Early Music America has announced that Ross Duffin and Beverly Simmons are the recipients of the 2018 Howard Mayer Brown Award for lifetime achievement in the field of early music. [Read more…]
Countertenor Jay White appointed artistic director of Quire Cleveland
by Daniel Hathaway
The board of Quire Cleveland has announced that countertenor Jay White will succeed founder Ross W. Duffin as artistic director of the professional choir at the end of Quire’s tenth anniversary season in July 2018.
Duffin, who is Distinguished University Professor of Musicology at Case Western Reserve University, and Beverly Simmons, Quire’s executive director, will move on “to pursue new artistic and familial adventures in California and Washington, D.C.,” according to a December 19 press release.
White, who joined Quire Cleveland in 2012, serves as professor of voice at Kent State University, where he is also music director of Kent State Opera. He sang for eight seasons with Chanticleer, and during his more than 35-year career has performed with the Men and Boys Choir of Washington Cathedral, Grace Cathedral San Francisco, the Folger Consort, the Carmel Bach Festival, and Apollo’s Fire Singers. [Read more…]
“Carols for Quire IX” at Trinity (Dec. 15)
by Timothy Robson
The ninth annual edition of Quire Cleveland’s “Carols for Quire IX from the Old and New Worlds” offered a pleasing respite from both the British cathedral and collegiate chapel carol traditions so commonly emulated in the United States, as well as the popular symphonic Christmas concerts. At first glance, the program seemed quite austere: at least in the U.S., names like Lully, Rameau, and DuFay are not normally associated with Christmas music. I attended the first of three performances, on Friday, December 15 at Trinity Cathedral in downtown Cleveland. [Read more…]
CD ReviewQuire Cleveland — Richard Davy: St. Matthew Passion (QC 107)
by Daniel Hathaway
Recorded live at performances in April of 2017, Ross W. Duffin’s reconstruction of Richard Davy’s St. Matthew Passion was three decades in the making. The original work, the earliest polyphonic passion setting by a known composer, is uniquely but only partially preserved at the end of the early 15th-century Eton Choirbook. Duffin supplied music for eleven missing movements at the beginning of the work, as well as the missing voices for the next dozen movements for which only alto and bass parts survive. [Read more…]
Quire Cleveland in “Hear My Voyce” at St. John’s Cathedral (October 6)
by Daniel Hathaway
Quire Cleveland began its tenth anniversary season with concerts in Painesville and Cleveland devoted to liturgical music by the 17th-century British composer Henry Purcell. On Friday, October 6 at St. John’s Cathedral in downtown Cleveland, Quire was in fine “voyce” as its 21 singers under the direction of founder Ross W. Duffin sang repertoire Purcell composed for the choir of the Chapel Royal between his appointment in 1682 and his untimely death at the age of 35 in 1695. [Read more…]
Quire Cleveland sing Davy’s St. Matthew Passion (April 9)
by Timothy Robson
This past weekend, as the culmination of a three-decade labor of love, Cleveland scholar, professor, and conductor Ross Duffin conducted his reconstruction of 15th-century English composer Richard Davy’s St. Matthew Passion. Performances were given in Akron and Cleveland by Duffin’s own Quire Cleveland with Jeffrey Strauss and Owen McIntosh as the soloists. I heard the Sunday afternoon performance on April 9 at Historic St. Peter’s Church in downtown Cleveland. [Read more…]
Quire Cleveland to sing reconstruction of Richard Davy’s Matthew Passion
by Daniel Hathaway
Here’s a librarian’s nightmare: knowing what you should find between its covers, you sit down to examine one of the great sources of English pre-Reformation music, only to discover that one-third of its contents no longer exists.
It’s still a mystery why so many pages of the late 15th-century Eton Choirbook that contains Richard Davy’s Matthew Passion went missing. But this weekend, Northeast Ohio audiences can hear Quire Cleveland sing the complete work in a restoration by its artistic director, Ross W. Duffin.
Performances will take place on Saturday, April 8 at 7:30 pm at St. Bernard’s Church in Akron, and twice on Palm Sunday, April 9 — at 3:00 pm at Historic St. Peter’s in downtown Cleveland, and at 7:00 pm (note corrected time) at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights. [Read more…]
CD Review
Quire Cleveland — England’s Phoenix: William Byrd, Divine Music for Choir
by Daniel Hathaway
Quire Cleveland’s live recording from its May 2016 concerts featuring the sacred music of William Byrd is distinguished by any measure, but it also comes with more than a little nostalgia. This is one of the last recordings to be engineered under the sure hand of Tom Knab, who died in August. The album is dedicated to his memory. (Read an appreciation here.) [Read more…]
Quire Cleveland: “Carols for Quire VIII” at Trinity Cathedral (December 2)
by Daniel Hathaway
Most choirs do well to take on one or two non-English languages in their programs. Quire Cleveland handily dispatched Christmas music from five centuries in Latin, Finnish, Latvian, Spanish (in several of its dialects), Wendat, Abenaki, Mohawk, and Afro-Portuguese in the eighth edition of “Carols for Quire” at Trinity Cathedral on Friday evening, December 2. Whatever the language, they sounded terrific. [Read more…]
Quire Cleveland’s “Carols for Quire VIII” to feature a multitude of languages
by Daniel Hathaway
Fans of Quire Cleveland’s annual Carols for Quire performances know that the ensemble’s singers are adept at wrapping their tongues around any number of languages in the same program. But as co-founder and artistic director Ross W. Duffin notes, the forthcoming performances may well set a new record. In three performances next weekend, his nineteen professional vocalists will treat their audiences to carols in Finnish, Abenaki, Afro-Portuguese, Mohawk, and Wendat, as well as in English, Latin, and Spanish.
“I’m always challenging the singers, but I think they were looking askance at me this time just because of all the special requirements,” Duffin said in a telephone conversation from his office at the music department of Case Western Reserve University.
One of those special requirements centers around the longest work on this year’s program, an Ensalada or musical salad by the 16th century composer Bartolomé Carceres. [Read more…]