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Rubin Institute winners announced in Oberlin

By Daniel Hathaway

At a Sunday morning ceremony in Klonick Hall of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music on January 22, Dean David Stull and donor Stephen Rubin announced the winners of the grand prize and public prize in the first bi-annual Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, which began on January 18.

     The $10,000 prize went to Jacob Street (above, with Rubin and Stull), a master's candidate in historical performance from North Reading, MA. In a surprise development, the panel awarded honorable mention to Megan Emberton, a senior piano major from Chelsea, MI, along with a cash award of $2,500.

      During the Institute, ten Rubin Scholars prepared in a fall term Introduction to Music Criticism Class team taught by Mike Telin and Daniel Hathaway of ClevelandClassical.com and Donald Rosenberg of The Plain Dealer, wrote reviews of Oberlin Artist Recital Series Concerts by The Cleveland Orchestra, pianist Jeremy Denk, Apollo's Fire and the International Contemporary Ensemble. Reviews were critiqued by a panel of national music critics including Alex Ross of The New Yorker, Anne Midgette of The Washington Post, Heidi Waleson of The Wall Street Journal, Tim Page of USC, John Rockwell, retired critic of The New York Times, and Rubin, who is publisher at Henry Holt in New York.

     A Public Prize for the best review of one of the first three concerts by a member of the audience, as judged by the teaching panel of Telin, Hathaway and Rosenberg, was awarded to Samantha London of Baltimore, MD (above, with Stull, Hathaway, Rosenberg, Telin and Rubin). In yet another surprise move, the Conservatory announced the awarding of an honorable mention to Earl Pike of Cleveland Heights, along with a prize of $250.

      Click here to visit the Rubin Institute website, where full coverage of the Institute includes postings of all the student reviews and the top 18 audience reviews.

Cleveland Classical Guitar Society:

An interview with Dale Kavanagh

By Mike Telin

In everything there is beauty Canadian born guitarist Dale Kavanagh told us by telephone from her home in Iserlohn, Germany. A teacher once told me that you need to enjoy the most silly kitsch that some people may find atrocious, but to try and find the beauty in everything.

     On Friday, January 27 beginning at 7:30 pm at the First Unitarian Church of Cleveland, Dale Kavanagh will present a solo recital of compositions by Leo Brouwer, Joaqun Rodrigo, Carlo Domeniconi and Villa-Lobos as well as her own compositions.

     Variety is also something she enjoys in her musical life Im playing so many other periods, baroque, classical, renaissance with my duo, that its nice to have a totally modern program. And while it is a modern program it still has a lot of variety. Ms. Kavanagh formed the Amadeus Guitar Duo with German guitarist Thomas Krichoff, twenty one years ago, and in addition to the duo, Ms. Kavanagh and Mr. Kirchoff have also run their own festival in Iserlohn for twenty-one years It started very small, but it has become quite huge with almost thirty-five thousand euros in prize money, as well as a Carnegie Hall debut." >>read on

Les Délices: Caractères de la danse

An interview with Debra Nagy

By Mike Telin

The next event in this year's season for Cleveland's French Baroque Ensemble, Les Dlices, is Caractères de la danse, two concerts scheduled for Saturday, January 28 at 8:00 pm at Tregoning & Company on West 78th Street in Cleveland and Sunday, January 29 at 4:00 pm at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights. The performers will include Debra Nagy, baroque oboe, Julie Andrijeski, violin, Josh Lee, viola da gamba & Michael Sponseller, harpsichord.

     The program includes music by Hotteterre, Rebel and Boismortier and takes us on a journey back in time to the worlds first ballet school, The Acadmie Royale de la danse, founded in 1661 by King Louis XIV. A lot of baroque music is based on French dance forms, so it is a wide open palette, Debra Nagy told by telephone from Chicago. It was interesting to do the research on the specific dance aspects of the program. She went on to point out the importance of using the correct terminology when talking about baroque dance. We tend to talk about baroque dance in a general way, but what we are talking about is the French noble style of dancing. This is not to say that dancing was not happening in other places, but it was not as formalized. There was a lot of social dancing, but what was happening during the first half of the seventeenth century in Germany and England was a little more like country dancing although that was also happening in France as well." >>read on

Antonio Pompa-Baldi to play

next Tri-C Classical Piano Recital

By Daniel Hathaway

Thanks to his first prize in the 1999 Cleveland International Piano Competition, Italian pianist Antonio Pompa-Baldi has graced Northeast Ohio's musical life ever since, first as a member of the faculty at the Oberlin Conservatory, then at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he continues to teach along with his wife, Emanuela Friscioni (they were married two weeks before the Cleveland Competition, which occasioned their first visit to the United States).

     Pompa-Baldi will play the third and final, free recital on this year's Tri-C Classical Piano Series at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Sunday, January 29 at 2pm, an event co-sponsored by the Consulate of Italy in Detroit. We reached him by telephone to ask him about his program, which features music by two lesser-played Austrian composers in the first half.

