks on paper that comprise Quartet for the End of Time.

Taking on that eight-movement work will be violinist Noah Bendix-Balgley, clarinetist Franklin Cohen, cellist Julie Albers, and pianist Roman Rabinovich. I reached the string players and pianist by phone and by email to talk about a few specific movements and how they plan to interpret the work as a whole. Selections from our separate conversations are presented here in a roundtable format.

[Read more…]

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