by Stephanie Manning
Just like most summer festivals, the schedule for the Kent Blossom Music Festival gets increasingly packed as it goes on. That all culminates with the fifth and final week, when the students rehearse side-by-side with The Cleveland Orchestra and perform in a concert at Blossom Music Center.
Helping send the students into that week was the last faculty concert of the summer, presented this year on July 15. The program, in Kent State University’s Ludwig Recital Hall, featured a group of Cleveland Orchestra string players with whom the students would soon be rehearsing.
Violinist Genevieve Smelser, violist Gareth Zehngut, cellist Dane Johansen, and bassist Charles Paul kicked things off with a modern piece: Fred Lerdahl’s Waltzes, written in 1981. Unsurprisingly, the quartet played together like the colleagues they are — paying attention to the broader needs of the group and not stepping on anyone’s toes.
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The Cleveland Orchestra told a familiar story, but with some unfamiliar faces, on July 9 at Blossom Music Center. The narrative sweep of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade was the highlight of an all-Romantic program that let several excellent young musicians take center stage.