     I am usually very interested in unearthing composers or pieces which for some reason fell through the cracks of time, he said, referring to Carl Czerny's Variations on a Theme by Rode, op. 22, La Ricordanza, and Johann Nepomuk Hummel's Sonata No. 5 in f#, op. 81. When I was a kid, I listened to Horowitz play the Czerny, but that was before the Internet, and I couldn't find a score. I forgot about it until I came to the US and it was very easy to obtain music. I played it many times in 2003-2004 and am now bringing it back. It's a delightful set and I have a lot of fun with it. >>read on

Cleveland Chamber Music Society:

A conversation with Rebecca Albers

By Mike Telin

The Cleveland Chamber Music Society continues its 2011-12 season on Tuesday, January 31 beginning at 7:30 pm with a performance by The Albers Trio and pianist Yeol Eum Son at the Fairmount Temple Auditorium in Beachwood. The program includes Mozarts Piano Quartet No. 2 in E-flat major, K. 493, Dohnanyis Serenade for String Trio in C major, Op. 10, & Brahmss Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25.

      The Albers sisters, violinist Laura, violist Rebecca, and cellist Julie began performing together while growing up in Boulder, Colorado. Since that time, they have gone on to distinguish themselves as individual artists as well as collectively. As the Albers Trio, they have performed in venues that include Alice Tully Hall, Wigmore Hall in London, and Carnegie Hall.

     Pianist Yeol eum Son (pronounced Yadum Son) was awarded the Silver Medal and the Steven De Groote Memorial Award for the Best Performance of Chamber Music at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2009.

     There has been a personnel change for the performance in Cleveland: violinist Laura Albers is expecting and her doctors have forbid her to fly. Violinist Arnaud Sussmann will be filling in for the concert.

We were able to speak to Rebecca by telephone in Saint Paul, where she serves as assistant principal viola of the Minnesota Orchestra. >>read on

Theatre of Voices at Cleveland Museum of Art:

A conversation with artistic director Paul Hillier

By Daniel Hathaway

British-born conductor Paul Hillier will make his second visit to the Cleveland Museum of Art's Viva! & Gala series this season when he brings his Theatre of Voices to Gartner Auditorium on Wednesday, February 1. Last October, he appeared on the series with another of his groups, The National Chamber Choir of Ireland, and audiences will remember when he brought Ars Nova Copenhagen to Trinity Cathedral a few years back. Hillier first came to prominence with his groundbreaking group, The Hilliard Ensemble. He has headed the early music programs at the University of California at Davis and the University of Indiana, and now maintains a choral conducting career equally devoted to early music and contemporary music and everything in between. We spoke with him via Skype in Porto, Portugal, where he was conducting Fauré and Mozart with the Coro Casa di Musica.

      Daniel Hathaway: I see that for your Cleveland concert you've programmed music by Arvo Pärt along with works by Machaut, Dowland and 14th century music from the Faenza Codex. How do these pieces work together on a program?

     Paul Hillier: I think they work well together. Pärt himself is very keen on Machaut, and though you wouldn't necessarily guess that in terms of direct musical influence, his sympathy with that style is good to know about. When you do a program of Pärt's music, I think you have two choices. Either you do the whole thing as Pärt in that one general, rather contemplative mood, which can be very beautiful, or you look at it in a different way and you try to find connections but also contrasts. >>read on

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Four Evenings in Finney Chapel at Oberlin
By Daniel Hathaway

In order to provide raw material for the first Rubin Institute for Musical Criticism, Oberlin College compressed four of its Artists Recital Series concerts onto four adjacent evenings, creating what could truly be called a Critical Mass. Everybody got to be a music critic last week — from the ten Rubin Fellows selected from a fall term Introduction of Musical Criticism class to the all-star panel of national critics, to the audience members who submitted overnight critiques for consideration by the teaching panel for the Public Prize. Taken together, the four concerts amounted to a celebration of the Oberlin Conservatory's impressive impact on the world of music. Here's our take on the four performances. To read what others thought, the Fellows' reviews and the eighteen top public reviews can be found on the Rubin Institute website, and another overview appears on Oberlin English professor (and CC.com correspondent) Nicholas Jones' blog.
     The Cleveland Orchestra took the first slot on Wednesday evening, January 18, pride of place for an ensemble that has played annually on the 133-year-old Artist Recital Series since 1919 — just half a year after the orchestra was founded. Music Director Franz Welser-Möst led the ensemble in the first three movements of Smetana's My Vlast, Kaija Saariaho's Orion and Shostakovich's Symphony No. 6. >>read on

Akron Symphony: “World Class Begins at Home”
By Robert Rollin

On Saturday evening January 21, Christopher Wilkins and the Akron Symphony presented an imaginative potpourri concert in E.J. Thomas Hall featuring the orchestra’s own members and friends. When Wilkins directed the San Antonio Symphony he received six ASCAP programming awards, and he continues to show creative imagination.
     The Bach Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 performance was the evening’s highpoint. The concerto, a unique masterwork from several perspectives, eschews the violins for a dark instrumentation of two violas, two cellos (originally two viola da gambas) and continuo (cello, contrabass, and harpsichord). It also has a lot of voice crossing and overlapping of instrumental parts. When the composer focuses on the low-range instruments, it represents a special challenge to bring clarity to the voices. >>read on