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Cleveland Chamber Collective: Music of America VI

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by Mike Telin

On Saturday, August 3 at 7:00 pm at Disciples Christian Church, The Cleveland Chamber Collective will present Music of America VI. The program includes works by Caroline Shaw, Missy Mazzoli, Jessie Montgomery, Michael Oesterle, Trevor Kazarian, and Eric Charnofsky. The concert is free.

During a recent telephone conversation Cleveland Chamber Collective director and conductor Ty Alan Emerson said that the Music of America series has evolved over time.

“When we started out, we were calling it American Icons, which was our way to feature music by composers such as Lou Harrison, George Crumb, and Leonard Bernstein. Then we thought, there’s all this other music being made in America that isn’t getting played. So several years ago we started to look at who else is out there and who are we missing.”

Emerson noted that right now, inclusion is the hot button in classical music, and that for several years the ensemble has been trying to find ways to be more inclusive.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Chamber Collective: Ty Alan Emerson’s Oath Breaker (Apr. 28)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

It is one of Cleveland’s persistently good things that outlets for fresh new music — played by some of the area’s best musicians — continue to thrive. On Sunday, April 28, we were reminded of this again at Cleveland Chamber Collective’s presentation of Ty Alan Emerson’s Oath Breaker, a Requiem for chamber ensemble and digital playback at the Pivot Center.

Emerson conducted a distinguished ensemble comprising Linda White, flute, Emily Cornelius, violin, Brian Slawta, viola, Trevor Kazarian, cello, Eric Charnofsky, piano, and Dylan Moffitt, percussion.

Oath Breaker takes the audience on a 60-minute journey of anger, grief, and hope, as a kind of collective PTSD therapy session about the events of January 6 and its subsequent aftermath. The mixture of recorded electronics, live performances, and poetic and prosaic texts helped to conjure in real time the horror of that day.

[Read more…]

Cleveland Classical Guitar Society: Zidur Guitar Duo (Feb. 24)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Hermelindo Ruiz and Samuel Diz, constituents of the Zidur Guitar Duo, made their Cleveland debut on Saturday, February 24, endearing themselves to the crowd at the Maltz Performing Arts Center with an attractive program and winning personalities — two young virtuosos from out of town you’d like to meet afterwards over tapas and beer.

Ruiz, a native Puerto Rican, and Diz, Spanish-born, delighted in sharing music from their respective countries, including works by Egúrbida, Gottschalk, Rodrigo, Vide, and Acosta, plus two by Ruiz himself. While other guitarists might have been inclined to flashier repertoire, Ruiz and Diz chose milder stuff, perhaps ambassadors of a gentler sort.

[Read more…]

CityMusic chamber series:
composer Akua Dixon on 
Justice, Equality & Freedom

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by Emmy Hensley

“I’ve been composing things, in a sense, all my life,” cellist and composer Akua Dixon said during a recent interview. “As an African American musician growing up studying classical music, I feel that I can offer a specific view that not many people have thought about.” 

Commissioned by CityMusic Cleveland, her string quartet We the People will be premiered on Friday, November 18 at 7:00 pm at Praxis Fiber Workshop by violinists Susan Britton and Eunho Kim, violist Yael Senamaud-Cohen, and cellist Trevor Kazarian.

The free concert, titled “Perspectives for String Quartet,” reflects on the theme of Justice, Equality, and Freedom. The program also includes Arvo Pärt’s Psalom, Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate’s Pisachi (Reveal): Six Epitomes for String Quartet, and Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet in F.

Writing We the People has served as an opportunity for Dixon to reevaluate what justice, equality, and freedom have meant throughout history. “Everything is a matter of opinion, and there are two sides to each coin,” she said. “When I started thinking about the theme, I looked into the Constitution’s Preamble. I read about the intent of setting up this particular democracy, as well as the interpretation of it by the people who founded it — and those who were not included in it. I feel that it’s a great time to have dialogue and to listen to the side of so many people of color and women — all the people that haven’t had a chance — and what they have to say about these topics.”

