by Daniel Hathaway
Everyone’s favorite season of the year has had tough going in Cleveland this time around, with temperatures lurching back and forth between the high 40s and the mid 80s. But Scott MacPherson and Cleveland Chamber Choir certainly nudged nature along at Rocky River Methodist Church on Saturday evening, May 13 with their attractive program, “No Time Like Spring.” The concert was to be repeated on Sunday afternoon at First Baptist in Shaker Heights. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
A critical mass of nearly 200 singers joined Christopher Wilkins, the Akron Symphony, and a first-rate quartet of soloists for a resounding performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s Elijah on Saturday evening, May 5 in E.J. Thomas Hall. Commissioned for the 1846 Birmingham Festival following the success of his earlier oratorio St. Paul, Mendelssohn’s concert-length work presents the life of the Hebrew prophet in several dramatic scenes.
by Daniel Hathaway
With its tuning challenges, tricky scherzo, and numerous transitions, Benjamin Britten’s Hymn to St. Cecilia is a ten-minute a cappella tour de force that tests the mettle of any choir that takes it on. In the second performance of their inaugural season, the 33 voices of Cleveland Chamber Choir more than rose to the occasion on Saturday evening, April 23 at First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights. In this and other British choral works, Scott MacPherson’s new professional ensemble validated the initial impression they made last November: this is a superb addition to Cleveland’s musical scene. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Accidental discoveries you make when you’re drawing up plans for a program sometimes send you off on a new tack. Scott MacPherson had long been contemplating a concert of British choral music for the second concert of the Cleveland Chamber Choir’s inaugural season and wanted something “on the vigorous, peppy side” to balance the “rich, sonorous” music he already had in mind.
“In Sweet Music Is Such Art: Celebrating British Choral Music” will take place on Saturday, April 23 at 7:30 pm in the sanctuary of First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights.
“We had performed Cecilia McDowall’s Aurea luce on our first concert in November”, MacPherson said, “so I wrote to her and asked if she had anything along those lines. She told me that her When Time is Broke: three Shakespeare songs had just been premiered by the BBC Singers in January and that the first movement might be just what what I was looking for.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
It was a fine evening for wind players at the Akron Symphony concert on Saturday, November 14 at E.J. Thomas Hall. Their distinguished playing lent many-hued colors to Johannes Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 in D, as well as to the second suite from Albert Roussel’s ballet Bacchus and Ariadne. And the program, under the direction of guest conductor JoAnn Falletta, featured the artistry of guest soloist Todd Levy in Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
On Saturday evening in Akron’s St. Bernard’s Church, the Summit Choral Society gave the second of three Christmas Candlelight Concerts, to a full house, proving that a Christmas concert can offer both substantial and lighter fare and remain thoroughly engaging without resorting to the false allure of tinsel-pop. The two-hour-long program featured the adult Masterworks Chorale, as well as the Society’s youth ensembles — the Touring Choir, Concert Choir and 2014 Alumni Choir — in a dozen selections, many of them written in the last decade or so. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
On Saturday, October 25 at 7:30 pm in the University of Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall, Frank Jacobs will conduct the Masterworks Chorale of the Summit Choral Society in Johannes Brahms’s German Requiem. The performance marks twenty-five years to the day since the chorus sang that work on its first concert.
“It seems like yesterday. Twenty-five years ago, we were just an upstart organization with no money,” Jacobs recalled in a telephone conversation. “We did the concert at Cuyahoga Falls High School in English with Brahms’s original accompaniment of two pianos — we threw in harp and timpani for extra color. Now, 25 years later on the same date, we’re doing it with full orchestra and in the way that it needs to be heard, in German. The music itself is so moving and powerful. It’s a universal statement of what we all face in this human condition — death.” [Read more…]