ClevelandClassical.com Header
Ad
Ad
Ad

Apollo’s Fire: “Fencing Match: Round One” (Aug. 9)

by

by Peter Feher

Before the sound of armed conflict came to dominate classical music in the 20th century — think of the skittering strings or machine-gun rattle of snare drums in Dmitri Shostakovich’s symphonies — combat didn’t always mean life or death.

Among the aristocracy of 18th-century Europe, the clinking of swords was a cultivated pastime, an art on par with, say, practicing an instrument.

And that’s the spirit with which Apollo’s Fire took the stage at Case Western Reserve University’s Harkness Chapel on Aug. 9 for “Fencing Match: Round One.” The ensemble plans to reprise the program on tour next year, with this summer’s series of concerts serving to sharpen the players’ skills.

Only a few moments during Saturday afternoon’s performance needed that extra bit of fine-tuning. Much of the repertoire was right in the sweet spot for Cleveland’s Baroque orchestra, centering on well-known classics as well as a couple of signature pieces from the Apollo’s Fire canon. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire — “Wassail! an Irish Appalachian Christmas” at CMA (Dec. 17)

by

by Daniel Hathaway

Apollo’s Fire’s 2023 Christmas Show, “Wassail! an Irish Appalachian Christmas,” was a reworking of its earlier crossover shows, “Christmas on Sugarloaf Mountain” and “Sugarloaf Mountain: an Appalachian Gathering” — attractive programs of folk music wrapped around the narrative of immigrants from the British Isles who brought their tunes with them to the New World. I saw the most recent version in its final performance in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Sunday, December 17.

The narrative, delivered by Derdriu Ring (also credited with theatrical direction) opens in an Irish village on Christmas Eve of 1849 during the Great Famine, then fast forwards to immigrants’ new homes in Appalachia on Christmas Day of the following year. A Wassailing segment captures the tradition of boozy, door-to-door caroling, followed by Winter by the Hearth, a celebration of coziness in the face of winter, then a segue into a telling of the Christmas story and preparations for the sea journey to America. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: Resilience, filmed at First Baptist, Oct. 20

by

by Daniel Hathaway

After the novel coronavirus brought live concerts to a standstill in March, Apollo’s Fire was among the first of Cleveland’s performing organizations to formulate a clear plan for 2020-2021. Cleveland’s Baroque orchestra proposed a hybrid subscription season that would permit in-person audiences at its various venues — at 15% of capacity — but alternatively, promised professionally-produced videos for viewing by subscribers about a week after the live performances.

The first such video, capturing the October 20 performance of Resilience at First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights, delivered handsomely on that promise. Erica Brenner’s sensitive videography and audio mixing preserved brilliant performances of music that illuminated two troubled periods in history: the plague of London in 1665, and the outbreaks of cholera and dysentery that dampened but failed to defeat the human spirit at the end of the American Civil War two centuries later. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire offers “Resilience” both In-Person and On-Demand

by

by Daniel Hathaway

After the novel coronavirus stopped the concert world in its tracks last March, Apollo’s Fire was among the first performing organizations to offer its constituents a choice about how to engage with the ensemble moving forward. On May 6, Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra announced a 2020-2021 season titled “A Pilgrimage of Hope” that allowed subscribers to choose between attending performances In-Person, or receiving a password to watch an exclusive concert video one week later.

“They expressed an overwhelming preference for edited videos,” Founder and Artistic Director Jeannette Sorrell said in a Zoom conversation last week. “That gives us the opportunity to tweak audio quality and change up camera angles. My media team and I will be extremely busy the week after each concert this year. It’s going to be an adventure.”

