by Daniel Hathaway
Think of the early Baroque Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi, and images of Venice and its highly photogenic Piazza San Marco inevitably pop up — especially if the work in question is the Vespers of 1610. But he didn’t write his most famous piece for the Most Serene Republic. Monteverdi composed the Vespers, along with the opera Orfeo, his first five books of madrigals, and the Missa in illo tempore when he was in the employ of the Gonzaga family in Mantua, until the family’s declining economic situation made him a free agent in 1612.
Ross W. Duffin and his twenty professional singers of Quire Cleveland will explore Monteverdi’s Mantuan legacy in a free concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in downtown Cleveland on Friday evening, September 30 at 7:30 pm. [Read more…]
Start with the second track of this excellent survey of George Frideric Handel’s expertise in writing for the soprano voice and its realization through the supple vocal chords of Amanda Forsythe. “Geloso tormento,” from Almira, the 19-year-old composer’s first opera, shows how ravishingly Handel and Forsythe can depict both rage and lament in the course of a single aria. (The soprano stunned audiences with such vocal prowess in the role of Edilia in the same opera during the 2013 Boston Early Music Festival.)
When you’ve presented a Christmas program every December for seven years, it could become a routine event — your institutional Nutcracker. Happily, Quire Cleveland has taken its “Carols for Quire” program in new directions and infused it with new twists every year. The 21-voice professional ensemble’s concert on Sunday afternoon in the chaste, Gothic space of St. Peter’s Church in downtown Cleveland just might have been its best edition yet. 
When Anglophones sing in a choir, they expect to encounter Latin, and perhaps some German. Spanish and French not so much, and rarely Finnish or Latvian. The 21 members of Quire Cleveland will find all those languages tripping off their collective tongues this weekend as the ensemble presents the seventh edition of “Carols for Quire from the Old & New Worlds.” Quire will sing three identical programs under the direction of founder Ross W. Duffin on Friday, December 4 at Trinity Cathedral and on Saturday and Sunday, December 5 and 6 at Historic St. Peter’s Church, all in downtown Cleveland (tickets available 
Expanding its reach around the region, Ross W. Duffin and Quire Cleveland took their survey of rounds and canons to Painesville United Methodist Church on Sunday afternoon, November 8. “Sing You After Me: Wondrous Rounds & Canons” showed the variety of ways that melodies combined with themselves can produce larger pieces of music. The cleverly-devised program featured two dozen works ranging from the 13th to the 19th centuries in expert performances by Quire’s 19 professional singers. 
The singers of Quire Cleveland will spend next weekend’s concerts vocally chasing each other through eight hundred years’ worth of rounds and canons — those clever contrapuntal constructions that produce their own textures and harmonies by combining a tune with itself at different intervals of time, and sometimes at different pitches.
When the Jesuit church of Saint-Louis in Paris asked for music for their 1694 Christmas Eve mass, their music director Marc-Antoine Charpentier took inspiration from an unlikely source — popular Christmas music of the sort sung in farmhouses and country churches far from Paris. 
For its sixth annual round of Christmas concerts on December 19, 20 and 21, Quire Cleveland under the direction of its founder, Ross W. Duffin, will feature music from a single national tradition. French Christmas carols, or Noëls, have a long, folk-based history both in their country of origin and wherever French culture has been spread — including by Jesuit missionaries in what is now French-speaking Canada.