by Daniel Hathaway
Cleveland has become something of a hotbed for chamber music, with a winter season sponsored by the Cleveland Chamber Music Society, two summer series curated by ChamberFest Cleveland and Encore Chamber Music Institute, and an orchestra famous for playing with the precision and nuance of a 90-piece string quartet.
What has been missing is vocal chamber music — the one-singer-on-a-part format that reaches such a high level in such European ensembles as Voces8 and the King’s Singers. But now enter the Cleveland Consort of Voices, a new group organized and led by Oberlin musicology professor and Collegium conductor Steven Plank. [Read more…]
Forming a small vocal ensemble was something that Steven Plank had wanted to do for a long time. And when a surge in COVID cases forced him to reduce the number of singers in the choir at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, the opportunity arose. “We began doing the liturgy with just eight singers,” Plank said during a telephone conversation. “We were having such a good time that one Thursday evening I asked if they would like to do some concerts. And they all said yes.”
A great thing about chamber music is that it can be performed in any space that can accommodate a small number of musicians while leaving room to comfortably seat an audience. Since 2005, Heights Arts’ Close Encounters Chamber Music Series has found its niche in Cleveland’s vibrant chamber music scene by presenting concerts in intriguing and inviting spaces around the city. The series, coordinated by artistic director Isabel Trautwein, presented its first concert of the season on Sunday afternoon, November 22 at Dunham Tavern Museum in Midtown. 
On Sunday, October 26, The Musical Theater Project will present its dynamic new production, Mary Martin: America’s Sweetheart, in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music, in cooperation with CIM. Hosted by Bill Rudman under the musical direction of Nancy Maier, two identical programs at 2:00 and 7:00 pm will feature Ursula Cataan and Sandra Simon, each performing as Mary Martin during different stages of her career. (Note: the 2 pm performance is already sold out.) 
“The Bach Legacy” is the overriding theme in this summer’s Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute, and artistic director Kenneth Slowik decided to devote the second faculty concert on Friday, June 21 to a partial replication of an historic benefit concert given in Hamburg in April of 1786 by Johann Sebastian Bach’s most celebrated son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. (Program pictured here.)