by Kevin McLaughlin
On the cold Tuesday evening of February 10, two venerable ensembles — the Imani Winds and Boston Brass — were brought together by Akron’s Tuesday Musical in E.J. Thomas Hall. The large audience was ready for something lively, and the players obliged, spending the better part of two hours passing enthralling music back and forth.
Outfitted in blue jackets, Boston Brass — José Sibaja and Jeff Conner (trumpets), Chris Castellanos (horn), Domingo Pagliuca (trombone), and William Russell (tuba) — introduced pieces and corrected each other’s pronunciation with good humor. “You may be wondering how guys in those jackets get work,” Conner quipped. José Sibaja, who grew up in Puerto Rico, took particular care with Spanish names, and was playfully merciless when his colleagues missed a vowel.
Dmitri Shostakovich’s Galop, one of the composer’s theater pieces from the 1930s, was up first. Articulation stayed clean even at the fast tempo, and the group reveled in the music’s dry humor. Sibaja and Conner impressed with their technical ease, while Pagliuca and Russell kept things grounded.
Performing a work as ubiquitous as Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons requires a delicate balance. At its best, the musicality and intention must be crystal clear, so that the end result feels as fresh as it does familiar. It’s a high bar, but one that Les Arts Florissants cleared with the utmost ease.
On Tuesday evening, October 21, pianist Marc-André Hamelin opened Tuesday Musical’s 2025–26 season in Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall with a program of unusual range and scale. He mapped the human mind and heart across an often-epic landscape — Beethoven’s granite Hammerklavier, Robert Schumann’s not merely scenic Waldszenen, and Ravel’s hallucinatory Gaspard de la nuit.
There are very few American cities who can count themselves as having an official fanfare. But now, Akron is one of them.
Composer and conductor Peter Boyer has a lot on his plate. But when recording producer Elaine Martone called him two years ago with an offer from Tuesday Musical, he just couldn’t say no.
