by Timothy Robson
In what must have been among the most alluring Christmas music concerts of this season, period instrument ensemble Les Délices (Debra Nagy, director) and Quire Cleveland (Jay White, director) teamed up to present French Baroque music for Christmas, highlighted by the Messe de Minuit (“Midnight Mass”) by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704). [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Quire Cleveland began its eleventh season on November 2 with new artistic leadership. Under the direction of Jay White, the professional chorus marked the dual celebrations of All Saints Day and All Souls Day with a cleverly devised, masterfully sung program at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in downtown Cleveland. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
The professional singers of Quire Cleveland will end their 10th anniversary season this Saturday evening May 26 at 7:30 pm, with a free concert at St. John’s Cathedral featuring favorite pieces from the ensemble’s repertoire. The event will also mark the retirement of Quire’s founders, Ross W. Duffin and Beverly Simmons, who plan to take up residence both in California and Washington D.C. to be close to their children and grandchildren.
Duffin and Simmons have been catalysts for early music in Cleveland since Duffin’s arrival at Case Western Reserve University in 1978. Among other activities, they produced the Chapel, Court and Countryside concert series at CWRU, and Duffin hosted the National Public Radio program Micrologos: Exploring the World of Early Music. Under his tutelage, a constant stream of early music specialists has emerged from Case over the decades, and Duffin was named Distinguished University Professor last year.
Crowning their achievements, on May 23, Early Music America named Duffin and Simmons as the recipients of the 2018 Howard Mayer Brown Award for lifetime achievement in the field of early music. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
A long-overdue collaboration between two of the area’s eminent chamber ensembles yielded divine results when Les Délices and Quire Cleveland came together on Saturday, April 28 at Lakewood Congregational Church for “Let the Heavens Rejoice!” The program showcased celebratory French Baroque psalms for 22 voices, 14 instruments, and a quartet of vocal soloists, all under the direction of guest conductor Scott Metcalfe.
by Mike Telin
“In many ways we’re long overdue for a collaboration, and I wanted to do something that neither group could do on their own,” Les Délices founder and artistic director Debra Nagy said by telephone. Quire Cleveland co-founder and artistic director Ross Duffin agrees. “This is a great opportunity for us to perform repertoire that otherwise would be very difficult to pull off,” he said during a separate interview.
On Friday, April 27 at 7:30 pm at St. Noel Church in Willoughby Hills, the two groups will come together for the first performance of “Let the Heavens Rejoice,” a showcase of celebratory psalms for 22 voices and 14 instruments conducted by Scott Metcalfe and featuring tenor Owen McIntosh, baritone Jeffrey Strauss, and sopranos Elena Mullins and Sarah Coffman. The program will be repeated on Saturday, April 28 at 8:00 pm at Lakewood Congregational Church, and on Sunday, April 29 at 4:00 pm at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights. Tickets are available online. A free open rehearsal will be held on Wednesday, April 25 from 7:00 pm until 10:00 pm at Plymouth Church.
by Jarrett Hoffman
Quire Cleveland’s latest holiday program spans from the 13th century up to this very decade. But that’s not the only way “Old & New” describes the ensemble’s ninth annual “Carols for Quire” concert, to be performed from December 15-17 in Cleveland and Rocky River. In honor of its tenth anniversary season, the choir will reach into its bag for some favorite carols from seasons past, and will close by celebrating the addition this year of Hanukkah music.
“A lot of what Quire does is Christian music, there’s no question about it,” Ross Duffin, founder and artistic director, said in a recent conversation. “That’s a large part of choral singing generally, just because the church has been such an important and ubiquitous patron for composers and singers throughout history.”
Duffin credited Executive Director Beverly Simmons — who also sings alto in the ensemble and is married to Duffin — for the idea to expand this year’s program to Hanukkah. “Her background is Jewish, and she sings every year for the High Holy Days,” he said.
by Daniel Hathaway
The fall of 2008 — with its dismal financial meltdown — probably wasn’t the most propitious time to start a new professional choral ensemble, but nine years later, founders Ross Duffin and Beverly Simmons find themselves basking in the success of Quire Cleveland. The group will launch their tenth season this weekend with performances of music by Henry Purcell at Lake Erie College in Painesville (October 5) and St. John’s Cathedral in downtown Cleveland (October 6), followed by more concerts than Quire has ever scheduled before in a single season.
In addition to the Purcell programs in October, the Carols for Quire performances in December, an April collaboration with Debra Nagy’s French Baroque ensemble Les Délices, and a grand finale of favorites from the past decade in May, Quire will revive two past programs. “Sing You After Me: Wondrous Rounds and Catches” will be presented in Akron on October 29, and “The Land of Harmony: American Choral Gems” will be performed both at the Holland Theater in Bellefontaine (May 12) and at First Lutheran Church in Lorain (May 13). [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
“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.”Those are welcome sentiments as we Northeast Ohioans continue to slide across the ice, slog through the drifts and wade through muddy puddles, but where do they come from? They’re words from the Biblical Song of Songs as set by the Vatican composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina in the late 16th century. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Jones
Those of us who love choral music have much to be grateful for at the holidays. When else in the year do we hear so much wonderful ensemble singing?
For at least six hundred years, Christmas has been the occasion for composers to write for choirs. Last weekend, Ross Duffin and Quire Cleveland brought us a rich program of mostly unfamiliar treasures. I attended Sunday afternoon’s concert, for which Trinity Cathedral’s seats were mostly full, and during which the sun streamed through the stained-glass windows.
Quire, now in its fifth year, is an ensemble of twenty highly accomplished singers. Their sound was crystal clear, with crisp diction and uniform vowels. They sang with remarkable ease in five languages—Latin, German, French, Spanish, and English—sometimes at breakneck speed, as in Michael Praetorius’s delightful German/Latin “patter song,” Psallite, unigenito. [Read more…]
Ciaramella, the Renaissance Wind Band, is in town this week for a masterclass and concert at Case. We reached shawm player Adam Gilbert in Los Angeles to ask about his career as a specialist in early wind instruments.
Mike Telin: What I first want to know, you are a shawm player. How does one go about becoming a shawm player?
Adam Gilbert: That’s a really good question. It’s changed in the last bunch of years, I think. I came to shawm because I was a recorder player. Long story. I played recorder as a kid because I wanted a clarinet – to be like Benny Goodman. That was pretty geeky in the first place, but then after I started playing clarinet I realized I wanted to play recorder, and that’s how I got involved in early music. And that was because I actually saw a concert of my hometown college collegium.
MT: And where was that?
AG: Columbia, South Carolina. I was thirteen, and that was the moment that I discovered Renaissance dances and was really excited by it. I went to New York to go to music school in January of 1981 and when I was there I was told, it’s great, you can study recorder, but my teacher said, I’ve got a gig for you if you can play a little bagpipes and shawm. A lot of people of my generation got into it from playing a lot of Renaissance instruments but nowadays you see a lot more modern oboists or baroque oboists going back and playing the earlier instruments because they’ve already had that specialty of playing double reeds.