[Read more…]

CityMusic Cleveland:
clarinet quintets old & new,
traditional & non-traditional

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by Jarrett Hoffman

A clarinet and a string quartet are the traditional components of a clarinet quintet, an instrumentation that has spawned widely performed works by composers such as Mozart, Brahms, and Coleridge-Taylor.

But after CityMusic Cleveland clarinetist Ellen Breakfield-Glick reached out to Margaret Brouwer about the possibility of writing a new clarinet quintet, the composer considered the possibilities, noting to herself that she had already written one in 2005.

“I’m all about sounds and colors,” Brouwer said during a recent interview. “That’s one reason I wanted to have percussion — I thought it would give me a lot of new colors.”

Commissioned by CityMusic and inspired by the theme for the ensemble’s 2021-22 season — “Justice, Equality, Hope” — Brouwer’s Justice March for the unconventional combination of clarinet, violin, viola, cello, and percussion will receive its premiere on Saturday, April 23 at 7:00 pm at Shrine Church of St. Stanislaus.

[Read more…]

In2ative to perform on
Nighttown Series April 6

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by Mike Telin

In2ativePortions of this article are reprinted from an interview in November of 2015 before In2ative performed on the LCCC Signature Series.

The story of how flutist Kimberly Zaleski and cellist Trevor Kazarian came to form the duo In2ative is fit for the big screen. After graduating from the Cleveland Institute of Music, they both worked in restaurants until one day they both found themselves out of jobs. It was at that moment that they decided to take a risk.

“We went to CoolCleveland and searched for all of the festivals in the area,” Kazarian recalled during a conference call with his musical partner. “We would go to each event, put out a hat, and play. We were paying our rent from tip money, but at the same time we were meeting people and making connections. I feel that a lot of what we have today goes back to that moment of taking the risk, and really going for what we believed in. We’re lucky to be in the situation that we are now.” [Read more…]

LCCC Signature Series: a chat with In2ative — flutist Kimberly Zaleski and cellist Trevor Kazarian

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by Mike Telin

In2ativeThe story of how flutist Kimberly Zaleski and cellist Trevor Kazarian came to form the duo In2ative is fit for the big screen. After graduating from the Cleveland Institute of Music they both worked in restaurants, until one day they found themselves out of work. It was at that moment that they decided to take the risk.

“We literally went to CoolCleveland and searched for all of the festivals in the area,” Kazarian recalled during a conference call with his musical partner. “We would go to each event, put out a hat, and play. We were paying our rent from tip money, but at the same time we were meeting people and making connections. I feel that a lot of what we have today goes back to that moment of taking the risk, and really going for what we believed in. We’re lucky to be in the situation that we are now.” [Read more…]

Groupmuse concept comes to Cleveland for inaugural classical houseparty on September 18 in Lakewood

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by Mike Telin

GroupmuseMany times in life an event sparks the beginnings of an idea. For Groupmuse founder Sam Bodkin, that event was his first hearing of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, Opus 133 in December of 2008. “I had never seriously listened to classical music before, and the piece shattered all of my preconceptions about what the genre was. It opened up an entirely new universe that had existed beside my own for so long but that I had never accessed, despite the fact that both my parents have always been classical music lovers.”

Once he got hooked on classical music, Bodkin fell in with a group of musicians studying at the New England Conservatory who would regularly put on house concerts. “Obviously this type of event has been happening for as long as there have been houses,” he said, “but it is such a departure from how most people experience classical music.

“For me, and for so many people, music isn’t just about the sound — it’s about the social scene that goes along with it. Anyone can have a string quartet perform in their home because you don’t need amplification, all you need are four chairs. Push the coffee table aside and you can have great masterpieces performed in just about any apartment in any city. [Read more…]

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