By Mike Telin
Now that the new calendar year is upon us, it’s interesting to see which of the area’s classical music organizations are going to be leading the way into 2025.
When it comes to competitions, that honor goes to Oberlin’s Thomas and Evon Cooper International Competition, which alternates annually between piano and violin.
Usually held in August, due to construction at the Conservatory this year’s violin competition needed to find an alternative time period. “We wanted the competition to happen so we moved it to January as a one-time thing,” competition director and jury chair Sibbi Bernhardsson said during a telephone conversation.
Since 2010 the Thomas and Evon Cooper International Competition has brought talented young violinists and pianists to the campus of Oberlin College and Conservatory every summer.
ENCORE Chamber Music held a musical tasting on Sunday afternoon, July 3rd at the Dodero Center for the Performing Arts. “Tales of Travel and Transformation” featured members of the Verona Quartet, artistic director Jinjoo Cho, and other faculty of the summer institute.
When the Oberlin Conservatory’s Richard Hawkins was asked to curate a concert for the Rocky River Chamber Music Society, he knew right away that it was an opportunity to program works that would include his Oberlin Conservatory faculty friends. “It’s always nice to present chamber music for winds and strings that people might not know,” the clarinetist said during a telephone conversation.
To open the academic calendar in recent years, Oberlin Conservatory violin professor Sibbi Bernhardsson has organized interdisciplinary festivals centered around intriguing themes. That continued earlier this month with “Music, Sports, and the Enduring Influence of Ancient Greece,” a topic that was examined through a variety of events, musical and otherwise, over the course of two days. I caught the tail-end of the festival via live stream: the fourth and final faculty recital in Warner Concert Hall on the evening of October 10.
The theme of ENCORE Chamber Music’s fourth season is “La Bohème: Art and Freedom,” mixing meanings of Bohemianism. It has brought together the 19th-century artistic movement that sought to break down conventions (think the characters from Puccini’s opera) with composers from Bohemia, of which Dvořák is the most famous. I attended three concerts where the overarching theme was successfully bent to include music from Mozart to living American composers.