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

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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: being a fly on the wall at early rehearsals of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo

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by Daniel Hathaway

Coro Wandering onto setAdmirers of Thomas Forrest Kelly’s 2000 book First Nights: Five Musical Premieres probably wish they could have been physically present to witness the very first performances of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, Handel’s Messiah, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, and Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps.

Me? I wish I had been able to attend the rehearsals — which often prove as interesting as the performances themselves. Rehearsals are where artistic philosophies get established, deals are made between directors and performers, and kinks get worked out. When the piece in question is a staged work, the rehearsal process becomes more complex: the ideas (and egos) of more than one director need to be melded into a single product, and there’s much more that can go awry.

Apollo’s Fire will produce three semi-staged performances of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo in the next week: two in Kulas Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music on Friday and Saturday, April 13 and 14 at 7:30 pm, and one at St. Raphael Church in Bay Village on Wednesday, April 18 at 7:30 pm. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: “Beethoven the Revolutionary” at CMA with Noah Bendix-Balgley (Apr. 28)

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by Daniel Hathaway

AF-Bendix-Balgley-CMATo cap off its 25th anniversary season, Jeannette Sorrell and Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra, Apollo’s Fire, made a big leap across historical and stylistic boundaries into the early Romantic music of Beethoven. In the second of four performances on Friday evening, April 28 at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Sorrell fielded an orchestra of 49 players (huge by AF standards) and joined forces with violinist Noah Bendix-Balgley (making his period instrument debut) to lead a spirited foray into music premiered in the first decade of the 19th century. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire caps off its 25th season with “Revolutionary Beethoven”

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by Daniel Hathaway

afjsconductingHistorical performance groups have revitalized Baroque music by performing 17th- and 18th-century works on the instruments for which they were written. More recently, a number of those ensembles have made forays into the classical world of Haydn and Mozart and the early Romantic era of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, expanding their musical rhetoric and stretching the capabilities of their instruments.

Now add Jeannette Sorrell and Apollo’s Fire to that list. Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra will conclude their 25th-anniversary season with “Beethoven and Schubert Rediscovered,” a festival that includes four Beethoven concerts, a “Schubertiade,” a dance workshop, and lectures and panel discussions.

The Beethoven programs, which run from April 26-29, will feature Berlin Philharmonic first concertmaster Noah Bendix-Balgley performing the Violin Concerto. The program includes the Egmont Overture and the Fifth Symphony.

[Read more…]

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