by Daniel Hathaway
ON TODAY:
Five operas will receive their premieres in Northeast Ohio today, four of them composed by students at the Cleveland Institute of Music, the fifth marking the return of the Baroque ensemble Les Délices to live performances.
CIM’s Opera Theater and New Music Ensemble are up first tonight at 7 with “A Pocketful of Operas,” four short chamber works in Mixon Hall. A Storm We Call Progress by Emma Cardon features an original libretto by Kirsten Barker and Laurana Wheeler Roderer. Ruth by Daniel DiMarino, with libretto by the composer, is based on the eponymous story in the Hebrew bible. Arseniy Gusev’s The Blind has been adapted by Tikhon Antonov from the Maurice Maeterlinck play. And Yoav Sadeh’s Loneliness is based on a short story by Bruno Shulz.
At 7:30 this evening at the Akron Public Library, Les Délices will present the first of four performances of The White Cat, a Baroque opera pastiche with puppets and projected imagery based on Catherine D’Aulnoy’s 17th century feminist retelling of Puss in Boots. [Read more…]
No Exit’s summer offerings took a surprising, yet delightful turn on Friday, July 19 — to classic video game music. Rob Kovacs is from the generation of musicians who grew up playing video games on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in the late 80s. Last year, he began an ambitious project dedicated to arranging this music for solo piano. 88bit, Kovacs’s alter ego, now has about an hour’s worth of music from eight games in his memorized repertoire. He played with passion and panache on his electronic keyboard at the intermission-less concert in the cozy atmosphere of Appletree Books in Cleveland Heights.
When French cellist Gautier Capuçon appeared with The Cleveland Orchestra in April of 2015, he thrilled audiences with his performances of Saint-Saëns’