That adventure begins this week, when Apollo’s Fire presents five live performances of “Resilience” in Akron, Shaker Heights, and Bay Village from October 8-11. “Three of the concerts sold out immediately through subscriptions,” Sorrell said, but under Ohio guidelines, the Orchestra can sell only 15% of a venue’s capacity. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire in Vivaldi, Bach & Telemann (March 8)

by

by Timothy Robson

Despite the lurid title of last weekend’s Apollo’s Fire concerts — Three Duels and a Funeral — no blood was shed onstage at St. Paul’s Church in Cleveland Heights on Friday evening, March 8. The entertaining program concocted by director Jeannette Sorrell was a set of concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach and Antonio Vivaldi, plus a humorous solo cantata by Georg Philipp Telemann eulogizing a talented, but murdered, canary. Each of the works had its own imaginative character. [Read more…]

CD Review — Apollo’s Fire: Christmas on Sugarloaf Mountain

by

by Hannah Schoepe

December evokes fantasies of snug fires, family festivities, and winter wonderlands. Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra Apollo’s Fire provides a fitting soundtrack to these daydreams, in their new album Christmas on Sugarloaf Mountain. The tracks portray sounds of Christmas from the Irish hillsides to the Appalachian Mountains. Light a candle, and put your dancing shoes on, because this album traverses songs of community, faith, and history, as well as barn dances and Scottish reels.

[Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire in Mozart and Haydn at the Cleveland Museum of Art (Oct. 12)

by

by Timothy Robson

Jeannette Sorrell and her intrepid orchestra Apollo’s Fire performed Friday evening, October 12, in a somewhat unusual venue — for them — Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art, in somewhat unusual repertoire — again, for them — Mozart and Haydn. After listening for years to Apollo’s Fire in churches around Northeast Ohio, I had a bit of cognitive dissonance being in a real concert hall with relatively drier acoustics and seats rather than pews. Apollo’s Fire certainly performs in concert halls elsewhere in the United States and internationally, but it seemed on Friday that the group had not yet fully settled into the ambience of Gartner Auditorium. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: “Christmas on Sugarloaf Mountain” (Dec. 9)

by

by Daniel Hathaway

Sugarloaf1The five sold-out performances of “Christmas on Sugarloaf Mountain” this month attest to the popularity of Apollo’s Fire’s crossover shows. Heard on Saturday, December 9 at First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights, the holiday sequel to “Sugarloaf Mountain: an Appalachian Gathering” was just as alluring and infectious as its predecessor, even if some of its elements were still in the process of settling in. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: Vivaldi at Cain Park (July 29)

by

by Robert Rollin

AF-Olivier-JeannetteApollo’s Fire performed an outstanding early music concert at Cleveland Heights’ Cain Park Amphitheater last Saturday night, July 29. Outside the venue, wine tastings, accompanied vocals, and a lively barbershop quartet set a relaxed mood. The core of the program was the ensemble’s performance of Antonio Vivaldi’s complete The Four Seasons, with the four separate concerti spread throughout the evening. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire Artist Profile: violinist Susanna Perry Gilmore

by

by Daniel Hathaway

suzannegilmoreThis summer, Apollo’s Fire audiences have had the opportunity to hear violinist Susanna Perry Gilmore explore two dimensions of her musical persona that aren’t part of her day job as concertmaster of the Omaha Symphony Orchestra — and which Jeannette Sorrell and Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra are largely responsible for developing.

Perry Gilmore appeared as a folk fiddler in “Mediterranean Roots” during the month of June, then turned to Baroque violin as soloist in the “Summer” concerto of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. The Vivaldi program was presented twice earlier this month in Northeast Ohio before going on tour to Youngstown and the Tanglewood, Gretna, and Ravinia Festivals. The show returns for two final performances at Cain Park and Laurel School’s Butler Campus on July 29 and 30.

How did the violinist originally become involved with Apollo’s Fire? “It was a serendipitous meeting,” Perry Gilmore said in a telephone conversation, explaining that Sorrell had made a guest appearance with the Omaha Symphony in the spring of 2014 in an all-Vivaldi program. [Read more…]

Follow ClevelandClassical.com

Contact us