This week the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Performing Arts series will present three musically diverse concerts in Gartner Auditorium.
On Thursday, December 11 at 7:30 pm, The Tallis Scholars make their CMA debut with a program of Renaissance choral music by William Byrd, Josquin des Prez, and Edmund Turges. Director Peter Phillips founded The Tallis Scholars in 1973. Through recordings and concert performances, the ensemble has established itself as the leading exponent of Renaissance sacred music throughout the world. Phillips has worked with the group to create, through good tuning and blend, the purity and clarity of sound that he feels best serves the Renaissance repertoire, allowing every detail of the musical lines to be heard. It is this resulting beauty of sound for which The Tallis Scholars has become so widely renowned.
On Saturday, December 13 at 2:00 pm musical styles shift from the Renaissance to the mid-twentieth and twenty-first centuries when Tim Weiss leads the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble in performances of Richard Wernick’s Concerto for cello and 10 players (1980) featuring cellist Darrett Adkins. The concert also includes Harrison Birtwistle’s Cortege (2007) and Stephen Hartke’s The Rose of the Winds (1998). (Note: violinist Jennifer Koh is indisposed and has withdrawn from this performance.)
Winner of an award for adventurous programming in 2002 by the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers and the American Symphony Orchestra League, Oberlin’s Contemporary Music Ensemble is considered one of the premier new music ensembles in higher education in the United States. Oberlin has long been an undergraduate haven for many nationally acclaimed composers, chamber musicians, and ensembles, and several rising young performers of new music began their careers as members of the CME, including eighth blackbird and the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE).
As part of December’s Second Sunday Family Day, the CMA presents Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 silent comedy classic The Kid, on Sunday, December 14 at 1:30 pm. Acclaimed New York guitarist and composer Marc Ribot performs his original soundtrack to Chaplin’s silent classic.
Ribot, described by The New York Times as “a deceptively articulate artist who uses inarticulateness as an expressive device,” has released over 20 albums under his own name over a 30-year career, exploring everything from the pioneering jazz of Albert Ayler to the Cuban son of Arsenio Rodríguez. His solo release, Silent Movies (Pi Recordings) has been described as a “down-in-mouth-near master piece” by the Village Voice, has landed on several Best Of lists including the LA Times, and received critical praise across the board.
Rolling Stone points out that “Guitarist Marc Ribot helped Tom Waits refine a new, weird Americana on 1985’s Rain Dogs, and since then he’s become the go-to guitar guy for all kinds of roots-music adventurers: Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Elvis Costello, John Mellencamp.” He has also recorded with Neko Case, Diana Krall, Solomon Burke, John Lurie’s Lounge Lizards, Marianne Faithful, Allen Toussaint, Medeski Martin & Wood, Caetono Veloso, Susana Baca, Nora Jones, The Black Keys, and many others.
Published on ClevelandClassical.com December 9, 2014.
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